This time it's audio, not video that is exporting, and has driven me to Tumblr.
I say this to tackle the impression of me that must be forming by now that I do nothing but watch strange English films on Film4, because I saw the Film4 premiere of Chatroom last night.
The thought the central premise of a charming sociopath who incites people to commit suicide on internet chatrooms was a fascinating idea and, coupled with the fact you never really know who you are speaking to in a chatroom or message board, had the potential to be as thoroughly disturbing as Hitchcock's better films.
However by about the start of Act II, I could tell this film couldn't really tell what it wanted to be. Was it a psychological thriller, or an attempt to find an innovative way to make a semi-intellectual slasher film? This fundamental conflict of intent finally ruined what would have been interesting in either.
The internet was represented as kind of a budget version of the Matrix, where chatrooms are shown as physical rooms the characters can walk in and out of, lock with passwords, decorate and so on. The first time the main characters meet in the chatroom reminded me very strongly of Black Box theatre.
There was a lot of characters leaping about, climbing on chairs and shoving themselves into each other's faces. Fine on stage, but when covered with a very close camera that seemed to have a pathological phobia of not being in constant, dizzying motion, made me feel slightly nauseous. I can only imagine what it must be like on the big screen.
The cast were all pretty good, with the two leads (Aaron Johnson as William and Matthew Beard as Jim) particularly strong. While Beard seemed comfortable and confidently lacking confidence both in the chatroom and real world, Johnson seems to work far better left to smoulder in tight close-up in the real world than leaping around like an idiot in the chatroom.
A few things struck me as odd as the film went on. Firstly, most of the main characters were not logging into the chatroom indoors at home, but from a variety of increasingly bizarre outdoor locations.
Personally I would have thought, from a directorial and budgetary point of view, this conceit of a chatroom was gift, as the director could create a claustrophobic and weird atmosphere with a series of interiors. Maybe this and the strange whirling room were stylistic choices that would explain themselves later.
As the film went on, I found myself spotting more and more instances of whacky exteriors and odd set-ups that made me feel like the film had to compensate for something in some way. What this was, I wasn't sure as I actually would have preferred the sparser world.
In fact, I thought, this would work perfectly on the stage.
It wasn't until the end credits rolled that I spied the following:
"Screenplay by Edna Walsh, adapted from her stage play..."
Ah, that explains it, I thought.
I know suspect that the writer and director were so keen to distinguish the film from the play that a number of extraneous scenes were written or modified into something that could only work on the screen, including one of the most bizarrely redundant chase scenes I have seen.
I was recently speaking to someone about Warhorse, and why I think it singularly failed as a film, when it had been so popular in both print and on stage. I should add I have not read the book, and all I have seen of the play was part of a fascinating documentary, but even on screen, I was surprised how quickly I became blind to the puppet's operators.
My personal theory is that people will suspend their disbelief more readily when reading or watching something in a theatre than they will when presented with ostensibly factual images on a screen. A puppet horse can think and react and make decisions and the audience will buy into it. When a live horse is edited to make it look as though it has free will, it becomes faintly ridiculous.
See most stories that are created today, I would say, have an indigenous medium. That is to say some are natively motion picture and television, others are genetically stage or audio plays, while more are ethnically printed whether it be as prose or a comic. Each evolved to thrive in its natural habitat, and cannot be merely transplanted from one to another.
As with plants and animals, a story has properties that help it thrive in its environment. It is possible to move them around, but while some will flourish readily, others need to adapt to survive.
While the fundamental story may remain unaltered, chances are it will lose things are not advantageous, and useful new adaptations will appear.
It is worth pointing out that I am really talking about the last seventy years or so. Prior to film, television, radio and fast, quality printing, a was fundamentally for stage or page.
These days of course we have feature films, short films, TV series, web series, comics, web comics, radio plays, podcasts, novels, short stories, and blogs.
So do I think any story can be moved into any medium?
Yes, I do. But it may have to undergo some heavy mutation to survive, and as with the chicken and the tyrannosaurus, may bear little resemblance to its ancestors.
Fundamentally it is a case of identifying what makes that story worth telling, then looking to the original for inspiration. The fundamental fallacy of doing something like The Lord of the Rings or Spider-Man on the stage is that you can tell the interesting, human parts of the stories fine, but all the major action, as with any number of Shakespeare's epics, will have to happen off stage or underwhelm.
As example from my own work, I recently finished a play set in a London theatre during the Blitz of World War Two. As end-of-act buffers (and to allow for the stage to be reset), I wrote several little vignettes of the ghosts of actors mutely performing excerpts from famous plays. As it is one of them has a minor bearing on the antipenultimate scene, but other than that their function is mechanical.
Without knowing this, a friend of mine read it. Either I wasn't clear or he hadn't realised, but he was reading it as a screenplay. The main feedback I got was "I didn't really get the ghosts."
After he had realised it was a play, he said, "Oh, it's a play? Well, the ghosts are fine, then."
As it is, had I written it as a screenplay, or if I were ever to adapt it, the ghosts are one of the first things I would change. They simply wouldn't work on screen as I had written them, and I would probably do away with them all together. The point is, even my friend could recognise that the screen and the stage are different environments and adaptations to suit one can be a hindrance in the other.
Finally - to ensure this analogy is really flogged to death - I, like a lot of people, found the more recent Harry Potter films increasingly similar, while the earlier ones had seemed very distinct. I think part of this is that the later books grew so massive that all the texture-adding subplots had to be axed in order to make the story fit a two and a half hour movie.
Harry Potter and the... I... erm... which one is this?
Without these subplots, it reveals that the books follow a fairly similar solving-a-mystery structure which, when constantly repeated, tend to blend into one. Like birds, once plucked of their bright and colourful feathers, they end up looking pretty similar underneath.
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