Word: stoppard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...REAL THING Tom Stoppard His witty wordplay would make even the Bard proud...
...attuned to the absurdities of modern life as anyone, the British playwright Tom Stoppard nevertheless cannot believe something he has heard about Shakespeare in Love. "Is it true that in America you can't see this film if you're 15?" he asks, his understanding of an R rating only slightly off. "That glimpse of nipple, and we lose 10 million viewers...
...might well be confused. The unlikely hit Stoppard has co-written with Los Angeles screenwriter Marc Norman is indeed daring--but only in its literary aspirations. Shakespeare in Love boldly imagines young Will, played by Joseph Fiennes, struggling with writer's block and a script called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, until he falls in love with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who becomes his Juliet. Fact weaves with fantasy, verse with demotic dialect, low comedy with high passion; and as director John Madden puts it, "Who dares put words in Shakespeare's mouth and get away with...
Still, the movie took a decade to happen. Norman, whose previous films include Cutthroat Island, got the idea in 1988 from one of his sons, who was studying Elizabethan drama, and eventually produced a script for Universal. In 1992 Stoppard--who wrote the movies Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Brazil, among others--came in to do a rewrite. The film fell apart over casting and languished until Miramax bought the rights from Universal...
...becomes pen-tied, the future of English literature is imperiled. For his new play he has a title--Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter--but not a clue. This is a man in search of a muse, which fate, in the form of screenwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, brightly provides. Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) has it all: beauty, poise, a dowry and a titled suitor. But what she really wants...