Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Demme, in working with screenwriter Adam Brooks on the final version of LaGravenese's script, found himself looking back further. "The more we focused in on 124 Bluestone Road, the more I thought, 'This is Ibsen, this is Chekhov, this is Morrison...
However it is slimmed down, and although its conclusion holds more hope than the book's, the movie is certainly Morrison. Says Demme: "Almost everything, every line of dialogue, every article of clothing, every detail we shamelessly took from the book to put in the movie. If Toni Morrison said black dress, it was going to be a black dress. We were slavish," he adds, without apparent irony. The film is also attentive to the change of seasons in the year of the story's life; the surrounding woods and streams are limned in lustrous imagery. But the whole picture...
...another sense, Winfrey's production of Beloved is a logical extension of her TV book club; it brings a novel she loves to millions, who can read it at the movies. Morrison was an early beneficiary of Oprah's literary saleswomanship; her 1977 Song of Solomon was the book club's second selection. "Sales were thunderous!" the author says. "It sold more in three or four months than it had in its entire 20 years...
...none of Morrison's novels had been filmed, and that was fine with her. "I was always annoyed," says the author and Princeton professor, "when my students would ask, 'When is there going to be a movie?' I told them that a novel is not what happens before the movie. Why can't it just be a book?" Morrison knows the page and the screen are only distantly related, especially in the adaptation of a novel like Beloved--dense, elliptical, teeming with allusion and metaphor, leaping from now to then and back again, in pain. Turning a book into...
...Oprah? Recalls Morrison: "She said, and this is kind of charming, 'I am going in my pocketbook and write a check.' I wasn't talking to a studio or a lawyer but to another human being. If you'll excuse it, it reminded me of myself. A single black woman who said, 'Well, I'm doing this. It's going to be hard for me, but that's beside the point.' This was a big project and, for her, a big deal. And she was deadly serious about every aspect...