This fall and winter, moviegoers are asking one question: Where have all the plays come from?
From September to February, five distinguished recent American plays have been or will be released as films: Extremities, 'night Mother, Children of a Lesser God, Crimes of the Heart, and Brighton Beach Memoirs. In addition, David Mamet's American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross will be released later in 1987.
Among the plays are three recent Pulitzer-prize winners and several of the most literate productions from leading regional theaters in the country. In addition, imports like Duet for One, Verdi's Otello, and 84 Charing Cross Road will also be seen, reflecting the taste of American distributors for "quality" films.
The film industry, in short, has gotten serious, and every moviegoer tired of endlessly cloned films for adolescents is asking why.
No single answer emerges, least of all an invasion of the literary muses into Hollywood. The timing of the releases seems accidental or at most a reflection of the vibrancy of contemporary stage.
Only one star, Sissy Spacek, is involved in more than one film. No studio is handling more than two, although independent producer Burt Sugarman originated the adaptations of three (Extremities, Children, and Crimes). But Sugarman sees the releases as merely "coincidental."
To some observers, the adaptations are, even at that, unusual. As screenwriter Richard Kletter (Never Cry Wolf, Return of the Black Stallion) says, they represent "only a slight drift of quality. Mostly they reveal Hollywood's voracious appetite for product, especially something that has proved successful in some other sphere."
But others see a "mini-trend" or "counter-trend" to some recent practices. In the last five years, young producers and directors have repetitively tried to ape the "mega hits" in the late 1970s and early 1980s of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
The result has been a succession of costly sci-fi and coming-of-age scenarios that, according to one industry wag, could all be titled Andy Hardy Spacewalks. As David Denby of New York magazine wrote in a recent cover story on American film, "The movie business, and American culture, has never recovered from that electronic media weekend when Jaws opened all over the country and Hollywood realized a movie could gross nearly $8 million in three days."
Increasingly, however, imitation "blockbusters" aimed at teenage audiences have proved to be costly as well as unoriginal. Universal Studio's summer sci-fi flop, Howard the Duck, cost $52 million to make and barely earned back $10 million.
Films made from plays, by contrast, are far less expensive to produce. They require only one or two sets and few if any special effects and attract actors willing to work for lower pay. They also attract producers because of their proven "track record" with a definite but limited segment of the film going audience, the "white-wine-and-brie" crowd of young urban
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