The Screengrab : neil simon

Screengrab Presents: The Best Stage-To-Screen Adaptations Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:30:00 GMT

SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1985)

It’s probably not a great sign that two of my heroes wound up killing themselves once old age began to creep in. After famously inserting himself into the gonzo dispatches he filed from the trenches of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson infamously inserted a ball of hot lead into his cranium as a permanent cure for depression and the nagging pain of various medical conditions. Likewise, the late, great monologist Spalding Gray jumped off a ferry in 2004 after years spent battling his own depression (stemming partly from his mother’s 1967 suicide) and pain (from a 2001 car accident) while also chronicling his own misadventures and neuroses in a series of seriocomic one-man shows for New York’s experimental Wooster Group theater company. Several of Gray’s monologues were filmed over the years (by directors including Steven Soderbergh and Nick Broomfield), but the first and best screen adaptation of his stage work was Jonathan Demme's Swimming To Cambodia, a rambling, fascinating (and extremely quotable) collage of national and personal history encompassing the Thai sex trade, the weird insanity of Richard Nixon, the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge and Gray’s own search for a perfect moment while employed as a character actor on the set of Roland Joffe’s 1984 biopic The Killing Fields.

BILOXI BLUES (1988)

I understand my wife’s disdain for Neil Simon. His schticky, schmaltzy brand of lowbrow theater ain’t for everyone (and he extended the career of Marsha Mason way past its natural expiration date). Yet there’s a lot to recommend Biloxi Blues, the charming middle installment of the playwright’s alliterative autobiographical trilogy (bookended by Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound). For one thing, Matthew Broderick is at his Ferris Beuller best as a World War II-era army recruit forced outside his blue state comfort zone during basic training in a deep red Mississippi boot camp. The film, which never feels the least bit stagy, is two parts nostalgic coming-of-age comedy and one part “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture war drama, but the true highlight is Christopher Walken in a memorable supporting role as a deceptively affable, quietly menacing drill sergeant just as scary in his way as the more traditional expletive-spewing Full Metal Jacket variety.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1993)

John Guare's finest play, a steadily escalating comedy of modern manners, was given the instant-classic treatment by director Fred Schepisi and a cast headed by first lady of the theater Stockard Channing, grizzled counterculture figure turned acting eminence Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith, then best known as the Fresh Prince. A movie whose wit and sophistication can make your head swim, it looks easy enough to make you wonder why all deserving plays haven't gotten as deft a movie treatment. Your first clue to the answer to that question may be that not even any other play of Guare's has made it to the Hollywood starting gate.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)

Working with Tennessee Williams' great play and the director Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando created thunder and lightning onstage during the Broadway run. Then he and Kazan packaged it in film cans and sent it out across the country to poison the minds of lucky youths everywhere. (Though there have always been people who expressed their regrets that Brando's performance hadn't been filmed early in the run -- you know, when it was really good.) Most of the rest of the Broadway cast came along for the ride, but the one key exception, Vivien Leigh as Blanche, turned out to be one of those uncanny marriages of a great, difficult role to a performer with an unsteady career who had something of her own that the character had always needed. The movie lives as a record of one of the most startling and sublime acting duets ever performed.

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE (2002)

Clare Peploe, a gifted director probably best known as the wife of Bernardo Bertolucci, had a small, too-little-seen triumph with this joyous and charming version of a romantic comedy written by the French Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux in 1732. The plot, which involves Mira Sorvino as a seductive royal and Ben Kingsley as a crackpot philosopher who has taught the object of Sorvino's romantic designs (Jay Rodan) to regard love with disdain, is a roundelay of schemes, masks, and mind fucks that Peploe weaves into a comic celebration of theatrical artifice itself.

LES PARENTS TERRIBLES (1948)

Jean Cocteau had already enjoyed a scandalous triumph with his play, an explosion of the form of the "boulevard comedy" likened to "Noel Coward on opium." He dove in head first when he decided to film it, resisting the urge to open up a text that has the small, overheated cast waging familial warfare in the confines of their cramped Paris apartment. The masterful handling of the farcical complications within the claustrophobic setting can make a viewer happily delirious.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Summer of ’78: “The Cheap Detective”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Cheap Detective

Release Date: June 23, 1978

Cast: Peter Falk, Madeline Kahn, Ann-Margret, Eileen Brennan, Dom DeLuise

The Buzz: If you loved Murder by Death, perhaps you’ll tolerate The Cheap Detective.

Keywords: Sequel, Second Part, Detective

The Plot: Apparently The Cheap Detective doesn’t have much of a following, seeing as it only has three IMDb keywords and two of them are wrong. This is not actually a sequel to Murder by Death, in which Peter Falk played the Sam Spade-ish detective Sam Diamond. Here Falk plays the Sam Spade-ish detective Lou Peckinpaugh. See – totally different thing. It is true that both films were written by Neil Simon in his wacky mode (as opposed to his more popular treacly mode), and Detective is clearly intended to capitalize on the success of the earlier movie. A mash-up spoof of both The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, it’s set in San Francisco on the eve of World War II. Peckinpaugh is a private eye whose partner has been murdered, along with a bunch of innocent bystanders. Since Peckinpaugh had been carrying on an affair with his partner’s wife Georgia (Marsha Mason), he’s immediately a suspect. Georgia is only the first in a string of unlikely femmes fatale who get Peckinpaugh in and out of trouble through the course of the movie. There’s also Eileen Brennan as sultry saloon singer Betty DeBoop, Louise Fletcher as the stand-in for Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa from Casablanca, and Madeline Kahn as the ludicrously evasive Mrs. Montenegro. Somewhere in the convoluted tangle of events, Peckinpaugh also gets involved with John Houseman and Dom DeLuise as a Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre pair looking for a dozen valuable diamond eggs.

The Test of Time: Compared to the typical zany comedy of today, The Cheap Detective is far less crude – but that’s not the same as saying it’s more sophisticated. What passed for a shocking sight gag in 1978 – like Kahn accidentally flushing her husband’s ashes down the toilet – wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the age of the execrable The Love Guru, in which grown men do battle with urine-soaked mops. Simon is taking his own shot at his Your Show of Shows colleague Mel Brooks’s brand of lowbrow parody, but seems unwilling to really get down and dirty. He and director Robert Moore assembled a month’s worth of Hollywood Squares stars for the supporting cast, including Abe Vigoda, Vic Tayback, Paul Williams, Scatman Crothers, David Ogden Stiers and James Coco, but to no avail. The Cheap Detective settles for cheap laughs, from a Chinese character named “Won Fat Ching” to groaners like “Oh, Georgia, I had you on my mind.” Falk does his best Bogart impression, which sounds a lot like Columbo.

Quotable Quote: “I wasn't talking to you, Schnell, I was telling him to go faster.”

2008 Equivalent: A spoofy spy story that really did originate with Mel Brooks, Get Smart.

Previously on Summer of '78: Jaws 2

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Finding Amanda"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

One function of film festivals is to provide a home for movies made by well-placed industry insiders who are under the mistaken impression that we're waiting to see what they'll do when they "stretch." Festivals give them a chance to show off their little art projects to a receptive or at least indulgent audience, including fellow insiders and aspirants to insiderdom who will at least make a big show of getting the in-jokes. ("That gross, disgusting security guard character--do you think it was supposed to be Harvey!?") Finding Amanda was written and directed by Peter Tolan, who wrote Analyze This, co-wrote America's Sweethearts, worked on various TV series (Murphy Brown), and is the creator and co-producer of Rescue Me, a crime against humanity that is sometimes miscategorized as a TV show. His new movie stars Matthew Broderick, whose opportunities for leading movie roles are contracting as his neck expands, as a once-promising TV writer who smashed his career up on the shoals of a triumvirate of addictions (drugs, booze, and gambling) and has now managed to crawl back to a job writing a third-rate sitcom. (The at-work scenes come complete with a self-deprecating cameo appearance by Ed Begley, Jr.) The plot kicks into gear when Broderick, whose control over his gambling jones turns out to be notional at best, finds out that his niece Amanda (Elizabeth Rice) is down in Las Vegas turning tricks for drug money. Broderick's long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) has just discovered a wad of betting slips that he inexplicably stuffed into the glove compartment of their car after spending an afternoon at the track, so since the time he had set aside to work on his marriage has just been freed up, he decides to swing over to Vegas and persuade Amanda of the joys of rehab.

Casting Broderick in a role like this--a variant of the kind of wild-man character that Tolan has been writing for Denis Leary on TV--is a bigger gamble than some of the bets made in Vegas by people who were last seen being escorted out to the desert by men shaped like monster trucks. I don't guess there's any hard and fast rule that states that an out-of-control thrillseeker with an addictive personality can't also be a finicky little dweeb with an unearned sense of entitlement, but who would want to watch such a creature? The best of Broderick's recent movies--Election, which, come to think of it, wasn't really all that recent--exploited his movie past by suggesting that fifteen-odd years of wear and tear had turned Ferris Bueller into his old arch-nemesis, the high school principal. Finding Amanda takes advantage of his stage background as Neil Simon's youthful alter ego, if you can call that an advantage. His comedy-writer character trudges through the movie spitting out a steady stream of unfunny, mechanical one-liners and sorry excuses for smart-ass remarks. If this is a deliberate method of showing what years of self-abuse have done to the guy's talent, the fact remains that it's the audience that's stuck listening to them. Finding Amanda never gets enough of a handle on its unlikable hero--it's not clear whether he's meant to be as big an unrepentant asshole as he seems to be, or even whether he really cares about the niece or just wants a chance to go on a Vegas spree while telling himself that he's on a quest. Most of the best work in the movie is done by people, like Tierney, whose roles are so small that its as if they were pressed into service after dropping by the set because they heard the catering was really good. Steve Coogan turns up for a couple of scenes as a casino manager who describes one of Broderick's past indiscretions as "a minor non-event," and that's about the most accurate self-description that Finding Amanda could hope for.