Word: screenplays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After months of tracking rumors and talking to Kaufman's family and friends, Alexander and Karaszewski had no clue who the real Andy was or how to structure a screenplay about him. It was only after one of Kaufman's girlfriends told them "there is no real Andy" that they found the key to their movie--the comic with multiple personalities was actually an invisible man. With that notion as their guide, they wrote Man on the Moon, a movie nearly as ambiguous as Kaufman himself...
Director Oliver Stone, who wrote Any Given Sunday's screenplay with John Logan, may be momentarily in a nonpolitical mood, but that does not mean he has given up his preoccupations with paranoia, greed and the brutality of American life. He sees his warriors as innocent animals, the purity of their violent athletic endeavors under constant threat of corruption by people trying to make a buck off their pain. Or, in the case of a particularly noxious sports reporter (John C. McGinley), a know-nothing who thinks he knows it all, just trying to make a name for himself...
...director, Alan Parker, worked with Laura Jones to write the screenplay, and the film is very faithful to the book--too faithful, perhaps. Like a complex organ hymn being plinked out on an electric keyboard, the film plays the same basic melody as the memoir but fails to bring out the nuances of McCourt's writing, while these nuances are precisely what made Angela's Ashes a great work rather than a mere string of anecdotes...
...Unfortunately, the plot and screenplay detract from the film's artistic merit. James Schamus' screenplay might reflect the language of the Civil War, yet the dialogue is entirely self-important and melodrama destroys any stake the viewer might have in the plot. Lee wishes to establish the North as a human presence, so Roedel reads some found union letters to the camp. Similarly, Lee has Roedel and Chiles talk under the stars to emphasize the characters' brotherhood...
...adaptation" of A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was so terrible, in fact, that Irving forced Disney to remove the original characters' names from the movie, leaving only a "loosely inspired by" credit. These films were missing one key piece: Irving himself. The Cider House Rules is the first screenplay he wrote himself, and it shows. He manages to capture the spirit of the novel without making caricatures of the main players. The people in the movie are drawn with attention to reality and complexity--plausibility never lapses...