U N I T module 6 2 THE SEVENTH ART In this Unit you will improve your communication skills in the field by exploring some aspects of the film industry and also learn some vocabulary. You will also go through the remarkable connection literature, history, cinema and how the three of them are interlaced another. A. ADAPTING HISTORY AND of media technical between with one LITERATURE INTO FILMS Many thousands of movies are adaptations from historical or literary sources. History is generically dealt with by cinema in the epic, period or historical film. Film historians generally distinguish the epic group from the strict historical group by its sheer size, expense and the sumptuousness of the movie s costumes and sets. The period film is distinguished by the fact that the setting can be set in the far distant past or the immediate present. Although literature, history and movies are distinct forms of communication, thousands of solutions and adaptations have been found so they can get along and have fruitful relationships. The first key is the nature and tradition of adaptation itself. Tales evolve and one generation adjusts the stories of the past to the present time and to its modern needs and ways of storytelling. How a story is told is as important as its subject matter. For example, there have been numerous versions of The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. The most famous one is the 1974 adaptation. The script was written by Francis Ford Coppola. In 2000, William Goldman, who loved the novel, said he actively campaigned for the job of adapting the script, but was astonished by the quality of Coppola s work: I still believe it to be one of the great adaptations... I called Coppola and told him what a wonderful thing he had done. If you see the movie, you will find all this hard to believe... The director who was hired, Jack Clayton, is a Brit... He had one thing all of them have in their blood: a murderous sense of class... Well, Clayton decided this: that Gatsby s parties were shabby and tacky, given by a man of no elevation and taste. As shot, they were foul and stupid and the people who attended them were foul and silly. Fitzgerald knew Hollywood and even if working as a screenwriter was a negative experience, it gave him material for his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, filmed by Elia Kazan in 1976. The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on that of the celebrated Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg. The most recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby is a 2013 Australian-American 3D drama film co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann which stars Leonardo Di Caprio. Here is the opinion of it by the film reviewer Philip French: Baz Luhrmann s hyperactive adaptation tramples over the subtleties of the Francis Scott Fitzgerald classic. Fitzgerald did more for Hollywood than that it has done for him and it made mediocre movies of his books. Apart from Fitzgerald, two other famous writers had a fractious relationship with Hollywood: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Faulkner collaborated with Howard Hawks (film director, producer and screenwriter) on two 234