I first learned the difference between screenwriting and playwriting in the "school of hard knocks" when a film producer optioned my stage play, Waitresses, and I was hired to write the screenplay (despite no track record as a screenwriter). The three-character play takes place entirely in the kitchen of a mobile home, and the first thing I learned how to do was to open up the story. What is essentially a mother-daughter drama set in a small town moved out of the kitchen into the community: to the café where both work as waitresses, to the local tavern and laundromat, to the rodeo and the local trout stream. Suddenly the mother had two male suitors, who were not even figments of my imagination when I wrote the play. Subplots were added. The screenplay that resulted, called Ruby’s Tune, was so different from the stage play in so many ways that if another writer had taken these same liberties I would have been horrified.
What I did in changing Waitresses into Ruby’s Tune was to follow conventional wisdom. And yet a small family of movies do not heed this advice and rely instead on considerably more dialogue and stationary setting than we expect from movies, especially from Hollywood movies. My Dinner With Andre comes immediately to mind, as well as a number of "art films", "foreign films", or films based on stage plays.
David Mamet, who has shown his screenwriting skill in such movies as House of Games and Wag the Dog, began his career as a playwright, and so it should not be surprising that he would bring a number of his stage plays to the screen. What is surprising, I think, is how closely these screenplays follow the original script and how ingeniously Mamet retains dialogue within a new scene structure that brings greater film dynamics and visual interest to the adaptation. In this article, I’ll look closely at his adaptations of American Buffalo and Oleanna, focusing on scene design and story structure.
Mamet’s "opening up of the story" (getting it out of the junkshop) begins with the credits, which are done over a poker game that is referenced early in the play. But the scene also changes for the play-proper’s opening dialogue, which now is set outside the junkshop at a newspaper machine. As Don opens his shop for the new business day - cranking up the awning, taking out the garbage - trips in and out of the store are frequent and natural, giving the early flow of the story much more physical movement than the stage’s single set permits. Against this greater visual interest, the play’s dialogue is retained essentially intact.
In other parts of the story, Mamet expands the visual canvas even more, including opening up the story into physical settings less organic to the story. At the end of Act One of the stage play, for example, Teach goes home to rest before a burglary that’s been planned for the night. Intermission.
In the movie, we follow Teach home and see the lowlife room he rents, images that reinforce his character. We also see what the other characters are doing during this time in purely visual scenes. Don, for example, is trying to get ahold of Fletch, a man he trusts more than Teach to get the burglary done right, and the silent phone call attempts increase the story’s tension.
Mamet takes advantage of conflict in the story to add visual interest. When Teach first learns that Don wants to bring Fletch into the plan, he naturally is upset. The implication is that Teach can’t handle the heist himself. Here, as elsewhere, Mamet moves the scene with dryly comic dialogue but in the film the story now moves outside again, as Teach goes to his car to pout, then starts beeping the horn to get going on the plan, and Don finally comes out to join him:
DON: What about he’s got a safe? TEACH: Big fucking deal. DON: How is that? TEACH: You want to know about a safe? DON: Yes. TEACH: What you do, a safe…you find the combination. DON: Where he wrote it down. TEACH: Yes. DON: What if he didn’t write it down? TEACH: He wrote it down. He’s gotta write it down. What happens he forgets it? DON: What happens he doesn’t forget it? TEACH: He’s gotta forget it, Don. Human nature. The point being, even he doesn’t forget it, why does he not forget it? DON: Why? TEACH: Cause he’s got it wrote down. Pause. That’s why he writes it down. Pause. Huh? Not because he’s some fucking turkey can’t even remember the combination to his own safe…but only in the event that (God forbid) he somehow forgets it…he’s got it wrote down. Pause. This is common sense. Pause. What’s the good keep the stuff in the safe, every time he wants to get at it he’s got to write away to the manufacturer? DON: Where does he write it? TEACH: What difference? Here…We go in, I find the combination fifteen minutes, tops. Pause. There are only so many places it could be. Man is a creature of habits. Man does not change his habits overnight. This is not like him. And if he does, he has a very good reason. Look, Don: You want to remember something, you write it down. Where do you put it? Pause. DON: In my wallet. Pause. TEACH: Exactly! Pause. Okay? DON: What if he didn’t right it down? TEACH: He wrote it down. (stage play, p77-8)Here the dialogue is unchanged from stage play to film but the new scene setting in the car gives not only visual variety but, by being enclosed in Teach’s car, provides a subtext of greater urgency, Teach wanting to get on with the deal and Don hesitant to go through with it without Fletch. All Teach has to do is start the car, and they are on their way.
This is not to say that there are no dialogue differences between play and film but that they are minor. Typically, as in the example below, Mamet cuts lines to tighten the scene. (Lines cut in the film are enclosed within brackets.)
BOB: Ruthie isn’t mad at you. [TEACH: She isn’t?] [BOB: No.] TEACH: How do you know? [BOB: I found out.] [TEACH: How?] BOB: I talked to her. TEACH: You talked to her. BOB: Yes. TEACH: I asked you you weren’t going to. BOB: Well, she asked me. [TEACH: What?] [BOB: That you were over here.] TEACH: What did you tell her? BOB: That you were here. [TEACH: Oh.]Mamet’s scene strategy in the film American Buffalo, then, is not to open up the story in terms of character or dialogue but only in terms of setting, and he is able to do this within the organic parameters of the story by moving outside the junkshop as well as to new spaces such as Teach’s flophouse. To be sure, the result is still a film that is character-dialogue driven, but Mamet succeeds, I think, it providing a far less "stagey" atmosphere than if he retained the story entirely within the junkshop.
At the heart of American Buffalo is Don’s almost parental caring for his gopher, Bobby. The story therefore develops around this changing relationship with respect to the planned burglary.
The first place point (end of Act One) occurs when Teach convinces Don to replace Bobby with himself. Thirty minutes into the story, Bobby leaves the junkshop, leaving Don and Teach to make new plans alone. "You’re only doing the right thing by him, Don," Teach says (p44). "Believe me. It’s best for everybody. What’s done is done. So let’s get started…"
But Don does not trust Teach’s ability to pull off the robbery. His doubts are reinforced when, at 58 minutes into the film, Teach produces a gun. Two minutes later, Bobby returns with news that Fletch is in the hospital - and without him Don is hesitant to go on. But is Bobby telling the truth? This is the midpoint, an hour into the film.
The final plot point (end of Act Two) occurs 73 minutes into the film when Bobby admits that he "missed the guy," missed staking out the victim in the planned robbery, which means the whole plan has been raised on the false premise of Bobby’s lie. Don’s forgiving Bobby (at film’s end, six minutes later) for this is the story’s resolution and a kernel of hope in what is otherwise a bleak human story.
The three-act paradigm is left intact in American Buffalo for the simple reason that the paradigm is about more than screenwriting - it is about storytelling.
Although here Mamet’s strategy in reshaping scene design for the film is identical to our previous example (to get out of the single set), the result requires more "suspension of disbelief" from the audience because the writer gives John not a single office but an office suite with adjoining rooms. Anyone who teaches at a college or university knows that such extravagance is given, if at all, only to department chairs.
This device, of course, permits John and Carol to move about from room to room in the same way that the characters in American Buffalo move in and out of the junkshop. More believably, we also move from office to hallway (at one point a passing secretary hands John some printed matter, to add a touch of realism). Sometimes the scene is set with exterior shots of campus life. Sometimes in his office John will write on the blackboard while speaking.
Where there are act-breaks in the stage story, the scene again shifts to new spaces. We see John at the house he is hoping to buy, celebrating with a bottle of wine. No new dialogue is added, no new characters introduced. As in our previous example, the "act break" scene is delivered visually.
And yet, the redesigned scenes here strike me as more forced than in American Buffalo. Scene changes there - such as moving dialogue into Teach’s car, a space in which he holds power, at the very time when he is trying to regain Don’s confidence - almost always do more than simply add movement and visual interest: they also reinforce the emotional subtext of the story at that point.
In Oleanna I fail to see this relationship. The wanderings of the pair, from one room of the office suite into another, into a hallway and back, appear more random, less functional. It’s as if movement is added for movement’s sake.
Mamet also rewrites and cuts stage dialogue more than in American Buffalo, though by no means in ways that change the narrative in any significant way. This is still essentially the stage play put to film, and if the result is less successful as a movie it is because the new settings draw attention to themselves because there is so little character motivation in moving from one area to another.
American Buffalo is a stronger film than a play because the scene changes reinforce the emotional subtext of the story. Oleanna, with a story in which "being trapped" is a central metaphor, suffers from unmotivated expansion.
The first plot point, 25 minutes into the film story, occurs when John makes a deal with the failing student, changing their relationship: "…I’ll make you a deal. You stay here. We’ll start the whole course over. … Your grade for the whole term is an A. If you will come back and meet with me" (p25). Carol wants to know, "Why would you do this for me?" "I like you," John replies, planting the seeds for the sexual harassment charges to follow.
The midpoint (45 minutes in) occurs when John tries to make an "out of court" resolution with Carol after she has formally made her complaint against him. Earlier, by his own lights, he was trying to help her, but now they are clear adversaries. How great this conflict will become is what drives the story through its middle section.
Finally John gets physical with her, restraining Carol from leaving his office, and she breaks free and runs into the hallway screaming, "LET ME GO. LET ME GO. WOULD SOMEBODY HELP ME? WOULD SOMEBODY HELP ME PLEASE…" (p57). This is the end of the film’s second act, an hour into the story.
What follows is a scene break in Act Two of the play. In the film, John moves into a motel to do some solitary thinking, a purely visual addition. Then he returns to his office to pack, to try one more time to understand Carol, only to learn that she wants his book and others banned from campus.
Then John, who fails to cooperate with her ideas of censorship, learns that she has filed still new charges against him - rape: "You tried to rape me. I was leaving the office, you pressed yourself into me. You pressed your body into me" (p78).
John loses it and becomes physically violent against her, the story twisting into a self-fulfilling prophecy. He has sealed his fate.
In American Buffalo this strategy works especially well because the broader scene-canvas is used in a way that adds to the emotional foundation of the story. In Oleanna, however, the expansion feels forced, and that story loses the wonderful sense of closed-space and entrapment that is central in the play - and also central to the thematic thrust of the story. Consequently Oleanna is a story more powerfully told on stage.
4/98