DAVID: If you were offered a chance to do an adaptation, say, of The Importance of Being Earnest for the screen, would you ever do something like that?

FRAN: No. Because what would you adapt? There's already been a wonderful movie of The Importance of Being Earnest, and it's a play. What always shocks me — this is the main thing I hate about the theater — is that every single person in the world can fuck with Shakespeare. Like you know, "Shakespeare? What does he know? He should have made Lady Macbeth … a Hell's Angel! Why didn't he think of that?" You know, any idiot can do that, but you can't touch a word of Neil Simon. Shakespeare doesn't have that … writer's guild, or whatever the union it is that represents playwrights …

DAVID: NAFTA.

FRAN: NAFTA, that it. The Teamsters. Whatever it is, the reason people like to write for the theater is because no one can change it. So it is against the law to change a semicolon in a Neil Simon play. But anyone in the world can completely change Shakespeare. It's absurd.


- bill 12-24-2008 7:28 pm

"it's (theatre) absurd." ha!
- bill 12-24-2008 7:30 pm [add a comment]





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.