Cinema and Drama

Similarities and Differences

Live drama is an ancient art form with centuries of recorded history and ongoing cultural vitality. Cinema is a much newer art form, with a history dating back only to approximately 1895. However, its mass appeal has pushed live theater into a secondary position in all but a handful of urban locations.

As art forms, theater and cinema have significant likenesses and intriguing differences:

• Both are primarily story-based art forms.
• Both live drama and cinema depend primarily on performers and performance to communicate the story to the audience. A stage play or a screenplay can be read like a novel, but only speaking, gesturing human actors can give the story its full, intended realization.
• Both drama and cinema share certain common supporting features.

These include sets, props, costumes, and all the other elements that make up mise en scène; music and other sound effects; and a play script in which the primary thrust of the story is articulated through human speech or "dialogue." Even in the silent era, films relied heavily on human speech understood through contextual intuition, gesture, facial expression, lip reading, and inserts of printed projected text.

Despite—or perhaps because of—these many likenesses, much has been written about the differences between the two media. For instance, in cinema circles, the terms "talky" and "stagey" are negative adjectives that imply the film has not liberated itself from its stage-bound origins. In motion pictures, "cinematic" is the primary form of praise, indicating that the film uses the medium's advantagescamera angles, editing, special effects.

In part, these distinctions derive from the historical rivalry of the two forms. However, they also point to certain crucial conditions of production. Indeed, they can all originate in one specific condition: dramatic scripts or "plays" are produced on a stage by actors performing directly and personally in the audience's company. In cinema, however, the actors perform for the director and the camera. Their performance is recorded on an intermediary medium, traditionally celluloid film, and increasingly digital formats, to be cut and manipulated for an audience who will be present for a performance of two-dimensional simulacra of the live actors. From this single difference—which can be explicitly located in the intermediary function of camera and film—come nearly all of the much-discussed differences between the two media.

For instance, cinema's visual field is potentially much greater than that of stage productions. This is a direct function of the beautiful mobility of modern camera equipment and advances in cinematic special effects. The stage can have splendid effects of spectacle, but no stage could convincingly deal with the events of films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), or Oppenheimer (2023).

Performers work in very different circumstances. The stage actor prepares their role to be performed sequentially, in real-time, from beginning to end, in a single developing sequence. The screen actor works piecemeal, creating the role in fragments that the director and editor stitch together in post-production to create the illusion of a sequential, emotionally evolving performance.

On the live stage, the performer is always conscious of playing directly and personally to the audience. Mistakes cannot be edited out in post-production, and charisma must be generated from within and projected throughout the house without the aid of lingering, larger-than-life close-ups or other amplifications of effect that the camera is uniquely qualified to create.

Still, despite the differences between the two media, core abilities and practices keep stage and screen united. Most screenwriters start writing plays because they must master the art of creating character, plot, and theme through the spoken word. Most actors learn and perfect their craft on the stage before live audiences. Even though many actors leave the stage when the world of film calls, only some can say they have made it without stage experience, and a surprising number return to the stage regularly to refresh their art and to renew their acquaintance with their audience.

The Beginnings

Historically, the art of narrative cinema is intertwined with its great historical precursor, the live theater. The nature of this relationship has long been a contentious issue in film criticism and theory. Secure in the cinema's current dominance as the premier source of performed story artfilm theorists tend to stress the cinema's uniqueness and its independence from stage-bound limitations. However, filmmakers were not always so eager to stress such differences. In the early days of movies, they often tried explicitly—and successfully—to appropriate the success of the live theater.

Although human speech is the core of stage drama, cinema, an almost silent medium for its first three decades, began incorporating elements of stage practice and personnel into the filmed product. During these years, vaudeville sketches and theatrical excerpts were routinely filmed and exhibited in cinema theaters and nickelodeons. A parallel development led to full-length stage plays appearing on screen in condensed versions. William Shakespeare was a favorite for such treatment, partly because the stories were well-known and the written texts accessible. Additionally, as the silent film moved into its mature phase (1910-1927), the desire to put full-length plays on screen helped producers like Adolf Zuckor and Daniel Frohman and their Famous Players Film Company to break the industry's own self-imposed one- or two-reel (fifteen to thirty-minute) limit on theatrical films. Thus, the full-length stage play helped give rise to the full-length feature film.

Among the famous stage plays that found their way to the silent screen was Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan: Or, The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up (pr. 1904; film 1924), Owen Wister and Kirk La Shelle's stage adaptation of Wister's famous novel The Virginian (1902; film 1914), Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (pr. 1892; film 1925), and Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie (pr. 1921; film 1923), later pronounced by O'Neill as one of his two favorite screen adaptations of his work.

The Early Sound Era

Throughout the silent film era, inventors were working to produce systems that would allow soundparticularly dialogueto be recorded for synchronized reproduction with the film. This development came to fruition with the nearly simultaneous development of Vitaphone, Phonofilm, and Movietone. Vitaphone was the first to make it to the screen in the Warner Bros. adaptation of Samson Raphaelson's stage hit The Jazz Singer (pr. 1925; film 1927).

Though sound now seems like an obvious asset to the film industry, it met initial resistance from the major studios, who were reluctant to pay for the new equipment, and some filmmakers, who feared sound would turn cinema into mere filmed theater. The believers were smaller commercial studios such as Warner Bros. and Fox, which correctly predicted that synchronized sound would give them a competitive edge over established significant studios such as Paramount.

The immediate popularity of the new sound film also created an even more favorable market for scripts that had already proven themselves on the stage. John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh estimate that at least 28 percent of feature films released between 1928 and 1930 were based on stage plays.

The standard-bearer was Eugene O'Neill. Anna Christie was remade for sound to serve as Greta Garbo's talking debut in the role of Anna. The film stayed faithful to the stage play, with a minimal effort to "open up" with exterior scenes, and is now largely regarded as a classic example of a stage play that never entirely became cinema despite a powerful script and excellent cast. Other O'Neill plays that came to the screen during the 1930s and 1940s included:

• The Long Voyage Home (pr. 1917; film 1940)
• Strange Interlude (pr. 1928; film 1932)
• The Emperor Jones (pr. 1920; film Emperor Jones, 1933)

The latter two productions were among O'Neill's most daring antirealistic theatrical experiments, and both subsequent films show the strain of the attempt to domesticate them for the screen.

In general, it proved easier to translate the more conventionally realistic playwrights to the screen than O'Neill, whose inventiveness derived from a profound rethinking of the expressive possibilities of the live theater. The pull of the movies of this era was toward realism, whether in comedy or drama. One playwright who made the transition successfully and frequently to the screen was Lillian Hellman with The Little Foxes (pr. 1939; film 1941), Watch on the Rhine (pr. 1941; film 1943), and The Children's Hour (pr. 1934)the latter filmed as These Three in 1936. Other 1930s and 1940s playwrights whose stage work made it to the screen were Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Robert E. Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson, Claire Boothe, and Philip Barry.

The 1950s and 1960s

Despite the impressive list of plays that achieved artistic and commercial success during the 1930s and 1940s, it would appear that the greatest era of this crossover activity came during the 1950s and early 1960s. Not only did a new generation of essential drama and comedy writers emerge on Broadway, but also that unique and distinctive New York invention, the Broadway musical, came fully into its own, both on the stage and inexpensive, lavishly staged, star-studded, full-color Hollywood versions.

The main creative engine of the Broadway-to-Hollywood movement of nonmusical stage plays was undoubtedly Tennessee Williams. Among his stage works that came to the screen during this period were The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944; film 1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (pr. 1947; film 1951), The Rose Tattoo (pr. 1951; film 1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (pr. 1955; film 1958), Suddenly Last Summer (pr. 1958; film 1959), Sweet Bird of Youth (pr. 1959; film 1962), and The Night of the Iguana (pr. 1961; film 1964). With these seven theater-to-film plays, Williams stretched the American filmgoer's imagination into the dark areas of desire, passion, loneliness, and forbidden sex. The censors could soften the details of Williams's themes, but there was no way to hide them completely.

The plays of William Inge also made impressive transitions from stage to screen. These included Come Back, Little Sheba (pr. 1950; film 1952), Picnic (pr. 1953; film 1955), Bus Stop (pr. 1955; film 1956), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (pr. 1957; film 1960). Other strong plays that made good movies include George Axelrod's The Seven Year Itch (pr. 1952; film 1955), Donald Bevan's Stalag 17 (pr. 1951; film 1953), Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (pr. 1953; film 1956), William Gibson's The Miracle Worker (pr. 1959; film 1962), and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (pr. 1962; film 1966). Two plays by African American authors that brought black concerns to a mainstream audience were Lorraine Hansberry's classic A Raisin in the Sun (pr. 1959; film 1961) and LeRoi Jones's (Amiri Baraka's) Dutchman (pr. 1964; film 1966) the latter bringing a distinctly Off-Broadway sensibility to the issues of race, class, and sex in the big city.

The 1950s and 1960s were also notable for the adaptation of Broadway musicals to the Hollywood screen. Musical films have been part of cinema since developing commercially and technologically feasible synchronization processes. The New York stage had always been home to various musical stage shows, ranging from non-narrative musical reviews to lightweight, formulaic musical comedies to the more narratively unified and musically refined operettas of Sigmund Romberg, Victor Herbert, and others. Many of these were turned into popular films. Still, in 1943, with the production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's Oklahoma!, the Broadway musical achieved a new level of musical and theatrical dynamism.

Eager for a product that would fill its new wide-screen technologies with color, music, and spectacle (and do something that the rising television medium could not match), Hollywood lavished talent, time, and money on a series of new musicals of unparalleled vitality and variety. The most significant names in American musical theater—Rodgers, Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Moss Hart, Jerome Kern, Leonard Bernstein, and more—were brought to screen audiences in the United States and worldwide. Among the most outstanding productions during this era were Annie Get Your Gun (pr. 1946; film 1950), Show Boat (pr. 1927; film 1951), Kiss Me, Kate (1948; film 1953), and Oklahoma! (film 1955), The King and I (pr. 1951; film 1956), The Music Man (pr. 1957; film 1962), My Fair Lady (pr. 1956; film 1964), West Side Story (pr. 1957; film 1961), The Sound of Music (pr. 1959; film 1965), and Hello, Dolly! (pr. 1964; film 1969).

After the 1960s

After 1969, mounting such spectacular shows and moving them to Hollywood seemed more complicated. Bob Fosse became a force with Sweet Charity (1966; film 1969) and Cabaret (pr. 1966; film 1972), but the most creative single individual working on Broadway, Stephen Sondheim, seemed all but ignored by Hollywood (his A Little Night Music of 1973 was filmed for release in 1977 by a European production group). "New age" stage hits such as Hair (pr. 1968; film 1979), Godspell (pr. 1971; film 1973), and Jesus Christ Superstar (1971; film 1973) had bumpy roads to the screen, with a pair of notable exceptions—Grease (1972; film 1978) and A Chorus Line (1975; film 1985)—the great age of Broadway musical adaptation ended with the 1960s.

More in the traditional mode has been the work of Neil Simon, one of the very few stage playwrights whose work—like that of O'Neill, Hellman, Williams, and Inge before him—almost always brings a guaranteed audience with it. From Barefoot in the Park (pr. 1963; film 1967) to Lost in Yonkers (pr. 1991; film 1993), Simon has written stage comedies that Hollywood loves to screen, top stars love to act in, and audiences line up to see.

The younger generation of playwrights has produced some challenging plays that have been made into interesting, often critically and commercially successful films. Still, most have yet to sustain a cinema connection by playwriting alone. Those who have forged careers in stage and screen have done so, like David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin, by becoming screenwriters, producers, and directors of their work and that of others. In the case of Sorkin, television has beckoned, and Sorkin has responded with the popular and critically successful television program The West Wing (1999).

The 2020s

In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda's stage production Hamilton (2016) achieved widespread acclaim before expanding its success to a different medium: online streaming services. Hamilton, which featured the incredible life of Alexander Hamilton, a key figure in American history, enjoyed a phenomenal multi-year run as a Broadway production. Hamilton's credits included eleven Tony Awards, a Grammy Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for the titular biography by Ron Chernow. In 2020, instead of a motion picture adaptation of the musical, a live performance of Hamilton became available on the Disney+ streaming service. This variation was forced, in part, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many movie productions were curtailed because in-person theater attendance was unavailable due to quarantine measures. Hamilton's appearance on a streaming service also demonstrated new consumer preferences for watching movie content at home. This trend continued throughout the 2020s, even as the COVID-19 pandemic abated. Because of the global success of Hamilton, speculation persisted that it would eventually be made into a movie prodution. This would mirror an earlier Miranda Broadway production, In the Heights (2006), which make its way to the big screen in 2021.

Shakespeare on Screen

With the evident slippage of the relationship between the stage playwright and the silver screen, it is noteworthy that one playwright who remains current is one of the classics, William Shakespeare, whose plays came to the screen in no fewer than one dozen theatrical screen releases since 1990 alone. Shakespearean screen production has a long and distinguished place in the relationship between drama and cinema history.

The filming of Shakespearean texts (not contemporary language adaptations) reframes the argument over whether the image should be more important than the word in filmmaking. The image remains primary, but the power and prestige of Shakespeare's poetic speech go a long way to achieving balance in critical debates. In addition, because Shakespeare's imagination ranged freely beyond the limits of the physical stage, it rarely seems strange or forced to open up the texts to multiple locations or settings. Finally, although Shakespeareans and moviegoers may debate whether to be "authentic" or modern in costume and setting, actual Elizabethan stage practice seemed tolerant of both approaches, which invites experimentation and innovation on both stage and film.

A short list of notable Shakespeare films would have to include the major works of such Shakespearean auteurs as Laurence Olivier, Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601; film 1955), Henry V (pr. c. 1598-1599; film 1944); Orson Welles, Othello (pr. 1604; film 1952), Chimes at Midnight (1967; adaptation of several Shakepeare plays); Franco Zeffirrelli, The Taming of the Shrew (pr. c. 1593-1594; film 1966), Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596; film 1968); and Kenneth Brannagh, Henry V (film 1989), Hamlet (film 1996), Much Ado About Nothing (pr. pr. c. 1598-1599; film 1993). However, many other films of varying degrees of fidelity to or freedom from the Shakespearean text capture on film the spirit of Shakespeare's multifaceted genius. Remaking Shakespeare keeps the cinema in a fruitful and honest relationship with its theatrical roots.

Legacy of the Stage

The complexities of the relationship between cinema and drama resist comfortable generalizations. As much as cinéastes may assert the independence of the cinema from the stage, there can be no doubt that historically, the early filmmakers were dependent on the theater both for performing talent in all genres and for story material that brought with it intense conflicts, human dimensions, engaging stories, and storytelling techniques, and rich resources of character and character development. Scholarship in silent film shows this was as true before the coming of sound as it certainly was afterward. Experience has shown that filming a great play rarely makes a great movie. Experience makes it equally evident that a great film is impossible without the inner, dramatic resources developed first for the live stage.

A review of the film industry's significant honors, the Academy Awards, is an exciting indicator of the high regard with which Hollywood still rewards a good stage play. Consider these winners of the Best Picture Award: You Can't Take It with You (1938), Casablanca (1943), Hamlet (1948), West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), A Man for All Seasons (1966), Oliver! (1968), Amadeus (1984), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). These outstanding theatrical films are just a tiny sampling of numerous other filmed plays in which their peers honored directors, actors (lead and supporting), and other talented theater and film professionals. Ultimately, the lesson is that while the cinema may have outgrown its theatrical precursor in the entertainment industry's power and prestige, it still recognizes the need to use the theater, be renewed by it, and honor it.

Bibliography

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