On the surface, it seems that adapting a work of theatre
into a movie would be a lot easier than adapting from a different work like a
book or a video game, and to a degree it is. But they are still two different
media, however similar they may be, and in order to do it right it can’t just
be a simple copy-and-paste job. For a
good example of stage to screen adaptation done right, look at 11 Things I Hate
About You, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming Of The Shrew: It took
what is, in the modern age, the most difficult Shakespeare work to portray due
its rather screwed-up gender politics and essentially left only the framework
and changed the rest in order to make it work, and for the most part it did. A
bad example of this? … Let’s get into today’s film: This is August: Osage
County.
