Word: screenplays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Screenplay by Harv Zimmel, Michael...
Unfortunately the writers for Shoot to Kill didn't measure up to the high caliber of the film's advertising and casting personnel. The lucky three to get screenplay credits are Harv Zimmel, Michael Burton and Daniel Petrie Jr.; there's no point in changing their names, since they aren't innocent. It's strange that the more writers a movie has, the lamer the script inevitably...
Judith Hearne took up permanent residence in the literary world's case load in 1955 when Novelist Brian Moore anatomized her "lonely passion." In Peter Nelson's screenplay, however, she is more a curio than a figure of powerful emotional relevance. This classic spinster (to whose portrayal Maggie Smith brings all the right moves but nothing very individual) is a Dublin piano teacher. Naturally she drinks a bit. Sometimes she drinks a lot. Her timorous gentility suggests to her landlady's brother (Bob Hoskins, with some of his spark plugs missing) the possibilities of untapped wealth -- enough of it, anyway...
...this one. Not even with Hollywood's premier actor-stars, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, as Francis and Helen. And not even with Kennedy writing the screenplay. He must have known that the novel's sour, allusive poetry -- part James Joyce, part James T. Farrell -- would get lost in translation to the screen. He must have realized that Francis' life is significant not for what he does but for what he dreams and fears. But a movie like this, which concentrates on mundane plot, can only show, not reveal. As directed by Hector Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman...
Literature has gone to pot because all the great young writers and Mark Twains of today are now in Hollywood writing the Great American Screenplay. Thus novels today stink and are too caught up in the high-brow theories of our great colleges and boring to read...