Word: screenplays
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...British director Tony Palmer's new film, Testimony, dramatizes the view that Shostakovich was a closet dissident who was bitterly resentful of the system that shackled him. In David Rudkin's elegant screenplay, Shostakovich (Ben Kingsley) negotiates his artistic salvation through public acquiescence, gratefully accepting his humiliation at a 1948 Soviet Composers' Union meeting and ritualistically denouncing Stravinsky at a conference the next year in New York City. Always he is haunted by the doom- laden specter of Stalin (Terence Rigby), who is seen thumbing through dossiers while sitting by the telephone, dispatching his opponents to their graves simply...
...ridden memory play, from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Eugene O'Neill's long-concealed Long Day's Journey into Night to Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky and Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. Into those ranks comes Michael Weller. Heretofore best known for Moonchildren and the screenplay of Hair, both valedictories to the '60s, Weller looks back to his adolescence, a decade earlier, in Spoils of War. His story of estranged parents and a teenage son who schemes to reunite them is a harrowing addition to the genre and the only work of lasting value to debut...
DIRECTOR Ernest Thompson admits that his new film 1969 is somewhat autobiographical. Thompson says he considers himself to be "more the Kiefer Sutherland character." However, Thompson, who also wrote the screenplay, says that his life isn't the only inspiration for the film. "It's only biographical to a point," he adds. Unlike the film's protagonist, Thompson says he did not break into the county office to steal his draft papers, though he did drive across the country in a leaf-painted bus, seeing the world and "trying to find peace...
...time director says he thinks many screenwriters become directors so that they can have their works produced as they see them. He says, "The possibility of the writer and the director having the same vision is unlikely," and while he says he is still satisfied with his Oscar-winning screenplay of On Golden Pond, he says that "there are things I would have done differently...
...final analysis, 1969 is not a great film. It is not a bad film, but it simply does not achieve the proportions of other '60s time piece films (notably Hair). While the screenplay illustrates Thompson's talent, his direction reduces what might have been a noteworthy film to mediocrity. College students may accept Thompson's version of the Woodstock era, since we weren't there, but it's hard not to think that he isn't just looking back through rose-colored glasses at the good old days when he was trying to avoid the draft and having a great...