Word: brecht
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite the ideological, artistic, and legal disputes which confused and nearly stopped the making of the film version of Bertolt Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper, the movie is a brilliant success. It was Brecht himself who nearly ruined the film, for between 1928, when he wrote the play, and 1931, when G. W. Pabst commissioned him to work on the film script, Brecht's interest in Marxism had become a strong conviction, and he wanted the film turned into an anti-capitalist diatribe...
Although Pabst accepted most of the plot revisions upon which Brecht insisted, Brecht quite rightly felt that the movie served to undercut rather than to preach the propaganda, and he sued for an injunction to stop the film from being released. He lost the suit, was paid handsomely for the film rights, and divorced himself from the production (after being assured that most of his plot revisions would be used and that all film rights would revert to him after two years). Kurt Weill won his half of the suit, and was allowed to rewrite his score for the movie...
...Harvard Dramatic Club production of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, opening in the Loeb Drama Center, has attracted the attention of several theatrical men in New York and in the academic theatre...
...working relationship between the playwright and the adaptor followed immediately on the heels of their first encounter in 1941. Few people in America had heard of, let alone wanted to translate, Bertolt Brecht. Bentley, then an instructor at U.C.L.A., was introduced to him in Hollywood as a man who could translate German. Brecht read some of his tentative translations and then produced some original material. "Line by line, I would translate and he would tell me what was wrong with my translation," Bentley now recalls with a smile that insinuates the nature of the criticism. "It wasn't that...
...failure of America to produce dramatists of the stature of Brecht, Giradoux, Pirandello, and Anouilh is one which Bentley explains in terms of the role theater plays in American society. "In this country, the theater is for amusement, which puts the author at a great disadvantage. Significant theater is written to be taken seriously." This is a motif to which he returns frequently. "Men like Hemingway and Faulkner write novels, because they know that novels will be taken seriously. But the play in this country that is both serious and popular is a real rarity...