The Pleasures of Good Words Translated to the Screen

You could make a pretty good case for the pleasures of fine screenwriting this week. Two original screenplays--”Broadcast News,” written (as well as directed and produced) by James L. Brooks, and “Moonstruck” by John Patrick Shanley, a writer who may be new to you if you’re not a theatergoer--are works of delicious specificity.

And over in the tricky world of adaptation, John Huston’s elder son, Tony, has done a delicate, imaginative job of turning James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the final, reverberating story from “Dubliners” into film material for what would become his father’s final--and requiem--work.

All three writers have given a little extra burnish to that best of all writing advice: “Write what you know.”

In his hard-shell fairy tale, Shanley has caught the tang and savor of Italian-Americans in Brooklyn Heights. As the son of a first-generation Irish-Catholic meat packer and a telephone operator in the East Bronx, he’s very nearly dealing with family--or at least clan.

Brooks’ turf is the backstage world of television news, which he captures at peak panic time--apparently the only way it comes. Beginning as a CBS copyboy, Brooks spent time as a newswriter, and it’s all there. (There was also the newsroom-centered “Mary Tyler Moore Show.”)

For anyone who has wondered why some television commentators who read the news seem barely able to deal with complete sentences--and who has perhaps wondered who writes their copy--let Brooks take you behind the scenes and you will understand everything. (I say some, not all. There are newspeople who pride themselves on researching and writing all their own material; they are not in the majority.)

Tony Huston at the age of 12 was riding to the hunt with his father at St. Clerans, their estate near Galway. That was during John Huston’s 18 years in Ireland, when he took Irish citizenship and became almost more Irish than his County Armagh forebears. Their time there probably informed the rhythms of the dialogue that the younger Huston had to invent to augment Joyce’s own, precise language.

Shanley has a lovely way with families, an ear for their overlapping interruptions, an eye for their unspoken rituals. Loretta Castorini (played by Cher with a special luminance and more animation than she’s ever allowed herself before) comes home at night to announce something special to her dozing pop, Cosmo. (He’s Vincent Gardenia, in a lovely, rich performance.) At her words, “I got news,” he makes for the kitchen. Where else are the secrets, the tragedies of a family divulged?

This time, the news is cheerful--her engagement. She has picked up a split of Mumms, which they divide, ritually, first adding a little lump of sugar. If there were bitters, which are also part of the ritual, I missed them. Having broken the news to the head of the family, they go in to Cher’s mother, Rose. She’s played by the magnificent Olympia Dukakis--who may be the winning Dukakis in the family next year, in two separate but not unrelated fields: politics and show business. (Democratic presidential candidate Michael is her first cousin.)

The kitchen table as the hallowed center of all family unity is part of “Moonstruck” that will strike home with almost everybody who’s had a family. There’s also a nice growly family brusqueness to which director Norman Jewison has given just the proper emphasis, so that it can be heard for what it is: dangerous-sounding but no rougher than a dog’s tongue on the fur of a companionable cat.

By example: Living upstairs in this enormous family-owned house in Brooklyn Heights is Cosmo’s father, known only as the Old Man. He’s played by 81-year-old Feodor Chaliapin, the namesake one of the five children of the legendary Russian singer and his Italian ballerina-wife. The Old Man’s own beloved family are his five dogs, whom he regularly feeds his own dinner and takes to the water’s edge so that all six of them can howl at the full moon: “The moon brings the woman to the man.”

One family dinner time, he attempts to take his furry quintet a second plate and Dukakis, without looking up or breaking the sentence she’s begun, says, “Old Man, if you give another piece of my food to those dogs, I’m gonna kick you till you’re dead.”

Completed by Chaliapin’s little circling turn back to his place at the table, it’s a gorgeous moment and a lapidary bit of writing. And that’s what Shanley has built and Jewison has interpreted: an undeniable mosaic of accuracy and poetry that add up to a paean to the family--and/or to enduring love, where ever it can be found.

Some of the fun of Brooks’ “Broadcast News” comes from our feeling of being eavesdroppers to the real thing--and some of that comes from Brooks’ casting. If the craggy, authoritative president of the network’s new division seems vaguely familiar, he should: It’s Peter Hackes, a 30-year Washington correspondent for NBC News. But it’s Brooks’ words that suddenly put everyone in a sort of 3-D verite , in one crucial scene.

All hell has broken loose as a Libyan plane has shot up a U.S. base in Egypt--catching the media mavens at a brunch. As Hackes assigns William Hurt’s untried anchorman to the job, leaving the superbly experienced Albert Brooks out in the cold, producer Holly Hunter, whose character would never dodge a single hard moral confrontation in life, feels that she must tell the news president about his major assigning gaffe.

Looking down at her from a formidable height, Hackes listens through her impassioned defense of Brooks, and says pleasantly what every boss has ever said to a pressing subordinate: “OK, that’s your opinion. I don’t agree.”

Aghast, Hunter says, “It’s not opinion.”

“You’re just absolutely right, and I’m absolutely wrong?” Hackes asks. “It must be nice to always believe you know better. To think you’re always the smartest person in the room.”

And from the depths of her late-20s certainty, Hunter says, “No--it’s awful .”

Now that would seem to be the very best kind of character revelation, funny and shattering and sort of awful all at once. And it’s only because we have had copious evidence that Holly Hunter’s Jane is a crackerjack, and because Hunter’s playing of her is so utterly endearing, that she doesn’t come off as an impossible wise guy but someone who’s lived with the burden of her precocity a good long time.

It is also Brooks’ singular powers of observation that make “Broadcast News” the in-depth and marvelous entertainment that it is. I don’t know how he has gotten into the soul of a young woman producer and noted her every passing emotion, down to the crying fits that are part of her Type-A existence. It seems magical. It may just be called good writing.

In “The Dead,” Tony Huston made a few changes from Joyce’s original story, one of them most telling. As this Dublin post-Christmas party comes to its end, a husband and wife, Gretta and Gabriel Conroy, are preparing to leave, when from where she stands on the stairs, Gretta hears the tenor voice of one of the guests singing “The Lass of Aughrim,” a lament for a cold, dead baby.

It will become the pivotal moment in the film, this pure singing of these grief-stricken words. They crystallize for Anjelica Huston’s memorable Gretta all the unspoken feelings she has had that night, and--as we learn--for years. In Joyce’s story, the singer, the celebrated and prideful Mr. Bartell D’Arcy, doesn’t finish, slamming down the piano lid, saying, roughly that he is “hoarse as a crow.”

For the film’s purposes, it is crucial that we have in our ears all of the song, and all its powerful, grief-stricken words, and so we do. Mr. Bartell D’Arcy may still complain that he is out of voice, but it is that voice that carries us into the heart of the film, contained in its last great moments. (And it is a great--director’s--choice to have him sing unseen, so that we may read her face in all its heart-rending poignancy.)

There are those who may complain that Joyce still eludes film makers, that there are nuances of inner feeling that cannot be turned out as simply as you would turn out your pockets. I don’t think so. “The Dead” is funny, complex, haunting, many-layered and mature, on film as well as on the printed page.