Doctorow is not only one of our most significant living novelists, he is also a highly creative screenplay writer. Adaptating novels for movies is a tricky and often thankless endeavor, one many novelists haven't the stomach for. But because Doctorow is profoundly intrigued with film's seductiveness, a frequent motif in his fiction, he has performed this arduous task to fine effect.
Three Screenplays presents the screenplays for
Daniel (produced in 1983 under the direction of Sidney Lumet),
Ragtime, a magnificent adaptation that perfectly mirrors the panoramic novel but which was never made (a shorter screenplay was commissioned for the Milos Forman film), and
Loon Lake, which has yet to be produced. Doctorow's remarks, meticulous commentary by film and American literature professor Paul Levine, and interviews with Doctorow and Lumet coalesce to form a provocative inquiry into "the process of artistic alchemy" that attempts the nearly impossible, the translation of fiction into film.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Three Screenplays is of interest as much for the stories of films that didn't get made (like the ten-hour-long script for Ragtime, commissioned by Robert Altman, but ditched by the producer Dino Di Laurentiis in favor of the version made by Milos Forman, which Doctorow clearly hates) as for any insight on the translation from novel to screenplay. There is a rueful, remarkably self-effacing interview with Sidney Lumet about where Daniel went wrong, and a lovely interview with the novelist in which he recalls the impact of Frances Farmer's movies.
(D. D. Guttenplan
Times Literary Supplement June 10, 2004)
Doctorow is not only one of our most significant living novelists, he is also a superbly illuminating essayist and highly creative screenwriter... Adapting novels for movies is a tricky and often thankless endeavor, one many novelists haven't the stomach for. But because Doctorow is profoundly intrigued with film's seductiveness, a frequent motif in his fiction, he has performed this arduous task to fine effect. Three Screenplays presents the screenplays for Daniel (produced in 1983 under the direction of Sidney Lumet), Ragtime, a magnificent adaptation that perfectly mirrors the panoramic novel but which was never made (a shorter screenplay was commissioned for the Milos Forman film), and Loon Lake, which has yet to be produced. Doctorow's remarks, meticulous commentary by film and American literature professor Paul Levine, and interviews with Doctorow and Lumet coalesce to form a provocative inquiry into 'the process of artistic alchemy' that attempts the nearly impossible, the translation of fiction into film.
(
Booklist October 2003)
[Doctorow] is at once a radical historian, a cultural anthropologist, a troubadour, a private eye, and a cost-benefit analyst of assimilation and upward mobility in the great American multiculture.
(
New York Review of Books )
The film adaptations will challenge students of Doctorow and film.
(
Choice )
This book is a welcome addition to E. L. Doctorow's published works, one which shows him to be an innovative adaptor of his novels into new configurations for another medium. These screenplays are fascinating to read set against the original novels and afford us the opportunity to understand what happens to the author's vision in a collaborative medium: what must necessarily be altered, what is always lost, what is enhanced.
(Chris Messenger, author of The Godfather and American Culture )
