Word: scripting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...good comedy is a little like madlibs. Knowing what to do with the empty spaces makes all the difference. It’s not just what actors can pull out of a script that makes a comedy funny; often, it’s what a cast can generate on its own—pure creative humor—that makes a play worth seeing...
Instead, his script, a spare, character-driven retelling of Mary and Joseph's trip to Bethlehem, was rushed into production by New Line Cinema and entrusted to an edgy director with a knack for youth culture, Thirteen's Catherine Hardwicke. Despite the challenges of reconciling Scripture with story, casting actors to play icons, constructing a Christ-era Nazareth in the Italian countryside, wrangling donkeys and camels, and figuring out how to market the first major-studio Bible epic since the genre's peak in the 1950s and '60s with films like The Ten Commandments, The Nativity Story will arrive...
Rich grappled with Scripture and script decisions. Should he stick with one Gospel? The Magi are only in Matthew, the shepherds only in Luke, but both Magi and shepherds appear in the film. Rich's first draft did not include The Magnificat, the verses Mary sings when her cousin Elizabeth feels a child stirring in her own womb, because it didn't match Mary's character arc. When a nun advising the film weighed in on the importance of the passage to Catholics, Hardwicke incorporated some of the verses in a voice-over later in the story...
...more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy. Director Marc Forster and a tony cast (Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah) hit every punch line with a gong, and Ferrell, who's quiet and fine, seems as lost among them as Harold is in his suddenly fictional world...
...they're more integral to character and plot, like Mary's sprightly, perfectly apropos opening number, Practically Perfect. The show strikes a nice balance between stage dazzle--avant-garde choreographer Matthew Bourne brings statues to life and defies gravity in more ways than one--and dramatic heft with a script (by Gosford Park screenwriter Julian Fellowes) that goes beyond the movie, adding material from other Travers stories...