Word: forman
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...bank on this: Milos Forman will never make a movie called The Milos Forman Story. Though the plot is dramatic enough -- early renown in his native Czechoslovakia, exile in cultural limbo, the struggle of starting over in a new land with a new language -- the climax does not ring true. It is too improbable: a smash hit and Oscars galore for his second American film, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), more profits and honors with last year's Amadeus. Sorry, pal. Send the script to Sly Stallone...
...Cuckoo's Nest). Hippies raise their voices, and a little hell, against the Viet Nam War (Hair, 1979). A black man is driven by righteousness to lead an armed revolt against white America (Ragtime, 1981). A great but graceless composer battles the musical establishment of Old Vienna (Amadeus). In Forman's American films an irascible individualist is forever butting his head against the walls of official power and getting bashed for his pains. These parables of dreams defeated hold echoes of tales from Forman's compatriots in dark absurdity, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera and Tom Stoppard. They are hardly...
...much about Forman and his films mirrors the spirit of America. Like any true Hollywood director, he works on the grand scale, in broad, confident strokes. Energy, not nuance, informs every frame. And like any true immigrant with a success story, Forman is grateful to his adoptive country. "For me," he says, "there was only one place to go if I couldn't live in my own country: America. It is a country of immigrants. There is such a tolerance for the foreign and the unfamiliar. America continues to amaze...
...national identities. More than half the prizes handed out by jury President Milos Forman went to films with multiple passports. The jury prizes (first and second runners-up) were awarded to Birdy, an American film directed and produced by Englishmen, and Colonel Redl, a period political drama made under German, Austrian and Hungarian aegis. The choice for best actor was American Star William Hurt, playing an imprisoned homosexual in the Brazilian film Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on a novel by the Argentine Manuel Puig. Insignificance, which took the technical prize, was the official British entry, but its setting...
What is the explanation? Forman has the best answer. "If people like it, they like it for the same reason the play excited me. It was a very entertaining evening in the theater, and yet I learned a lot I had never known before. I believe that people also identify with the characters. There is a little of Mozart in each of us, and perhaps a great deal of Salieri." For Forman and Shaffer the challenge was to transform Shaffer's stage play, where much is left to the imagination, into a sumptuous movie that includes fully staged operas, grand...