‘FROM STAGE TO SCREEN’: TRANSFORMING IMAGES

What do Beth Henley, Fionnula Flanagan, Lyle Kessler, Stanley Kramer, Eileen Brennan, Daniel Mann, Tom Moore, Jane Alexander, Fay Kanin, Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, and others have to say about taking work from stage to screen?

Plenty, and much of it not nice--depending on the perspective. “From Stage to Screen,” a Saturday all-day seminar sponsored by the Ensemble Studio Theatre on the Paramount lot, ended up as a sort of serious how-did-you-do-it peep show.

Writers, directors and actors brazen enough, crazy enough, hungry enough to take their work (or allow others to take it) from the stage to the screen joined panels consisting of (a) writers, (b) directors, (c) actors and (d) a mixer that, with the aid of film clips, provided an overview of the day’s exchanges and discussions.

The writers were angry, the directors competititive, the actors bemused.

Writer/producer Kanin, who moderated the writer’s panel, said that “people from other planets only make noises.” Kanin, who is the co-author of “Goodbye My Fancy” with her husband Michael Kanin, noted that stars are saying they want roles “that give them something to chew on.” Plays, she suggested, provide that kind of meat, but panelists insisted that changing a play to a screen play is a mixed experience.

For Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley, writing the screenplay for “Crimes of the Heart,” “was much less fun” than writing the play. There were technical things to learn, and the idea was no longer new, she said.

Opening a play up for a film can also be troublesome. “The most interesting thing is (creating) the off-stage characters,” said Bill C. Davis, author of “Mass Appeal.” “The most difficult is a tendency to water things down.”

“Two words differentiate film from theater: ‘Print it,’ ” said playwright Robert E. Lee of Lawrence and Lee (“Inherit the Wind,” “First Monday in October”). “Once it’s printed it’s set down forever.”

Worst of all, many claimed, the writer loses control on the road to the studio. Decisions are often wrenched from his hands. And when a property’s sold to films, it’s gone-- as Mark Medoff (“Children of a Lesser God”) and David Mamet (“Sexual Perversity in Chicago”) found out.

Competitiveness and one-upmanship or how to take a piece of writing--anybody’s--and change it into a movie, was the name of the film directors’ game. Randa Haines (director of “Children of a Lesser God,” the film) defended her decision not to use Medoff as screenwriter of his own play, because she believed she wouldn’t get the right kind of script from him.

“I had the responsibility to turn this into a movie as beautiful and meaningful as the play, but something that would work as a movie. “

Yet the trailer of “Children of a Lesser God,” calls it “A Randa Haines Film.” Whose play is it, anyway? Whose vision is being fulfilled?

Ed Zwick, who directed Mamet’s “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” not only had different writers do the screenplay, but explained that the title was also changed (to “About Last Night . . .”) because “the advertisers” rejected the word perversity-- sure to be confused with perversion.

Haines called deciding not to use Medoff “my first lesson in the ruthlessness of how to make movies.” Zwick didn’t see what all the fuss was about over a few changes.

Unspoken generational differences also emerged on the director’s panel, which included such prominent members of the older guard as Stanley Kramer (“Inherit the Wind,” “Cyrano de Bergerac”) and Daniel Mann (“The Rose Tattoo,” “Come Back Little Sheba”). At the height of their productivity, Kramer and Mann had operated from temperate positions, made possible by what Kramer called a different climate of “banditism,” in contrast, he said, to the “changing face of management” that prevails today.

“They don’t object to pictures that have content,” he quipped. “They object to pictures that have content and don’t make money.

“We just spent an hour and a half with a writers’ panel missing the point that what you (directors) wanted to do was not necessarily what the writers wanted.”

What of the actors, lowest on the totem pole, except for those rare occasions of superstardom? Powerlessness is their lot and was the object of vociferous complaint in the acting session. Where writers had been frustrated and angry, actors seemed frustrated and resigned, which explains why so many develop a terrific sense of humor--or develop into their own writer/producers and variations thereof, such as Fionnula Flanagan (“James Joyce’s Women”) or Jane Alexander (“Square Dance”).

Said Flanagan: “I never wanted to be just an actress. My earliest desire was to be a mogul. . . . I was fortunate in that I made a niche for myself that made the statement I wanted to make--about women, about being Irish, about Joyce.”

About differences between stage and screen acting, said Alexander: “Stage acting is like marathon running, film acting is like sprinting. To be a champion you have to be good at both.”

In the end, the event was mostly about how to make plays into movies and on the way become angry, frustrated, broke, powerful, rapacious, powerless, disconsolate, ruthless, despairing, crazy or just plain mad--depending on who you are, when you are, where you are.