Tonight is the
Academy Awards. I previously blogged about one of the nominees for Best
Picture, The Favourite, which is not
based on a play, but tells the story of the same historical events dramatized
in Eugène Scribe's play The Glass of
Water.
This got me
wondering about other Best Picture winners that started out as plays. Two years
ago Moonlight won, and that film was
based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's relatively unknown drama In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. I knew of McCraney through his
play Wig Out! which I saw at the Vineyard Theatre, but he was basically unheard
of when Moonlight won its Oscar. Now,
his play Choir Boy is showing on
Broadway and he heads the playwriting program at Yale.
The 2010 winner
for Best Picture, The King's Speech,
was a stage play by David Seidler before being adapted for the screen. It was at
a reading of the script at a theatre in London that director Tom Hooper's
mother discovered the piece and told him about it. The Academy's 2002 winner, Chicago, was of course adapted from the
stage musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, which was itself adapted from a 1926
play by Maurine Dallas Watkins.
Driving Miss Daisy, which won Best Picture in 1989, is
based on a play by Alfred Uhry which still gets performed quite a bit. The
film, in fact, still feels like a play, which is not true of 1984's winner Amadeus. Peter Shaffer, after having a
hit with his stage play, went about completely rewriting the piece for the screenplay.
The result was a film that is profoundly different from the play it's based
upon, but both are quite good in their own manners.
No films based
on plays won Best Picture Oscars in the 1970s, but in the 1960s the musicals West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of
Music and Oliver! all took away
top honors, as did A Man for All Seasons,
based on the play by Robert Bolt. Back in 1948, Laurence Olivier's film version
of Hamlet won Best Picture. Yeah, you
probably knew that was based on a play, but did you know Casablanca, which won in 1943, was based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett
and Joan Alison?
The 1938 winner,
You Can't Take It with You, was of
course adapted from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The 1933 film Cavalcade was based on a play by
Noël Coward and went on to win a Best Picture Oscar. That same honor also went to
1932's Grand Hotel, which was based
on a play by William Drake, which he had in turn adapted from a German novel by
Vicki Baum.
