FinkPish

I think you are thinking of the director, Sam Mendes, who had mostly directed theater pieces before American Beauty.

Joe Molotov

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

will travel

Pajama Game.
Annie Get Your Gun.

fmian

Dammit! My only chance to contribute and I fail!!

Giantrobo

TITUS...Shakespeare

uhftv

Oleanna's kind of a stinker movie compared to the play, but it has its moments.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? holds up well with the play unlike some of the toned down Tennesse Williams' plays turned to films.

The original Dracula was a much improved version of the stage play.


12 Angry Men brings to mind the early days of tv, since it was not started as a traditional staged play for an audience but a teleplay that was intended to be filmed. Another example would be Marty.

marka351

West Side Story

movielib

Does that mean the copy in my collection is a bootleg?

Oh, wait, guess it's legit.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...v=glance&s=dvd

Matthew Chmiel

Are we including musicals as well? I've seen people reference Rocky Horror, West Side Story, and Phantom of the Opera.

If we can mention musicals, then let me mention...
- Hair
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch
- Little Shop of Horrors
- Grease
- And to a lesser extent, Grease 2

Franchot

Dead End

Marvin's Room

Picnic

Street Scene

Holiday (British Import--Hopefully, a US release soon)

You Can't Take It With You

The Front Page (released in two versions and a switched sex version called "His Girl Friday")

The Petrified Forest

Peter Pan

Tape

The Coconuts

Joan of Arc

Wait Until Dark

Lovers And Other Strangers

Sleuth

Look Back In Anger

Deathtrap

Bus Stop

A Streetcar Named Desire

Suddenly, Last Summer

Cyrano de Bergerac

Billy Liar

(To name just a few that are on DVD. To name just a few that are from several different genres. To name a few that weren't mentioned already...)

The Bus

Just putting in my two cents and mentioning The Big Kahuna, with Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, and Peter Facinelli. Entire movie takes place in a hotel suite.

baracine

I would say that roughly 50 % of all screenplays have been adapted from other mediums since the invention of the film camera, which is to say mostly works of fiction and mostly novels. I would also say that roughly 10 % of all screenplays have been adapted from stage plays in every culture imaginable. Plays, as a source of inspiration, are not so numerous as novels because plays are the most expensive form of fiction to produce, outside movies. But they have the advantage of being already blocked into scenes with dialogue.

There is still room for a considerable amount of confusion and debate if you take into account that some of the most popular plays of the last century were themselves adaptations, legitimate or not, of other works of fiction, i.e. novels. E.g.: "Ben-Hur", the play, was adapted from "Ben-Hur", the novel; "The Sign of the Cross", the play, was pilfered from "Quo Vadis?", the Nobel Prize-winning novel; "La Traviata", the Verdi opera, was pilfered from "La Dame aux Camélias", the novel and later the play, by Alexandre Dumas fils; "Nosferatu", the film, was pilfered from "Dracula", the novel; "Dracula", the film, was adapted from a play, "Dracula", which was a legitimate adaptation of the novel "Dracula" (i.e. royalties were paid to Bram Stoker's estate); "Damn Yankees"' the film musical, was a faithful adaptation of "Damn Yankees", the stage musical, which was itself a spoof on Goethe's stage play "Faust" (public domain), etc., etc., etc. This thread could go on forever.

Filmmaker

I'll be a son of a bitch! I've never seen this DVD on the shelves nor read any reference to it. Talk about the "under the radar" release of all time...