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The personalization space is real, between the dream of getting it right and the worry of it going wrong ( like when we encounter “persofails” similar to a company’s constant plea to regular people to purchase additional bathroom seats ). It’s an particularly confusing place to be a modern professional without a map, a map, or a strategy.

There are no Lonely Planet and some tour guides for those of you who want to personalize because successful personalization depends so much on each group’s talent, technology, and market position.

But you can ensure that your group has packed its carriers rationally.

There’s a DIY method to increase your chances for victory. You’ll at least at least disarm your boss ‘ irrational exuberance. Before the group you’ll need to properly plan.

We refer to it as prepersonalization.

Behind the song

Take into account Spotify’s DJ element, which debuted this year.

We’re used to seeing the polished final outcome of a personalization have. A personal have had to be developed, budgeted, and given priority before the year-end prize, the making-of-backstory, or the behind-the-scenes success chest. Before any customisation have goes live in your product or service, it lives amid a delay of valuable ideas for expressing consumer experiences more automatically.

So how do you decide where to position your personalisation wagers? How do you design regular interactions that didn’t journey up users or—worse—breed mistrust? We’ve found that for many well-known budgeted programs to support their continued investments, they initially required one or more workshops to join vital technologies users and stakeholders. Make it matter.

We’ve closely monitored the same evolution with our consumers, from major software to young companies. In our experience with working on small and large personalization work, a program’s best monitor record—and its capacity to weather tough questions, work steadily toward shared answers, and manage its design and engineering efforts—turns on how successfully these prepersonalization activities play out.

Effective workshops consistently save time, money, and overall well-being by separating successful future endeavors from unsuccessful ones.

A personalization practice involves a multiyear effort of testing and feature development. It’s not a switch-flip in your tech stack. It’s best managed as a backlog that often evolves through three steps:

1. customer experience optimization ( CXO, also known as A/B testing or experimentation )
2. always-on automations ( whether rules-based or machine-generated )
3. mature features or standalone product development ( such as Spotify’s DJ experience )

This is why we created our progressive personalization framework and why we’re field-testing an accompanying deck of cards: we believe that there’s a base grammar, a set of “nouns and verbs” that your organization can use to design experiences that are customized, personalized, or automated. You won’t require these cards. But we strongly recommend that you create something similar, whether that might be digital or physical.

Set the timer for your kitchen.

How long does it take to cook up a prepersonalization workshop? The activities we suggest including during the assessment can ( and frequently do ) last for weeks. For the core workshop, we recommend aiming for two to three days. Details on the essential first-day activities are included in a summary of our broad approach.

The full arc of the wider workshop is threefold:

Kickstart: This specifies the terms of engagement as you concentrate on both the potential and the team’s and leadership’s readiness and drive.
1. Plan your work: This is the heart of the card-based workshop activities where you specify a plan of attack and the scope of work.
2. Work your plan: This stage essentially entails creating a competitive environment in which team members can individually present their own pilots that each contain a proof-of-concept project, its business case, and its operating model.

Give yourself at least a day, split into two large time blocks, to power through a concentrated version of those first two phases.

Kickstart: Apt your appetite

We call the first lesson the “landscape of connected experience“. It looks at the possibilities for personalization in your company. A connected experience, in our parlance, is any UX requiring the orchestration of multiple systems of record on the backend. A marketing-automation platform and a content-management system could be used together. It could be a digital-asset manager combined with a customer-data platform.

Give examples of connected experience interactions that you admire, find familiar, or even dislike, as examples of consumer and business-to-business examples. This should cover a representative range of personalization patterns, including automated app-based interactions ( such as onboarding sequences or wizards ), notifications, and recommenders. We have a list of these in the cards. Here’s a list of 142 different interactions to jog your thinking.

It’s all about setting the tone. What are the possible paths for the practice in your organization? Here’s a long-form primer and a strategic framework for a broader perspective.

Assess each example that you discuss for its complexity and the level of effort that you estimate that it would take for your team to deliver that feature ( or something similar ). We break down connected experiences into five categories in our cards: functions, features, experiences, complete products, and portfolios. Size your own build here. This will help to draw attention to both the benefits of ongoing investment and the difference between what you currently offer and what you intend to deliver in the future.

Next, have your team plot each idea on the following 2×2 grid, which lays out the four enduring arguments for a personalized experience. This is crucial because it emphasizes how personalization can affect your own methods of working as well as your external customers. It’s also a reminder ( which is why we used the word argument earlier ) of the broader effort beyond these tactical interventions.

Each team member should decide where they would like to place your company’s emphasis on your product or service. Naturally, you can’t prioritize all of them. Here, the goal is to demonstrate how various departments may view their own advantages over the effort, which can be different from one department to the next. Documenting your desired outcomes lets you know how the team internally aligns across representatives from different departments or functional areas.

The third and final KickStart activity is about filling in the personalization gap. Is your customer journey well documented? Will compliance with data and privacy be a significant challenge? Do you have content metadata needs that you have to address? It’s just a matter of acknowledging the magnitude of that need and finding a solution ( we’re fairly certain that you do ). In our cards, we’ve noted a number of program risks, including common team dispositions. For instance, our Detractor card lists six intractable behaviors that prevent progress.

Effectively collaborating and managing expectations is critical to your success. Consider the potential obstacles to your upcoming progress. Press the participants to name specific steps to overcome or mitigate those barriers in your organization. As research has shown, personalization initiatives face a number of common obstacles.

At this point, you’ve hopefully discussed sample interactions, emphasized a key area of benefit, and flagged key gaps? Good, you’re ready to go on.

Hit that test kitchen

Next, let’s take a look at what you’ll need to create personalization recipes. Personalization engines, which are robust software suites for automating and expressing dynamic content, can intimidate new customers. They give you a variety of options for how your organization can conduct its activities because of their broad and potent capabilities. This presents the question: Where do you begin when you’re configuring a connected experience?

The key here is to avoid treating the installed software ( as one of our client executives humorously put it ) like some sort of dream kitchen. These software engines are more like test kitchens where your team can begin devising, tasting, and refining the snacks and meals that will become a part of your personalization program’s regularly evolving menu.

Over the course of the workshop, the ultimate menu of the prioritized backlog will come together. And creating “dishes” is the way that you’ll have individual team stakeholders construct personalized interactions that serve their needs or the needs of others.

The dishes will be made from recipes, which have predetermined ingredients.

Verify your ingredients

You’ll ensure that you have everything you need to create your desired interaction ( or that you can determine what needs to be added to your pantry like a good product manager ) and that you have validated with the right stakeholders present. These ingredients include the audience that you’re targeting, content and design elements, the context for the interaction, and your measure for how it’ll come together.

This is not just about identifying needs. Documenting your personalizations as a series of if-then statements lets the team:

1. compare findings to a unified approach for developing features, similar to how artists paint with the same color palette,
2. specify a consistent set of interactions that users find uniform or familiar,
3. and establish parity between all important performance indicators and performance metrics.

This helps you streamline your designs and your technical efforts while you deliver a shared palette of core motifs of your personalized or automated experience.

Create a recipe.

What ingredients are important to you? Consider a who-what-when-why construct:

• Who are your key audience segments or groups?
• What kind of content will you provide for them, what design elements, and under what circumstances?
• And for which business and user benefits?

Five years ago, we developed these cards and card categories for the first time. We regularly play-test their fit with conference audiences and clients. And there are still fresh possibilities. But they all follow an underlying who-what-when-why logic.

In the cards in the accompanying photo below, you can typically follow along with right to left in three examples of subscription-based reading apps.

1. Nurture personalization: When a guest or an unknown visitor interacts with a product title, a banner or alert bar appears that makes it easier for them to encounter a related title they may want to read, saving them time.
2. Welcome automation: An email is sent to a newly registered user to highlight the breadth of the content catalog and convert them to happy subscribers.
3. Winback automation: Before their subscription lapses or after a recent failed renewal, a user is sent an email that gives them a promotional offer to suggest that they reconsider renewing or to remind them to renew.

A good preworkshop activity might be to consider a first draft of what these cards might be for your organization, though we’ve also found that cocreating the recipes themselves can sometimes help this process. Start with a set of blank cards, and begin labeling and grouping them through the design process, eventually distilling them to a refined subset of highly useful candidate cards.

The later stages of the workshop could be characterized as moving from focusing on a cookbook to a more nuanced customer-journey mapping. Individual” cooks” will pitch their recipes to the team, using a common jobs-to-be-done format so that measurability and results are baked in, and from there, the resulting collection will be prioritized for finished design and delivery to production.

Better architecture is required for better kitchens.

Simplifying a customer experience is a complicated effort for those who are inside delivering it. Beware of anyone who contradicts your advice. With that being said,” Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes“.

When a team is overfitting, it’s because they aren’t designing with their best data, which is why personalization turns into a laugh line. Like a sparse pantry, every organization has metadata debt to go along with its technical debt, and this creates a drag on personalization effectiveness. For instance, your AI’s output quality is in fact impacted by your IA. Spotify’s poster-child prowess today was unfathomable before they acquired a seemingly modest metadata startup that now powers its underlying information architecture.

You can’t stand the heat, in fact…

Personalization technology opens a doorway into a confounding ocean of possible designs. Only a disciplined and highly collaborative approach will produce the necessary concentration and intention for success. So banish the dream kitchen. Instead, head to the test kitchen to save time, preserve job security, and avoid imagining the creative concepts that come from the doers in your organization. There are meals to serve and mouths to feed.

This framework of the workshop gives you a strong chance at long-term success as well as solid ground. Wiring up your information layer isn’t an overnight affair. However, you’ll have solid ground for success if you use the same cookbook and the same recipes. We designed these activities to make your organization’s needs concrete and clear, long before the hazards pile up.

Although there are costs associated with purchasing this type of technology and product design, time well spent on sizing up and confronting your unique situation and digital skills. Don’t squander it. The pudding is the proof, as they say.

I’ve been fascinated by shows since I was a child. I loved the figures and the excitement—but most of all the reports. I aspired to be an artist. And I believed that I’d get to do the things that Indiana Jones did and go on exciting activities. Yet my friends and I had movie ideas to make and sun in. But they never went any farther. However, I did end up in the user experience ( UX) field. Today, I realize that there’s an element of drama to UX— I hadn’t actually considered it before, but consumer analysis is story. And to get the most out of customer studies, you must tell a compelling story that involves stakeholders, including the product team and decision-makers, and piques their interest in learning more.

Think of your favorite film. It more than likely follows a three-act construction that’s frequently seen in movies: the layout, the conflict, and the resolution. The second act shows what exists now, and it helps you get to understand the characters and the challenges and problems that they face. The issue begins in Act 2, which introduces the issue. Here, difficulties grow or get worse. And the solution is the third and final work. This is where the issues are resolved and the figures learn and change. This structure, in my opinion, is also a fantastic way to think about customer research, and I think it can be particularly useful for explaining consumer research to others.

Use story as a framework when conducting study.

It’s sad to say, but many have come to see studies as being dispensable. Research is frequently one of the first things to go when expenses or deadlines are tight. Instead of investing in study, some goods professionals rely on manufacturers or—worse—their personal judgment to make the “right” options for users based on their experience or accepted best practices. That may get groups a little bit out of the way, but that approach is therefore easily miss out on resolving people ‘ real issues. To be user-centered, this is something we really avoid. Design is enhanced by customer research. It keeps it on record, pointing to problems and opportunities. Being aware of problems with your goods and taking corrective actions can help you be ahead of your competition.

In the three-act structure, each action corresponds to a part of the process, and each part is important to telling the whole story. Let’s take a look at the various functions and how they relate to customer research.

Act one: layout

The setup consists entirely in comprehending the history, and that’s where basic research comes in. Basic research ( also called relational, discovery, or preliminary research ) helps you understand people and identify their problems. Like in the movies, you’re learning about the difficulties customers face, what options are available, and how they are affected by them. To do basic research, you may conduct cultural inquiries or journal studies ( or both! ), which can assist you in identifying both prospects and problems. It doesn’t need to be a great investment in time or money.

Erika Hall writes about the most effective anthropology, which can be as straightforward as spending 15 hours with a customer and asking them to” Walk me through your morning yesterday.” That’s it. Give that one demand. Locked up and listen to them for 15 days. Do everything in your power to keep yourself and your pursuits out of it. Bam, you’re doing ethnography”. Hall predicts that “[This ] will likely prove quite fascinating. In the very unlikely event that you didn’t learn anything new or helpful, carry on with increased confidence in your way”.

This makes perfect sense to me. And I love that this makes consumer research so visible. You can simply attract participants and carry out the recruitment process without having to create a lot of paperwork! This can offer a wealth of knowledge about your customers, and it’ll help you better understand them and what’s going on in their life. Understanding where people are coming from is what action one is really all about.

Maybe Spool talks about the importance of basic research and how it may type the bulk of your research. If you can substitute what you’ve heard in the fundamental research by using more customer information that you can obtain, such as surveys or analytics, or to highlight areas that need more research. Together, all this information creates a clearer picture of the state of things and all its deficiencies. And that’s the start of a gripping tale. It’s the place in the story where you realize that the principal characters—or the people in this case—are facing issues that they need to conquer. This is where you begin to develop compassion for the characters and support their success, much like in films. And finally partners are now doing the same. Their business may lose money because users didn’t finish particular tasks, which may be their love. Or probably they do connect with people ‘ problems. In any case, action one serves as your main strategy to pique the interest and interest of the participants.

When partners begin to understand the value of basic research, that is open doors to more opportunities that involve users in the decision-making approach. And that can help product teams become more user-centric. This benefits everyone—users, the product, and stakeholders. It’s similar to winning an Oscar for a film; it frequently results in a favorable reception and success for your product. And this can be an incentive for stakeholders to repeat this process with other products. Knowing how to tell a good story is the only way to convince stakeholders to care about doing more research, and storytelling is the key to this process.

This brings us to act two, where you iteratively evaluate a design or concept to see whether it addresses the issues.

Act two: conflict

Act two is all about digging deeper into the problems that you identified in act one. This typically involves conducting directional research, such as usability tests, where you evaluate a potential solution ( such as a design ) to see if it addresses the issues you identified. The issues could include unmet needs or problems with a flow or process that’s tripping users up. Additional problems will arise in the course of act two of a film. It’s here that you learn more about the characters as they grow and develop through this act.

According to Jakob Nielsen, five users should be typically in usability tests, which means that this number of users can typically identify the majority of the issues:” You learn less and less as you add more and more users because you will keep seeing the same things over and over again… After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by repeatedly observing the same findings but not learning much new.”

There are parallels with storytelling here too, if you try to tell a story with too many characters, the plot may get lost. With fewer participants, each user’s struggles will be more easily recalled and shared with other parties when discussing the research. This can help convey the issues that need to be addressed while also highlighting the value of doing the research in the first place.

Usability tests have been conducted in person for decades, but you can also conduct them remotely using software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other teleconferencing software. This approach has become increasingly popular since the beginning of the pandemic, and it works well. You might consider in-person usability tests like watching a movie as opposed to remote testing like attending a play. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Usability research in person is a much more extensive experience. Stakeholders can experience the sessions with other stakeholders. You also get real-time feedback on what they’re seeing, including surprises, disagreements, and discussions about them. Much like going to a play, where audiences get to take in the stage, the costumes, the lighting, and the actors ‘ interactions, in-person research lets you see users up close, including their body language, how they interact with the moderator, and how the scene is set up.

If conducting usability testing in the field is like watching a play that is staged and controlled, where any two sessions may be very different from one another. You can take usability testing into the field by creating a replica of the space where users interact with the product and then conduct your research there. Or you can meet users at their location to conduct your research. With either option, you get to see how things work in context, things come up that wouldn’t have in a lab environment—and conversion can shift in entirely different directions. You have less control over how these sessions end as researchers, but this can occasionally help you understand users even better. Meeting users where they are can provide clues to the external forces that could be affecting how they use your product. In-person usability tests add a level of detail that remote usability tests frequently lack.

That’s not to say that the “movies” —remote sessions—aren’t a good option. Remote training sessions can reach a wider audience. They allow a lot more stakeholders to be involved in the research and to see what’s going on. Additionally, they make the doors accessible to a much wider range of users. But with any remote session there is the potential of time wasted if participants can’t log in or get their microphone working.

The advantage of usability testing, whether conducted remotely or in person, is that you can ask real users questions to understand their reasoning and understanding of the problem. This can help you not only identify problems but also glean why they’re problems in the first place. You can also test your own ideas and determine whether they are true. By the end of the sessions, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how usable the designs are and whether they work for their intended purposes. Act two is where the excitement is at the heart of the narrative, but there are also potential surprises. This is equally true of usability tests. Unexpected things that are said by participants frequently alter how you view things, and these unexpected developments in the story can lead to unexpected turns in your perception.

Unfortunately, user research is sometimes seen as expendable. Usability testing is frequently the only method of research that some stakeholders believe they ever need, and it’s too frequently the case. In fact, if the designs that you’re evaluating in the usability test aren’t grounded in a solid understanding of your users ( foundational research ), there’s not much to be gained by doing usability testing in the first place. Because you narrow down the subject matter of your feedback without understanding the needs of the users. As a result, there’s no way of knowing whether the designs might solve a problem that users have. In the context of a usability test, it’s only feedback on a particular design.

On the other hand, if you only do foundational research, while you might have set out to solve the right problem, you won’t know whether the thing that you’re building will actually solve that. This demonstrates the value of conducting both directional and foundational research.

In act two, stakeholders will—hopefully—get to watch the story unfold in the user sessions, which creates the conflict and tension in the current design by surfacing their highs and lows. And in turn, this can encourage stakeholders to take action on the issues raised.

Act three: resolution

The third act is about resolving the issues from the first two acts, while the first two acts are about understanding the background and the tensions that can compel stakeholders to take action. While it’s important to have an audience for the first two acts, it’s crucial that they stick around for the final act. That includes the entire product team, including developers, UX experts, business analysts, delivery managers, product managers, and any other interested parties who have a say in the coming development. It allows the whole team to hear users ‘ feedback together, ask questions, and discuss what’s possible within the project’s constraints. Additionally, it enables the UX design and research teams to clarify, suggest alternatives, or provide more context for their decisions. So you can get everyone on the same page and get agreement on the way forward.

Voiceover narration of this act is typically used with audience input. The researcher is the narrator, who paints a picture of the issues and what the future of the product could look like given the things that the team has learned. They offer the stakeholders their suggestions and suggestions for how to create this vision.

Nancy Duarte in the Harvard Business Review offers an approach to structuring presentations that follow a persuasive story. The most effective presenters employ the same methods as great storytellers: By reaffirming the status quo and then revealing a better way, they create a conflict that needs to be resolved, writes Duarte. ” That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently”.

This type of structure aligns well with research results, and particularly results from usability tests. It provides proof for “what is “—the issues you’ve identified. And “what could be “—your recommendations on how to address them. And so forth and forth.

You can reinforce your recommendations with examples of things that competitors are doing that could address these issues or with examples where competitors are gaining an edge. Or they can be as visual as quick sketches of a potential solution to a problem. These can help generate conversation and momentum. And this continues until the session is over when you’ve concluded everything by summarizing the key points and offering suggestions for a solution. This is the part where you reiterate the main themes or problems and what they mean for the product—the denouement of the story. This stage provides stakeholders with the next steps, and hopefully, the motivation to take those steps as well!

While we are nearly at the end of this story, let’s reflect on the idea that user research is storytelling. The three-act structure of user research contains all the components for a good story:

Act one: You meet the protagonists ( the users ) and the antagonists ( the problems affecting users ). This is the plot’s beginning. In act one, researchers might use methods including contextual inquiry, ethnography, diary studies, surveys, and analytics. These techniques can produce personas, empathy maps, user journeys, and analytics dashboards as output.

Act two: Next, there’s character development. The protagonists encounter problems and difficulties, which they must overcome, and there is conflict and tension. In act two, researchers might use methods including usability testing, competitive benchmarking, and heuristics evaluation. Usability findings reports, UX strategy documents, usability guidelines, and best practices can be included in the output of these.

Act three: The protagonists triumph and you see what a better future looks like. Researchers may use techniques like presentation decks, storytelling, and digital media in act three. The output of these can be: presentation decks, video clips, audio clips, and pictures.

The researcher performs a number of tasks: they are the producer, the director, and the storyteller. The participants have a small role, but they are significant characters ( in the research ). And the audience is the audience, as well. But the most important thing is to get the story right and to use storytelling to tell users ‘ stories through research. By the end, the parties should leave with a goal and an eagerness to address the product’s flaws.

So the next time that you’re planning research with clients or you’re speaking to stakeholders about research that you’ve done, think about how you can weave in some storytelling. User research is ultimately a win-win situation for everyone, and all you need to do is pique stakeholders ‘ interest in how the story ends.

I’ve lost count of the times when promising ideas go from being useless in a few months to being useless after working as a solution designer for too long to notice.

Financial items, which is my area of expertise, are no exception. It’s tempting to put as many features at the ceiling as possible and hope someone sticks because people’s true, hard-earned money is on the line, user expectations are high, and a crammed market. However, this strategy will lead to disaster. Why, you see this:

The drawbacks of feature-first growth

It’s simple to get swept up in the enthusiasm of developing innovative features when you start developing a financial product from scratch or are migrating existing user journeys from papers or telephony channels to online bank or mobile apps. They may believe,” If I may only add one more thing that solves this particular person problem, they’ll enjoy me”! But what happens if you eventually encounter a roadblock as a result of your security team’s negligence? not like it? When a difficult-fought film fails to win over viewers or fails due to unanticipated difficulty?

The concept of Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) is applied to this. Even though Jason Fried doesn’t usually refer to it that way, his podcast Rework and his book Getting Real frequently address this concept. An MVP is a product that offers only enough value to your users to keep them interested, but not so much that it becomes difficult to keep up. Although the idea seems simple, it requires a razor-sharp eye, a ruthless edge, and the courage to stand up for your position because it is easy to fall for” the Columbo Effect” when there is always” just one more thing …” to add.

The issue with most fund apps is that they frequently turn out to be reflections of the company’s internal politics rather than an encounter created specifically for the customer. This implies that the priority is to provide as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the requirements and desires of competing inside ministries as opposed to a distinct value statement that is focused on what people in the real world actually want. These products may therefore quickly become a muddled mess of confusing, related, and finally unlovable client experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The significance of the foundation

What is a better strategy, then? How may we create products that are user-friendly, firm, and, most importantly, stick?

The concept of “bedrock” comes into play in this context. The mainstay of your product is really important to people, and Bedrock is that. It’s the fundamental building block that creates price and maintains relevance over time.

The core has to be in and around the standard servicing journeys in the world of retail bank, which is where I work. People only look at their existing accounts once every five minutes, but they also look at it daily. They purchase a credit card every year or every other year, but they at least once a month examine their stability and pay their bills.

The key is in identifying the main tasks that individuals want to complete and therefore relentlessly striving to make them simple, reliable, and trustworthy.

How can you reach the foundation, though? By focusing on the” MVP” strategy, giving convenience precedence, and working incrementally toward a clear value proposition. This means avoiding pointless extras and putting your clients first, making the most of them.

It also requires some nerve, as your coworkers might not always agree on your eyesight right away. And dubiously, occasionally it can even suggest making it clear to customers that you won’t be coming to their house and making their breakfast. Sometimes you need to use “opinionated user interface design” ( i .e., clumsy workaround for edge cases ) to test a concept or to give yourself some more time to work on something else.

Functional methods for creating stick-like economic products

What are the main learnings I’ve made from my own research and practice?

1. What trouble are you trying to solve first, and make a distinct “why”? Who is it for? Before beginning any project, make sure your goal is completely clear. Make certain it also aligns with the goals of your business.
2. Avoid the temptation to put too many functions at once by focusing on one, key feature and focusing on getting that right before moving on to something else. Choose one that actually adds price, and work from that.
3. When it comes to financial items, clarity is often over richness. Eliminate unwanted details and concentrate solely on what matters most.
4. Accept constant iteration as Bedrock is a powerful process rather than a set destination. Continuously collect customer opinions, make improvements to your product, and move toward that foundation.
5. Stop, look, and listen: Don’t just go through with testing your product as part of the delivery process; test it consistently in the field. Use it for yourself. Move the A/B testing. User opinions on Gear. Speak to the users of it and make adjustments accordingly.

The “bedrock dilemma”

This is an intriguing conundrum: sacrificing some of the potential for short-term growth in favor of long-term stability. But the return is worthwhile: products built with a focus on rock will outlive and surpass their rivals over time and provide users with long-term value.

How do you begin your quest for rock, then? Consider it gradually. Start by identifying the essential components that your customers actually care about. Focus on developing and improving a second, potent function that delivers real value. And most importantly, make an obsessive effort because, whatever you think, Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker, you can’t deny it! The best way to foretell the future is to make it, he said.

Learn more at Duct Tape Selling about John Jantsch’s The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide for Moving to Fractional CMO Services.

Introduction to the Fractional CMO Model Major Fractional CMO Training Companies System Comparison Table Framework evaluations The 4 CMO Models Decision-Making Advice Application Essentials Making the Final Decision Conclusion More Resources Introduction The Growing Fractional CMO Landscape The finite CMO design offers high-level branding strategy without the expense of a full-time hire. ]… ]

Learn more at Duct Tape Selling about John Jantsch’s The Ultimate Buyer’s Guide for Moving to Fractional CMO Services.

Advantages: The Fractal CMO Landscape Is Changing

Without the expense of a full-time employee, the partial CMO concept offers high-level advertising strategy. This link compares the various alternatives for teaching and advises you on the best course of action.

Understanding the Fractional CMO Model

A part-time corporate marketing executive is a partial CMO. Cost-effective authority is advantageous for businesses, and consultants are able to play high-value roles.

A partial CMO is a part-time selling executive hired by companies to implement strategy without paying full-time. &#8221, – Casey Stanton, CMOx

Major Fractional CMO Training Companies

Duct Tape Selling

offers the Strategy Second Leadership Accelerator with an emphasis on positioning professionals as proper officials.

CMOx

provides a method for consolidation and implementation with an emphasis on tactical execution and audits.

DigitalMarketer

provides electric execution systems and the Client Value Journey to engage and convert clients.

Comparison Board for the Program

Provider	Framework	Client Orientation	Excellent For	Investment	Community
Duct Tape Selling	Strategy Second	Retainer based on technique	Strategic Consultants	$9,000+	400+ Experts
CMOx	Functional Advertising	Tactical Plan and Audit	Application Experts	$10,000	Facebook Group
DigitalMarketer	Client Value Journey	90-day Onboarding Retainer	Digital Professionals	Varies	Qualified Partner Network

Framework evaluations

• Strategy Second (DTM): Strategic first, implementation later
• Functional Advertising (CMOx): Audit-driven, systemized execution
• Client Value Journey (DM): Nurture through digital sales funnel

The 4 partial CMO Models

Independent: One specialist per customer set
1. Agency: Cm as a support via accounts directors
2. Collective: Personal experts, a shared brand
3. Organized Company: Team-based reference model

Decision-Making Advice

• Assess your knowledge, mission, and objectives for the clientele.
• Make sure plans provide systems, resources, and help.
• Avoid rigorous programs and overhyped promises.

Application Essentials

• Definition of packages: fee, cross, and strategy-only
• Use sales tiers:$ 5k–$ 15k tasks,$ 3k–$ 15k servants
• Acquire clients: information, recommendations, reach
• Give using phased plans: Assess, Plan, and Execute

Making the Final Decision

Choose a plan that best fits your corporate objectives, ease with the strategy, and ROI expectations. Community assistance is crucial.

It’s time to cease selling your time, and instead, to begin selling your knowledge. &#8221, – John Jantsch

Conclusion

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Spoilers appear in this instance 7 of Hacks season 4. Hollywood shifts people. However, Dance Mom on Hacks has hardly ever changed someone more rapidly than the glitter and glamour of Tinseltown. In the fourth episode of the fourth season of this beloved comedy on HBO Max ( Hey, we get to call it” HBO Max” again! ), ]…]

The first post on Den of Geek: Julianne Nicholson Is Obviously Having the Time of Her Life as Dance Mom was shared.

Recently a friend mentioned how much of a pity it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those secret” classic” reimaginings now like the ones we had growing up. And after a brief moment of reflection, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘ 90s were treated to an embarrassment of treasures when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent pictures. Almost every week seemed to give another development of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a smile and a push to charm to youth reading much the same writings in high school or university.

However, when one considers the breadth of 1990s film beyond “teen movies,” it was more than just the vehicles starring Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles that were receiving the traditional treatment. In fact the ‘ 90s, and to a large extent the ‘ 80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literature ( if largely of the English variety ) with the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. Some of the most creative or ambitious artists in the industry fought against the sluggishness of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more terrible considerations of bras and major hats.

We saw some of the most honest and enduring alterations of Dickens or Louisa May Alcott making it on screen, and Shakespeare was unquestionably a bigger company in tinsel area than at any other time during this time. Why is that and can it occur again? This look back at the golden age of time item costumed dramas and colorful artistic adjustments…

Mozart and Merchant Ivory

Since the beginning of the platform, moviemakers have looked up at well-worn and common stories for ideas and market experience. In 1907, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short after making his enduring trip to the moon. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.

Even so, literary adaptations were often constrained, particularly in Hollywood where filmmakers had to contend with the limitations of censorship via the Hays Code and preconceived notions about what an American audience would enjoy. Therefore, the most well-known costumed dramas were typically vanity projects or something with a more sensational tone, like the biblical or the swords and sandals epics.

So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year Milo Forman’s Amadeus won Best Picture, and the second was the year James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s lush adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View festigt our conception of what a” Merchant Ivory” film could be. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.

In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ( 1975 ) —a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of modern oppression and control from about a decade earlier —was taking the story of Mozart and making it a punk rock tragicomedy. Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it funnier and darker as Forman attempted to pose Mozart as a modern-day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment, in a play by the same name. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.

It then continued to do relatively well and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past ( Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won the year before but that was based on a subject matter in the living memory of most Academy voters ). Otherwise, most of the recent winners were dramas or dramedies about the modern world: Kramer vs. Kramer ( 1979 ), The Deer Hunter ( 1978 ), and Annie Hall ( 1977 ). They were a response to a viewer who wanted to escape the artificiality of their parents ‘ films, which in the U.S. associated historical costumes with the ( grand ) phoniness of Ben-Hur ( 1959 ) or Oliver! ( 1968 ).

However, the British masterpiece A Room with a View, which established this as the start of a well-known trend, was released a few years later. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those films were mixed with modern comedies and dramas like rock’ n roll-infused The Guru ( 1969 ) and Jane Austen in Manhattan ( 1980 ). Importantly, all of these movies were typically small chamber pieces made for a select group of people.

Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U. S. —this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country”! ( It’s fun to recall a time when a movie could be a hit in New York if it were just selling out every day. ) The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.

It also defined what became the” Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in future Oscar and box office darlings like the Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Carter-starring Howard’s End ( 1992 ), and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day ( 1993 ). Remains was an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but these were all distinctly British and understated films, which signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in’em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.

Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama

In 1990, Michael Mann was one of the hottest creatives working in Hollywood. He helped NBC’s edgy ( by ’80s standards ) police drama, Miami Vice, become the “gritty” and artistic version of American television. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would conflict with Mann’s neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic, which he created for the series.

As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the &#8217, 80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter ( 1986 ). Instead he sought to adapt a childhood favorite for the screen, James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans. In its original form, the text served as a launching pad for filmmakers to create a gripping, primal, and prestigious film with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian War ( or Seven Years War ), in which indigenous tribes in what is now upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes.

He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is a beautiful drama and a high-profile action film, and it did more business in the United States than Tom Cruise’s A Few Good Men and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It also would create a precedent we&#8217, d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.

Some of the biggest and most respected filmmakers of the moment, many of them praised under auteur theory, were looking to literary classics for an audience that craved them. One of Martin Scorsese‘s most ambitious and underappreciated films was the 1993 masterpiece The Age of Innocence, which was an inspiration from an Edith Wharton novel.

It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. The Age of Innocence, in fact, remains the best film adaptation of the Gilded Age in cinema. It captures the lush pageantry of the most wealthy New Yorkers ‘ heyday as well as how class sectarian prejudice developed into ruthless tribalism, which ultimately led to the romantic apprehensions of one conformist attorney (once again Daniel Day-Lewis ) and this would-be-divorced lover ( Michelle Pfeiffer ).

It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U. S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already the toast of international and independent cinema via movies like The Wedding Banquet ( 1993 ) and martial arts-adjacent Pushing Hands ( 1991 ), but it is when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 that he became a Hollywood favorite who would soon get movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ( 2000 ) and Hulk ( 2003 ) greenlit. Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman make a great ensemble, and Sinn and Sensibility benefits greatly from a fantastic cast as well. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.

It established a standard by which the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured, whether it be Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow or Netflix’s most recent Persuasion adaptation starring Dakota Johnson.

A Dark Universe of Gods and Monsters

The same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star right before Columbia Pictures approved Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightful ( and arguably definitive ) interpretation of Little Women in 1994. And it was Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola‘s wacky and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel, which was then viewed as a sneer of hubris by rivals who snickered at it. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called” New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. He also correctly predicted there was a box office hit if he could bring all those elements out in an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation.

One of the most lavish and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever made onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort, is whether you like or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel, which is pretty audacious given the author’s name in the title. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.

It established a standard for what can in retrospect be regarded as a pseudo-“dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1994 ), a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a worse movie that flopped, but it looked spectacular as the only major Frankenstein movie to remember Shelley set the story during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.

Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would be successful in adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in the same year as Frankenstein did, despite the failure of the film. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. In a scene dripping in homoeroticism, the actor who played Top Gun‘s Maverick would stick fangs into a young Brad Pitt’s neck.

This trend continued throughout the’ 90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionist ( and Coppola-produced ) Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. For instance, did you remember that Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom appeared in a revisionist take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where she played the not-so-good doctor’s maid? By the way, it’s called Mary Reilly ( 1996) ).

Shakespeare’s Resurrection

Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Yet curiously it was only in the 1990s that someone really lit on the idea of making a movie directly based on the Bard tailored almost exclusively for that demographic: Baz Luhrmann in 1996, who reconfigured the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into the visual language of MTV. He even altered the title to reflect William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.

That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. With hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama, they created a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do.

But Shakespeare’s work did not quite make it to the top of the box office in the 1990s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. It’s difficult to remember Gibson as a heartthrob of sorts in the 1980s and early 1990s or as a star-dwelling hero worthy of heroic leading man roles in today’s world.

Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamlet ( 1990 ) if you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet ( perhaps not a surprise now ), and Zeffirelli mines the medieval melancholy of the story well with production design, costumes, and location shooting at real Norman castles. Helena Bonham Carter is also still the best screenplay ever made. Hamlet ( 1990 ) would eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the’ 90s: Kenneth Branagh.

Aye, Branagh might get the most credit for the Shakespearean revival in this era, starting with his 1989 adaptation of Henry V, which featured Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife ( and ex ), Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing ( 1993 ), a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. It also features Denzel Washington as a dashing Renaissance prince, Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.

In the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996, Branagh’s following 1990s efforts would be defined by their direction whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein or right back on them. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. Hamlet ( 1996 ) is indulgent at its full four-hour length. Yet somehow that befits the material. Branagh would also star as Iago in Oliver Parker’s Othello ( 1995 ) opposite Laurence Fishburne and reconfigure the Bard as a musical in his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost ( 2000 ).

By the end of the decade, Julie Taymor&#8217, Titus ( 1999 ), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream ( 1999 ), in which Kevin Kline turns into an ass and pretends to be Michelle Pfeiffer, were all paved the way for more unconventional Shakespeare films.

The Teenage Shakespeare Remix ( and Austen, Chaucer, and others ): The Birth of the…

As popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the’ 90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re talking moving past modernizing Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did, or repurposing it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim aimed with West Side Story.

These were straightforward, unapologetic youth movies that also served as clever rehash of traditional storytelling techniques. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You ( 1999 ), a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. In fact, Tiles would do this kind of remix a few times in the more serious-faced modernization of Hamlet ( 2000 ), the third Hamlet film in ten years, but this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC, and Othello, O ( 2000 ), which also starred Mekhi Phifer as a tragic distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior.

Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale ( 2001 ), an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the strange attempt to turn Pierre Choderlos de Laclos ‘ Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 into an erotic thriller for teens ( the’ 90s were weird, huh? ) via 1999’s Lusty Cruel Intentions.

However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s Clueless ( 1995 ), a pitch perfect transfer of Jane Austen’s Emma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Cher ( Alicia Silverstone ), a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-intentioned in her matchmaking mischief, defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity by avoiding modern trends and simply inventing her own. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother ( Paul Rudd ). It’s a classic!

And the Rest

There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime, like Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst in the 1994 film Little Women, or the depressing, like the pathetic in the Demi Moore and Gary Oldman-led The Scarlet Letter ( 1995 ). There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible ( again with Ryder and Day-Lewis! ), and then those that just had some fun with playwrights, as seen in the <a href=””>over-celebrated Shakespeare in Love ( 1998 ). Mel Gibson even made the appearance of the sword and sandals ‘ resurgence in 2000 by going completely medieval ( and ahistorical ) on the costumed drama in Braveheart ( 1995 ).

More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, by and large, this kind of film has vanished. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That beautiful film was a good-sized hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.

These projects are currently largely relegated to long-form stream series, just like everything else that studio bean counters don’t consider to be four-quadrant intellectual property. Which in some cases is fine. The BBC production, which many would argue was the best version of Pride &amp, Prejudice, would be, in my opinion. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers ( who arguably isn’t making films for the same mainstream sensibility the likes of Gerwig or, for that matter, Coppola were ), period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.

This seems due to studios increasingly eschewing anything that isn’t reliably based on a brand that middle-aged adults loved. In that case, it might be worthwhile to remind them that children from the 1990s are getting older and having own children. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories, a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These tales are primarily published in the public domain. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don&#8217, t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. So perhaps once again, a play’s the thing in which they can catch the conscience of the… consumer? Or something similar.

The post The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the third episode of Love, Death + Robots, naked warriors battle atop dinosaurs, mysterious crab invasions, and despotic felines. Netflix’s genre-blending lively book series skillfully highlights technology fiction’s versatility with stories that embrace horror, comedy, melodrama, and another label-defying tales. It’s a uncommon illustration]…]…]…]…]…]]…]] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ] ]

The article Love, Death + Robots Producers Reveal the Season 4 Episode Written for Zack Snyder appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Recently a friend mentioned how much of a pity it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those secret” typical” reimaginings now like the ones we had growing up. And after a brief moment of reflection, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘ 90s were treated to an shame of treasures when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent pictures. Almost every week appeared to feature a new development of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all done with a smile and a push to appeal to teenagers who were reading the same writings in higher school or university.

But then when looking back at the push of 1990s film beyond simply “teen movies”, it was more than just Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger vehicles that were getting the traditional treatment. In fact the ‘ 90s, and to a large extent the ‘ 80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literature ( if largely of the English variety ) with the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. Some of the most creative or ambitious artists in the industry fought against the sluggishness of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more brutal constraints of corsets and top hats.

We saw some of the most faithful and enduring adaptations of Austen or Louisa May Alcott making it onto the screen, and Shakespeare was arguably bigger business in tinsel town than at any other point during this time. Why is that and can it happen again? Let’s take a look back in time to the era of period-themed dramas and extravagant literary adaptations…

Mozart and Merchant Ivory

Since the beginning of the medium, moviemakers have looked back at well-worn and familiar stories for inspiration and audience familiarity. In 1907, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short after making his enduring trip to the moon. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.

Even so, literary adaptations were frequently constrained, particularly in Hollywood, where directors had to contend with the Hays Code’s restrictions on censorship and preconceived ideas about what American audiences would find appealing. The most popular costumed dramas tended to therefore be vanity projects or something of a more sensational hue—think biblical or swords and sandals epics.

So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s lush adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View was the catalyst for our conception of what a” Merchant Ivory” film could be. Milo Forman’s Amadeus won Best Picture in the latter year. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.

In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ( 1975 ), a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of contemporary oppression and control from about a decade earlier, was adapting Mozart’s life story into a punk rock tragicoma. Based on a Peter Shaffer play of the same name, Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it both funnier and darker as Forman strove to pose Mozart as a modern day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling as much Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.

It then continued to do relatively well and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past ( Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won the year before but that was based on a subject matter in the living memory of most Academy voters ). Otherwise, the majority of recent winners were dramas or dramedies about contemporary life, like Annie Hall ( 1977 ), Kramer vs. Kramer ( 1979 ), and The Deer Hunter ( 1978 ). They reflected an audience that wanted to get away from the artificiality of their parents ‘ cinema, which in the U. S. associated historical costumes with the ( grand ) phoniness of Ben-Hur ( 1959 ) or Oliver! ( 1968 ).

However, the British masterpiece A Room with a View, which established this was the start of a popular trend, was released a few years later. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those movies were paired with contemporary comedies and dramas like Jane Austen in Manhattan in 1980 and The Guru in 1969. More importantly, all of these films tended to be art house pictures, small chamber pieces intended for a limited audience.

Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U. S. —this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country”! ( It’s fun to recall a time when a movie could be a hit in New York if it were just selling out every day. ) The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.

It also defined what would become the” Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in upcoming Oscar and box office superstars like Howard ( 1992 ), Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in 1993’s The Remains of the Day, and others. These were all distinctly British and understated pictures, with Remains being an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but their relative success with a certain type of moviegoer and Academy voter signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in’ em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.

Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama

One of the most eminently creative people to work in Hollywood was Michael Mann in 1990. As the executive producer and sometime-director on NBC’s edgy ( by’ 80s standards ) police drama, Miami Vice, he played a direct hand in proving American television could be “gritty” and artistic. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would conflict with Mann’s series’ neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic.

As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the &#8217, 80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter ( 1986 ). Instead, he attempted to adapt James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th-century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans, a childhood favorite for the screen. Certainly a problematic text in its original form with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian War ( or Seven Years War ) where Indigenous tribes in what is today upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes, the text proved a jumping off point for Mann to craft a gripping, primal, and prestigious film.

He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is a beautiful drama and an elevated action film, which did more business in the United States than Tom Cruise’s A Few Good Men and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast in the same year. It also would create a precedent we&#8217, d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.

Some of the most well-known and influential filmmakers of the time, many of whom were praised in auteur theory, were turning to literary classics to appeal to a select group of people. After the one-two genre punch of Goodfellas ( 1990 ) and Cape Fear ( 1991 ), Martin Scorsese made one of his most ambitious and underrated films: a stone-cold 1993 masterpiece inspired by an Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence.

It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. The Age of Innocence, in fact, remains the best film adaptation of the Gilded Age in cinema. It captures the lush pageantry of the most wealthy New Yorkers ‘ heyday as well as how class sectarian prejudice developed into ruthless tribalism, which ultimately led to the romantic apprehensions of one conformist attorney (once again Daniel Day-Lewis ) and this would-be-divorced lover ( Michelle Pfeiffer ).

It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U. S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already a star in international and independent cinema with films like The Wedding Banquet ( 1993 ) and Pushing Hands ( 1991 ), but it was only when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility ( 1995 ), that he became a household name and soon received the greenlight for films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ( 2000 ) and Hulk ( 2003 ). Sense and Sensibility benefits greatly, too, from a marvelous cast with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman among its ensemble. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.

It established a standard by which the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured, whether it be Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow or Netflix’s most recent Persuasion adaptation starring Dakota Johnson.

A Dark Universe of Monsters and Gods

Meanwhile, right before Columbia Pictures greenlit Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightful ( and arguably definitive ) interpretation of Little Women in 1994, the same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star. And it was Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola‘s wacky and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel, which was then viewed as a fad by rivals who snickeredered at the time by rivals who snickered in reference to a notorious Brian De Palma bomb from 1990. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called” New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. If he could combine all those elements into an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation, he correctly predicted there would be a box office success.

Love or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel—which is pretty audacious since he put the author’s name in the title—Coppola crafted one of the most sumptuous and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever put onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.

It established a standard for what can in retrospect be regarded as a pseudo-“dark universe” of ostensibly savagely Hollywood-adapted classic literary monsters. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1994 ), a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a poorer film that failed, but it still looked fantastic as the only major Frankenstein film to bear in mind Shelley’s depiction of the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.

Yet while Frankenstein failed, Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would have a lot of success in the same year adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. In a scene dripping in homoeroticism, the actor who played Top Gun‘s Maverick would stick fangs into a young Brad Pitt’s neck.

This trend continued throughout the’ 90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionist ( and Coppola-produced ) Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. Do you recall, for instance, Julia Roberts playing the not-so-good doctor’s maid in a revisionist version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the height of her stardom? It’s called Mary Reilly ( 1996 ), by the by.

Shakespeare’s Resurrection

Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Intriguingly, it was only in the 1990s that someone genuinely sprang up about creating a film that was almost exclusively based on the Bard: Baz Luhrmann, who translated Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy into MTV’s visual language in 1996. He even stylized the title as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.

That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. With hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama, their Verona was a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do so.

But it was hardly the first box office breakout for Shakespeare in the ‘ 90s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. It is difficult to recall Gibson’s portrayal of a heartthrob of sorts in the 1980s and early 1990s to the modern eye or as a dashing star deserving of heroic leading man roles.

Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamlet ( 1990 ) if you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Although Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet, it’s not surprising that Zeffirelli successfully uses production design, costumes, and location shooting at actual Norman castles to convey the medieval melancholy of the story. Plus, Helena Bonham Carter remains the best Ophelia ever put to screen. Hamlet ( 1990 ) would eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the’ 90s: Kenneth Branagh.

Aye, Branagh might get the most credit for the Shakespearean revival in this era, starting with his 1989 adaptation of Henry V, which featured Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife ( and ex ), Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing ( 1993 ), a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. Additionally, there are performances from Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, Denzel Washington as a fierce Renaissance prince, and Patrick Doyle’s gloriously over-the-top score.

It would define the style of Branagh’s following’ 90s efforts, whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein, or right back on them in the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. Hamlet ( 1996 ) is indulgent at its full four-hour length. Yet somehow that befits the material. In his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost ( 2000 ), Branagh would reprise his role as Iago in Laurence Fishburne’s Othello ( 1995 ).

It paved the way for more outside-the-box Shakespeare movies by the end of the decade like Julie Taymor&#8217, s deconstructionist Titus ( 1999 ) and the A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1999 where Kevin Kline turns into an ass and makes out with Michelle Pfeiffer.

The Teenage Shakespeare Remix ( and Austen, Chaucer, and others ): The Birth of the…

As popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the’ 90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re discussing whether to modernize Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did or to repurpose it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim did with West Side Story.

These were straight, unapologetic youth films that also proved clever reworkings of classic storytelling structure. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You ( 1999 ), a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. In fact, Tiles would perform this kind of remix a few times in the more serious-faced modernization of Hamlet ( 2000 ), the third Hamlet film in ten years, but this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC, and the more serious-faced modernization of Othello, O ( 2000 ), which also featured Mekhi Phifer as a tragic distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior.

Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale ( 2001 ), an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the odd attempt to make Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos from 1782 an erotic thriller for teenagers ( the 1990s were weird, huh? )? via <a href=””>the lusty Cruel Intentions ( 1999 ).

However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s Clueless ( 1995 ), a pitch perfect transfer of Jane Austen’s Emma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Cher ( Alicia Silverstone ), a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-intentioned in her matchmaking mischief, defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity by avoiding modern fads and simply inventing her own. With the assumption that anything she wrote in 1994 would be dated by ’95, she creates a faux yet now authentically iconic language and fashion style via Cher ( Alicia Silverstone ). You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother ( Paul Rudd ). It’s a classic indeed!

And the Rest

There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime, like the Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst-starred, Gillian Armstrong-directed Little Women of 1994, and they can also include the wretched, like the pathetic The Scarlet Letter ( 1995 ) starring Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible ( again with Ryder and Day-Lewis! ), and then those who simply enjoyed playing some playwrights, as depicted in the overly clocked Shakespeare in Love ( 2000 ). The inklings of the sword and sandals ‘ return in 2000 was even hinted at by Mel Gibson going full medieval ( and ahistorical ) on the costumed drama in Braveheart ( 1995 ).

More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. However, this kind of film has largely vanished. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. In 2019, that stunning movie was a big hit, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.

Now such projects, like everything else not considered four-quadrant intellectual property by studio bean counters, is mostly relegated to long-form stream series. Which in some cases is fine. The BBC production, which was also from the 1990s, is arguably the best version of Pride & Prejudice, in my opinion. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers ( who arguably isn’t making films for the same mainstream sensibility the likes of Gerwig or, for that matter, Coppola were ), period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.

This appears to be a result of studios increasingly skipping anything that isn’t consistently based on a popular brand. But in that case … it might be worth reminding them that’ 90s kids are getting older and having children of their own. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories, a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These tales are primarily in the public domain. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don&#8217, t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. Perhaps a play is the catalyst for the conscientiousness of the consumer once more? Or something like that.

The post The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations appeared first on Den of Geek.

Generation Alpha’s has just been announced, and in every era there is a chosen one. 15-year-old American Horror Story and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew actor Ryan Kiera Armstrong will be joining OG Buffy the Vampire Slayer star ( and reboot producer ) Sarah Michelle Gellar in the series revival Hulu pilot. [ …] There have been no further character details.

The article Buffy the Vampire Slayer Reset Captain Puts Its Chosen One appeared initially on Den of Geek.

Recently a friend mentioned how much of a pity it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those secret” traditional” reimaginings now like the ones we had growing up. And I came to an agreement after a moment of reflection. Children and teens of the ‘ 90s were treated to an shame of treasures when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent pictures. Almost every week appeared to feature yet another development of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all reworked with a smile and a push to appeal to teens who read the same scriptures in high school or university.

But then when looking back at the push of 1990s film beyond simply “teen movies”, it was more than just Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger vehicles that were getting the traditional treatment. In fact the ‘ 90s, and to a large extent the ‘ 80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literature ( if largely of the English variety ) with the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. Some of the most creative or ambitious artists in the industry were looking to trade in the guns and cruelty of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier for the even more terrible boundaries of bras and top hats.

We saw some of the most honest and enduring adaptations of Dickens or Louisa May Alcott making it onto the screen, and Shakespeare was probably bigger organization in tinsel town than at any other time during this time. Why is that and can it occur again? Let’s take a look back in time to the era of period-themed tragedies and extravagant intellectual adaptations…

Mozart and Merchant Ivory

Since the beginning of the platform, moviemakers have looked up at well-worn and common stories for ideas and market experience. In 1907, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a around 10-minute silent little after making his persistent trip to the moon. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the stockings.

Even so, artistic adaptations were frequently constrained, especially in Hollywood, where directors had to contend with the Hays Code’s restrictions on censorship and preconceived ideas about what American audiences would find appealing. The most popular costumed plays tended to so get vanity projects or something of a more dramatic hue—think religious or swords and sandals epics.

So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year Milo Forman’s Amadeus won Best Picture, and the second was the year James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s lush adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View festigt our conception of what a” Merchant Ivory” film could be. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.

In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ( 1975 ), a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of contemporary oppression and control from about a decade earlier, was adapting Mozart’s life story into a punk rock tragicoma. Based on a Peter Shaffer play of the same name, Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it both funnier and darker as Forman strove to pose Mozart as a modern day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling as much Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.

It continued to do relatively well and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past ( Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won the year before but that was based on a subject matter in the living memory of most Academy voters ). Otherwise, the majority of recent winners were dramas or dramedies about contemporary life, like Annie Hall ( 1977 ), Kramer vs. Kramer ( 1979 ), and The Deer Hunter ( 1978 ). They reflected an audience that wanted to get away from the artificiality of their parents ‘ cinema, which in the U. S. associated historical costumes with the ( grand ) phoniness of Ben-Hur ( 1959 ) or Oliver! ( 1968 ).

However, the British masterpiece A Room with a View, which established this as the start of a well-known trend, was released a few years later. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those movies were paired with contemporary comedies and dramas like Jane Austen in Manhattan in 1980 and The Guru in 1969. More importantly, all of these films tended to be art house pictures, small chamber pieces intended for a limited audience.

Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U. S. —this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country”! ( It’s fun to recall a time when a movie could be a hit in New York if it were just selling out every day. ) The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.

It also defined what would become the” Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in upcoming Oscar and box office superstars like Howard’s End ( 1992 ), Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day ( 1993 ), and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day ( 1993 ). These were all distinctly British and understated pictures, with Remains being an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but their relative success with a certain type of moviegoer and Academy voter signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in’ em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.

Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama

One of the hottest creatives in Hollywood was Michael Mann in 1990. As the executive producer and sometime-director on NBC’s edgy ( by’ 80s standards ) police drama, Miami Vice, he played a direct hand in proving American television could be “gritty” and artistic. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would conflict with Mann’s series’ neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic.

As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the &#8217, 80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter ( 1986 ). Instead, he attempted to adapt James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th-century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans, a childhood favorite for the screen. Certainly a problematic text in its original form with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian War ( or Seven Years War ) where Indigenous tribes in what is today upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes, the text proved a jumping off point for Mann to craft a gripping, primal, and prestigious film.

He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is a beautiful drama and a high-profile action film, and it did more business in the United States than Tom Cruise’s A Few Good Men and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It also would create a precedent we&#8217, d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.

Some of the biggest and most well-known filmmakers of the moment, many of whom were praised under auteur theory, were turning to literary classics for a target audience that admired them. After the one-two genre punch of Goodfellas ( 1990 ) and Cape Fear ( 1991 ), Martin Scorsese made one of his most ambitious and underrated films: a stone-cold 1993 masterpiece inspired by an Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence.

It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. In fact, The Age of Innocence continues to be the best film adaptation of the Gilded Age in cinematic form. It captures the lush pageantry of the most wealthy New Yorkers ‘ heyday as well as how class snobbery developed into a ruthless tribalism, which ultimately led to the romantic aversions of one conformist attorney (once again Daniel Day-Lewis ) and this would-be divorce love of his life ( Michelle Pfeiffer

It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U. S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already a star in international and independent cinema with films like The Wedding Banquet ( 1993 ) and Pushing Hands ( 1991 ), but it was only when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility ( 1995 ), that he became a household name and would soon have received approval for films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ( 1999 ), and Hulk ( 1999 ). Sense and Sensibility benefits greatly, too, from a marvelous cast with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman among its ensemble. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.

It established a standard by which the majority of the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured, whether it be Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice a decade later, any attempts at Emma from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow to this decade with Anya Taylor-Joy, or even Netflix’s most recent Dakota Johnson-led Persuasion adaptation.

A Gods and Monsters-A Dark Universe

Meanwhile, right before Columbia Pictures greenlit Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightful ( and arguably definitive ) interpretation of Little Women in 1994, the same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star. And it was Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola‘s wacky and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel, which was then viewed as a fad by rivals who snickeredered at the time by rivals who snickered in reference to a notorious Brian De Palma bomb from 1990. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called” New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. If he could combine all those elements into an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation, he correctly predicted there would be a box office hit.

Love or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel—which is pretty audacious since he put the author’s name in the title—Coppola crafted one of the most sumptuous and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever put onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.

It established a standard for what can in retrospect be regarded as a pseudo-“dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1994 ), a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. Although it was a worse film than the one that failed, it looked fantastic as the only major Frankenstein film to bear in mind Shelley’s depiction of the late 18th century.

Yet while Frankenstein failed, Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would have a lot of success in the same year adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. In a scene dripping in homoeroticism, the actor who played Top Gun‘s Maverick would stick fangs into a young Brad Pitt’s neck.

This trend continued throughout the’ 90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionist ( and Coppola-produced ) Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. Do you recall, for instance, Julia Roberts playing the not-so-good doctor’s maid in a revisionist version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the height of her stardom? It’s called Mary Reilly ( 1996 ), by the by.

Shakespeare’s Resurrection

Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Intriguingly, it was only in the 1990s that someone genuinely sprang up about creating a film that was almost exclusively based on the Bard: Baz Luhrmann, who translated Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy into MTV’s visual language in 1996. He even stylized the title as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.

That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. With hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama, their Verona was a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do so.

But it was hardly the first box office breakout for Shakespeare in the ‘ 90s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. It’s difficult to remember Gibson as a heartthrob of sorts in the 1980s and early 1990s or as a star-dwelling hero worthy of heroic leading man roles in today’s world.

Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamlet ( 1990 ) if you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Although Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet, it’s not surprising that Zeffirelli successfully uses production design, costumes, and location shooting at actual Norman castles to convey the medieval melancholy of the story. Plus, Helena Bonham Carter remains the best Ophelia ever put to screen. Hamlet ( 1990 ) would eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the’ 90s: Kenneth Branagh.

Aye, Branagh might get the most credit for the Shakespearean revival in this era, starting with his 1989 adaptation of Henry V, which featured Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing ( 1993 ), a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. Additionally, it features Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, Denzel Washington as a shrewd Renaissance prince, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.

It would define the style of Branagh’s following’ 90s efforts, whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein, or right back on them in the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. Hamlet ( 1996 ) is indulgent at the play’s length of four hours. Yet somehow that befits the material. In his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost ( 2000 ), Branagh would reprise his role as Iago in Laurence Fishburne’s Othello ( 1995 ).

It paved the way for more outside-the-box Shakespeare movies by the end of the decade like Julie Taymor&#8217, s deconstructionist Titus ( 1999 ) and the A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1999 where Kevin Kline turns into an ass and makes out with Michelle Pfeiffer.

The Teenage Shakespeare Remix ( and Austen, Chaucer, and others ): The Birth of the…

As popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the’ 90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re discussing whether to modernize Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did or to repurpose it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim did with West Side Story.

These were straight, unapologetic youth films that also proved clever reworkings of classic storytelling structure. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You ( 1999 ), a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. In fact, Tiles would perform this kind of remix in the more serious-faced modernization of Hamlet, O ( 2000 ), which featured Mekhi Phifer as a tragically distrusting high school sports star rather than a warrior, and Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet, the third Hamlet film in ten years, but this one is set in turn-of-the-century NYC.

Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale ( 2001 ), an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the odd attempt to make Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos from 1782 an erotic thriller for teenagers ( the 1990s were weird, huh? )? via <a href=””>the lusty Cruel Intentions ( 1999 ).

However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s Clueless ( 1995 ), a pitch perfect transfer of Jane Austen’s Emma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Cher ( Alicia Silverstone ), a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-intentioned in her matchmaking mischief, defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity by avoiding modern trends and simply inventing her own. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother ( Paul Rudd ). It’s a timeless!

And the Rest

There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These include the sublime, like Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst in the 1994 film Little Women, and the depressing, like the pathetic, The Scarlet Letter, which was helmed by Gary Oldman and Gillian Armstrong. There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible ( again with Ryder and Day-Lewis! ), and then those who simply enjoyed playing some Shakespeare in Love ( 1998 ), which were overcelebrated. The inklings of the sword and sandals ‘ return in 2000 was even hinted at by Mel Gibson going full medieval ( and ahistorical ) on the costumed drama in Braveheart ( 1995 ).

More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, by and large, this kind of film has vanished. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That gorgeous movie was a big hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.

Now such projects, like everything else not considered four-quadrant intellectual property by studio bean counters, is mostly relegated to long-form stream series. Which in some cases is fine. The BBC production, which is also from the 1990s, is arguably the best version of Pride & Prejudice, in my opinion. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers ( who arguably isn’t making films for the same mainstream sensibility the likes of Gerwig or, for that matter, Coppola were ), period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.

This appears to be because studios are increasingly avoiding anything that isn’t consistently based on a brand that middle-aged adults adored. But in that case … it might be worth reminding them that’ 90s kids are getting older and having children of their own. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories, a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These tales are primarily in the public domain. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don&#8217, t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. Perhaps once more, a play is the vehicle by which they can capture the conscience of the consumer? Or something like that.

The post The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations appeared first on Den of Geek.

Nintendo closes out the end of an era in 2025 with the introduction of the Nintendo Switch 2 and gradual sunsetting of the original Nintendo Switch. This shift in focus to the new console won’t be overnight, of course, and rarely is whenever console publishers transition to a fresh generation. The first Switch generation was […]

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Recently a friend mentioned how much of a shame it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those backdoor “classic” reimaginings today like the ones we had growing up. And after thinking for a moment, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘90s were treated to an embarrassment of riches when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent films. Nearly every week seemed to offer another modernization of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a wink and a nudge to appeal to teenagers reading much the same texts in high school or university.

But then when looking back at the sweep of 1990s cinema beyond just “teen movies,” it was more than only Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger vehicles that were getting the classical treatment. In fact the ‘90s, and to a large extent the ‘80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literature (if largely of the English variety) with the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. It was a time when some of the most exciting or ambitious artists working in the industry sought to trade in the bullets and brutality of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more brutal constraints of corsets and top hats.

Shakespeare was arguably bigger business in tinsel town than at any other point during this period, and we saw some of the most faithful and enduring adaptations of Austen or Louisa May Alcott make it to the screen. Why is that and can it happen again? Let’s look back at the golden age of period piece costumed dramas and splashy literary adaptations…

Mozart and Merchant Ivory

Since the beginning of the medium, moviemakers have looked back at well-worn and familiar stories for inspiration and audience familiarity. Not too many years after making his enduring trip to the moon, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short in 1907. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.

Even so, literary adaptations were often constrained, particularly in Hollywood where filmmakers had to contend with the limitations of censorship via the Hays Code and preconceived notions about what an American audience would enjoy. The most popular costumed dramas tended to therefore be vanity projects or something of a more sensational hue—think biblical or swords and sandals epics.

So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year that Miloš Forman’s Amadeus won Best Picture, and the latter was the year that our conception of what a “Merchant Ivory” film could be was cemented by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s luscious adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.

In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)—a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of modern oppression and control from about a decade earlier—was taking the story of Mozart and making it a punk rock tragicomedy. Based on a Peter Shaffer play of the same name, Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it both funnier and darker as Forman strove to pose Mozart as a modern day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling as much Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.

It went on to do relatively big business and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past (Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won the year before but that was based on a subject matter in the living memory of most Academy voters). Otherwise, most of the recent winners were dramas or dramedies about the modern world: Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Annie Hall (1977). They reflected an audience that wanted to get away from the artificiality of their parents’ cinema, which in the U.S. associated historical costumes with the (grand) phoniness of Ben-Hur (1959) or Oliver! (1968).

Yet perhaps the movie that proved this was the beginning of a popular trend came a few years later via the British masterpiece A Room with a View. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those films were mixed with modern comedies and dramas like rock ’n roll-infused The Guru (1969) and Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980). More importantly, all of these films tended to be art house pictures; small chamber pieces intended for a limited audience.

Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U.S.—this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country!” (It’s fun to remember a time when a movie just selling out in New York every day could make it a hit.) The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.

It also defined what became the “Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in future Oscar and box office darlings like the Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Carter-starring Howard’s End (1992), and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day (1993). These were all distinctly British and understated pictures, with Remains being an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but their relative success with a certain type of moviegoer and Academy voter signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in ‘em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.

Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama

In 1990, Michael Mann was one of the hottest creatives working in Hollywood. As the executive producer and sometime-director on NBC’s edgy (by ‘80s standards) police drama, Miami Vice, he played a direct hand in proving American television could be “gritty” and artistic. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would clash with the neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic that Mann developed for the series.

As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the ’80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter (1986). Instead he sought to adapt a childhood favorite for the screen, James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Certainly a problematic text in its original form with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian War (or Seven Years War) where Indigenous tribes in what is today upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes, the text proved a jumping off point for Mann to craft a gripping, primal, and prestigious film.

He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is an elevated action movie, and a beautiful drama that did bigger business in the U.S. than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tom Cruise vehicle A Few Good Men in the same year. It also would create a precedent we’d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.

Some of the biggest and most respected filmmakers of the moment, many of them praised under auteur theory, were looking to literary classics for an audience that craved them. After the one-two genre punch of Goodfellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991), Martin Scorsese made one of his most ambitious and underrated films: a stone-cold 1993 masterpiece inspired by an Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence.

It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. Indeed, The Age of Innocence remains the best cinematic representation of the Gilded Age in the U.S., capturing the lush pageantry of the most elite New Yorkers’ lifestyles in their robber baron heyday, as well as how class snobbery metastasized into a ruthless tribalism that doomed the romantic yearnings of one conformist attorney (again Daniel Day-Lewis) and this would-be divorcée love of his life (Michelle Pfeiffer).

It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U.S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already the toast of international and independent cinema via movies like The Wedding Banquet (1993) and martial arts-adjacent Pushing Hands (1991), but it is when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 that he became a Hollywood favorite who would soon get movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Hulk (2003) greenlit. Sense and Sensibility benefits greatly, too, from a marvelous cast with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman among its ensemble. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.

It set a standard that most of the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured by, be it Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic take on Pride and Prejudice a decade later, various attempts at Emma from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow to this decade with Anya Taylor-Joy, or even Netflix’s recent Dakota Johnson-led Persuasion adaptation.

A Dark Universe of Gods and Monsters

Meanwhile, right before Columbia Pictures greenlit Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightful (and arguably definitive) interpretation of Little Women in 1994, the same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star. And it was Dracula.

Considered a folly of hubris at the time by rivals who snickered to Variety it should be renamed “Bonfire of the Vampires” (in reference to a notorious Brian De Palma bomb from 1990), Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola’s lurid and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called “New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. He also correctly predicted there was a box office hit if he could bring all those elements out in an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation.

Love or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel—which is pretty audacious since he put the author’s name in the title—Coppola crafted one of the most sumptuous and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever put onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.

It set a standard for what can in retrospect be considered a pseudo “dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a worse movie that flopped, but it looked spectacular as the only major Frankenstein movie to remember Shelley set the story during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.

Yet while Frankenstein failed, Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would have a lot of success in the same year adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. It was also a grandiose costumed drama where the guy who played Top Gun’s Maverick would sink fangs into young Brad Pitt’s neck in a scene dripping in homoeroticism.

This trend continued throughout the ‘90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionist (and Coppola-produced) Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. For instance, did you remember that Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom appeared in a revisionist take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where she played the not-so-good doctor’s maid? It’s called Mary Reilly (1996), by the by.

The Resurgence of Shakespeare

Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Yet curiously it was only in the 1990s that someone really lit on the idea of making a movie directly based on the Bard tailored almost exclusively for that demographic: Baz Luhrmann in 1996, who reconfigured the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into the visual language of MTV. He even stylized the title as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.

That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. Their Verona was a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news, with hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do.

But it was hardly the first box office breakout for Shakespeare in the ‘90s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. To the modern eye, it is hard to remember Gibson was a heartthrob of sorts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s—or generally viewed as a dashing star worthy of heroic leading men roles.

Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamlet (1990) if you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet (perhaps not a surprise now), and Zeffirelli mines the medieval melancholy of the story well with production design, costumes, and location shooting at real Norman castles. Plus, Helena Bonham Carter remains the best Ophelia ever put to screen. Hamlet (1990) would eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the ‘90s: Kenneth Branagh.

Aye, Branagh might deserve the most credit for the Shakespearean renaissance in this era, beginning with his adaptation of Henry V (1989), which featured the makings of Branagh’s troupe of former RSC favorites turned film actors: Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife (and ex), Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing (1993), a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. It also features Denzel Washington as a dashing Renaissance prince, Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.

It would define the style of Branagh’s following ‘90s efforts, whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein, or right back on them in the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. At the play’s full four-hour length, Hamlet (1996) is indulgent. Yet somehow that befits the material. Branagh would also star as Iago in Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) opposite Laurence Fishburne and reconfigure the Bard as a musical in his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000).

It paved the way for more outside-the-box Shakespeare movies by the end of the decade like Julie Taymor’s deconstructionist Titus (1999) and the A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1999 where Kevin Kline turns into an ass and makes out with Michelle Pfeiffer.

The Birth of the Teenage Shakespeare Remix (and Austen, and Chaucer, and…)

As popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the ‘90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re talking moving past modernizing Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did, or repurposing it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim aimed with West Side Story.

These were straight, unapologetic youth films that also proved clever reworkings of classic storytelling structure. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. Stiles would, in fact, do this kind of remix a number times in the more serious-faced modernization of Othello, O (2000), which also starred Mekhi Phifer as a tragically distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior, and Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke’s own Hamlet (2000), the third Hamlet movie in 10 years, albeit this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC.

Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale (2001), an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the strange attempt to turn Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 into an erotic thriller for teens (the ‘90s were weird, huh?) via the lusty Cruel Intentions (1999).

However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), a pitch perfect transfer of Jane Austen’s Emma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Foregoing modern fads and simply inventing her own—with the assumption anything she wrote in 1994 would be dated by ’95—Heckerling create a faux yet now authentically iconic language and fashion style via Cher (Alicia Silverstone), a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-meaning in her matchmaking mischief that she defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother (Paul Rudd). It’s a classic!

And the Rest

There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime like the Gillian Armstrong-directed Little Women of 1994 starring Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst; and they can include the wretched like the Demi Moore and Gary Oldman-led The Scarlet Letter (1995). There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (again with Ryder and Day-Lewis!), and then those that just had some fun with playwrights, as seen in the over-celebrated Shakespeare in Love (1998). The inklings of the sword and sandals’ return in 2000 was even hinted at by Mel Gibson going full medieval (and ahistorical) on the costumed drama in Braveheart (1995).

More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, this type of film has by and large gone away. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That beautiful film was a good-sized hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.

Now such projects, like everything else not considered four-quadrant intellectual property by studio bean counters, is mostly relegated to long-form stream series. Which in some cases is fine. Many would argue the best version of Pride & Prejudice was the BBC production… also from the ‘90s, mind. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers (who arguably isn’t making films for the same mainstream sensibility the likes of Gerwig or, for that matter, Coppola were), period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.

This seems due to studios increasingly eschewing anything that isn’t reliably based on a brand that middle-aged adults loved. But in that case… it might be worth reminding them that ‘90s kids are getting older and having children of their own. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories; a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These stories are mostly in the public domain too. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don’t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. So perhaps once again, a play’s the thing in which they can catch the conscience of the… consumer? Or something like that.

The post The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations appeared first on Den of Geek.

Recently a friend mentioned how much of a shame it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those backdoor “classic” reimaginings today like the ones we had growing up. And after thinking for a moment, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘90s were treated to an embarrassment of riches when it came to […]

The post The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations appeared first on Den of Geek.

Recently a friend mentioned how much of a shame it was that, generally speaking, there are few of those backdoor “classic” reimaginings today like the ones we had growing up. And after thinking for a moment, I agreed. Children and teens of the ‘90s were treated to an embarrassment of riches when it came to the Bard and Bard-adjacent films. Nearly every week seemed to offer another modernization of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or Geoffrey Chaucer, all retrofitted with a wink and a nudge to appeal to teenagers reading much the same texts in high school or university.

But then when looking back at the sweep of 1990s cinema beyond just “teen movies,” it was more than only Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger vehicles that were getting the classical treatment. In fact the ‘90s, and to a large extent the ‘80s as well, was an era ripe with indie studios and Hollywood majors treating classic literature (if largely of the English variety) with the sanctity nowadays reserved for comic books and video games. It was a time when some of the most exciting or ambitious artists working in the industry sought to trade in the bullets and brutality of New Hollywood from a decade or two earlier in favor of the even more brutal constraints of corsets and top hats.

Shakespeare was arguably bigger business in tinsel town than at any other point during this period, and we saw some of the most faithful and enduring adaptations of Austen or Louisa May Alcott make it to the screen. Why is that and can it happen again? Let’s look back at the golden age of period piece costumed dramas and splashy literary adaptations…

Mozart and Merchant Ivory

Since the beginning of the medium, moviemakers have looked back at well-worn and familiar stories for inspiration and audience familiarity. Not too many years after making his enduring trip to the moon, Georges Méliès adapted Hamlet into a roughly 10-minute silent short in 1907. And of course before Kenneth Branagh, Laurence Olivier had Hollywood falling in love with the Bard… at least as long it was Larry in the tights.

Even so, literary adaptations were often constrained, particularly in Hollywood where filmmakers had to contend with the limitations of censorship via the Hays Code and preconceived notions about what an American audience would enjoy. The most popular costumed dramas tended to therefore be vanity projects or something of a more sensational hue—think biblical or swords and sandals epics.

So it’s difficult to point to an exact moment where that changed in the 1980s, yet we’d hazard to suggest the close together Oscar seasons of 1984 and 1986 had a lot to do with it. After all, the first was the year that Miloš Forman’s Amadeus won Best Picture, and the latter was the year that our conception of what a “Merchant Ivory” film could be was cemented by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s luscious adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Considered by Forster scholars one of the author’s slighter works, the film had critics like Roger Ebert swooning that it was a masterpiece.

In the case of Amadeus, the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)—a zeitgeist-shaping portrait of modern oppression and control from about a decade earlier—was taking the story of Mozart and making it a punk rock tragicomedy. Based on a Peter Shaffer play of the same name, Forman and Shaffer radically reimagined the story, making it both funnier and darker as Forman strove to pose Mozart as a modern day rebel iconoclast with his wig resembling as much Sid Vicious as the Age of Enlightenment. Located atop Tom Hulce’s giggling head, it signaled a movie that had all the trappings of melodrama but felt accessible and exciting to a wide modern audience.

It went on to do relatively big business and win Best Picture. While not the first period film to do so, it was the first in a long while set in what could be construed as the distant past (Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi won the year before but that was based on a subject matter in the living memory of most Academy voters). Otherwise, most of the recent winners were dramas or dramedies about the modern world: Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Annie Hall (1977). They reflected an audience that wanted to get away from the artificiality of their parents’ cinema, which in the U.S. associated historical costumes with the (grand) phoniness of Ben-Hur (1959) or Oliver! (1968).

Yet perhaps the movie that proved this was the beginning of a popular trend came a few years later via the British masterpiece A Room with a View. To be sure, the partnership of Merchant and Ivory had been going for more than 20 years by the time they got to adapting Forster, including with several other costumed dramas and period pieces. However, those films were mixed with modern comedies and dramas like rock ’n roll-infused The Guru (1969) and Jane Austen in Manhattan (1980). More importantly, all of these films tended to be art house pictures; small chamber pieces intended for a limited audience.

Yet as the marketing campaign would later trumpet about A Room with a View—the ethereal romantic dramedy which introduced Daniel Day-Lewis and a fresh-faced Helena Bonham Carter to the U.S.—this movie had the “highest single theatre gross in the country!” (It’s fun to remember a time when a movie just selling out in New York every day could make it a hit.) The film’s combination of Forster’s wry satire and cynicism about English aristocracy in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era, coupled with the sweeping romance of Puccini arias and Tuscan countrysides, made it a massive success.

It also defined what became the “Merchant Ivory” period piece forever after, including in future Oscar and box office darlings like the Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, and Carter-starring Howard’s End (1992), and Hopkins and Thompson’s reunion in The Remains of the Day (1993). These were all distinctly British and understated pictures, with Remains being an outright tragedy delivered in a hushed whisper, but their relative success with a certain type of moviegoer and Academy voter signaled to Hollywood that there was gold up in ‘em hills. And soon enough, more than just Forman on the American side was going up there to mine it.

Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, and the Auteur’s Costumed Drama

In 1990, Michael Mann was one of the hottest creatives working in Hollywood. As the executive producer and sometime-director on NBC’s edgy (by ‘80s standards) police drama, Miami Vice, he played a direct hand in proving American television could be “gritty” and artistic. Even the episodes he didn’t helm were defined by the standards he insisted upon—such as never putting cool guys Crockett and Tubbs in a red or brown car. It would clash with the neon-light-on-celluloid aesthetic that Mann developed for the series.

As that series was winding down by 1990, Mann was more in demand than ever to make any film project he might have wanted—something perhaps in-keeping with Vice or gritty crime thrillers he’d made in the ’80s like serial killer thriller Manhunter (1986). Instead he sought to adapt a childhood favorite for the screen, James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th century American frontier novel, The Last of the Mohicans. Certainly a problematic text in its original form with its imperial-fantasy riff on the French and Indian War (or Seven Years War) where Indigenous tribes in what is today upstate New York were either reduced to the noble or cruel savage stereotypes, the text proved a jumping off point for Mann to craft a gripping, primal, and prestigious film.

He also made a movie that far exceeded its source material with The Last of the Mohicans being an often wordless opera of big emotions played in silence by Day-Lewis, Madeleine Stowe, and Wes Studi, all while Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s musical score looms like thunderclouds across the mountainous landscape. It is an elevated action movie, and a beautiful drama that did bigger business in the U.S. than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tom Cruise vehicle A Few Good Men in the same year. It also would create a precedent we’d see followed time and again throughout the rest of the decade.

Some of the biggest and most respected filmmakers of the moment, many of them praised under auteur theory, were looking to literary classics for an audience that craved them. After the one-two genre punch of Goodfellas (1990) and Cape Fear (1991), Martin Scorsese made one of his most ambitious and underrated films: a stone-cold 1993 masterpiece inspired by an Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence.

It’s a story that Scorsese argues is just as brutal, if not more so, than his gangster pictures. Indeed, The Age of Innocence remains the best cinematic representation of the Gilded Age in the U.S., capturing the lush pageantry of the most elite New Yorkers’ lifestyles in their robber baron heyday, as well as how class snobbery metastasized into a ruthless tribalism that doomed the romantic yearnings of one conformist attorney (again Daniel Day-Lewis) and this would-be divorcée love of his life (Michelle Pfeiffer).

It might not have been a hit in its time, but Ang Lee’s breakout in the U.S. a year later definitely was. The Taiwanese filmmaker was already the toast of international and independent cinema via movies like The Wedding Banquet (1993) and martial arts-adjacent Pushing Hands (1991), but it is when he directed a flawless adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1995 that he became a Hollywood favorite who would soon get movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Hulk (2003) greenlit. Sense and Sensibility benefits greatly, too, from a marvelous cast with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, and Alan Rickman among its ensemble. It also captured the sophisticated satirical and melancholic underpinnings of Austen’s pen that most previous Hollywood adaptations never scratched.

It set a standard that most of the best Austen adaptations to this day are measured by, be it Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s cinematic take on Pride and Prejudice a decade later, various attempts at Emma from the 1990s with Gwyneth Paltrow to this decade with Anya Taylor-Joy, or even Netflix’s recent Dakota Johnson-led Persuasion adaptation.

A Dark Universe of Gods and Monsters

Meanwhile, right before Columbia Pictures greenlit Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and later Gillian Armstrong’s still delightful (and arguably definitive) interpretation of Little Women in 1994, the same studio signed off on its first period piece with Winona Ryder attached to star. And it was Dracula.

Considered a folly of hubris at the time by rivals who snickered to Variety it should be renamed “Bonfire of the Vampires” (in reference to a notorious Brian De Palma bomb from 1990), Bram Stoker’s Dracula was Francis Ford Coppola’s lurid and magnificent reimagining of Stoker’s definitive Victorian novel. Published in 1897 with on-the-nose metaphors for London society’s anxieties over foreigners, sexual promiscuity and disease, and the so-called “New Woman” working in the professional classes, Coppola saw all of that potential in the well-worn and adapted vampire novel. He also correctly predicted there was a box office hit if he could bring all those elements out in an exciting and anachronistic fever dream for the MTV generation.

Love or hate Coppola’s looseness with Stoker’s novel—which is pretty audacious since he put the author’s name in the title—Coppola crafted one of the most sumptuous and expensive depictions of Victorian society ever put onscreen, winning costume designer Eiko Ishioka an Oscar for the effort. He also made an unexpected holiday hit that played like bloody gangbusters alongside Home Alone 2 and Aladdin that winter.

It set a standard for what can in retrospect be considered a pseudo “dark universe” of classic literary monsters getting ostensibly faithful and expensive adaptations by Hollywood. Coppola himself produced Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), a film that is actually in many ways closer to the thematic letter of its author than Bram Stoker’s Dracula ever was. It was also a worse movie that flopped, but it looked spectacular as the only major Frankenstein movie to remember Shelley set the story during the Age of Enlightenment in the late 18th century.

Yet while Frankenstein failed, Tom Cruise and Neil Jordan would have a lot of success in the same year adapting Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The book admittedly was recent, having been published in 1976, but the story’s roots and setting in 18th and 19th century bayou occultism were not. It was also a grandiose costumed drama where the guy who played Top Gun’s Maverick would sink fangs into young Brad Pitt’s neck in a scene dripping in homoeroticism.

This trend continued throughout the ‘90s with some successes, like Tim Burton’s wildly revisionist (and Coppola-produced) Sleepy Hollow in 1999, and some misses. For instance, did you remember that Julia Roberts at the height of her stardom appeared in a revisionist take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where she played the not-so-good doctor’s maid? It’s called Mary Reilly (1996), by the by.

The Resurgence of Shakespeare

Of course when talking about classic literature and storytelling, one name rises above most others in the schools and curriculums of the English-speaking world. Yet curiously it was only in the 1990s that someone really lit on the idea of making a movie directly based on the Bard tailored almost exclusively for that demographic: Baz Luhrmann in 1996, who reconfigured the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet into the visual language of MTV. He even stylized the title as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet.

That proved the tip of an anachronistic iceberg whose cast included Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his heartthrob powers as Romeo and real-life teenager Claire Danes as his Capulet amore. Their Verona was a Neverland composite of Miami, Rio de Janeiro, and the nightly news, with hyper music video editing and frenetic neon-hued melodrama. Some older scholars viewed Luhrmann’s anachronisms as an abomination, but as a Millennial, I can attest we loved this thing back in the day. Many still do.

But it was hardly the first box office breakout for Shakespeare in the ‘90s. When the decade began, the helmer of another cinematic Romeo and Juliet classic from a different era, Franco Zeffirelli, attempted to make Hamlet exciting for “kids these days” by casting Mel Gibson right in the midst of his Lethal Weapon popularity as the indecisive Dane. To the modern eye, it is hard to remember Gibson was a heartthrob of sorts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s—or generally viewed as a dashing star worthy of heroic leading men roles.

Nonetheless, there is quite a bit to like about Hamlet (1990) if you can look past Gibson’s off-screen behavior in the following decades, or the fact Zeffirelli cuts what is a four-hour play down to less than 2.5 hours. Gibson actually makes for a credible and genuinely mad Hamlet (perhaps not a surprise now), and Zeffirelli mines the medieval melancholy of the story well with production design, costumes, and location shooting at real Norman castles. Plus, Helena Bonham Carter remains the best Ophelia ever put to screen. Hamlet (1990) would eventually be overshadowed, though, both by Gibson’s awful behavior and because of a much grander and bombastic adaptation from the man who became the King of Shakespeare Movies in the ‘90s: Kenneth Branagh.

Aye, Branagh might deserve the most credit for the Shakespearean renaissance in this era, beginning with his adaptation of Henry V (1989), which featured the makings of Branagh’s troupe of former RSC favorites turned film actors: Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed, and of course his future wife (and ex), Emma Thompson. Together the pair would mount what is in this writer’s opinion the best film ever based on a Shakespeare play, the divine and breezy Much Ado About Nothing (1993), a perfect encapsulation of perhaps the first romantic comedy ever written that features Branagh and Thompson as the sharp-tongued, dueling lovers Benedict and Beatrice. It also features Denzel Washington as a dashing Renaissance prince, Kate Beckinsale in her breakout role, and a gloriously over-the-top score by Patrick Doyle.

It would define the style of Branagh’s following ‘90s efforts, whether they went off-the-rails like in the aforementioned Frankenstein, or right back on them in the 70mm-filmed, ultra wide and sunny adaptation of Hamlet he helmed in 1996. Avoiding the psychological and Freudian interpretations of the Danish prince chased by Olivier and Zeffirelli, Branagh turns Hamlet into a romantic hero spearheading an all-star ensemble cast. At the play’s full four-hour length, Hamlet (1996) is indulgent. Yet somehow that befits the material. Branagh would also star as Iago in Oliver Parker’s Othello (1995) opposite Laurence Fishburne and reconfigure the Bard as a musical in his own directorial effort, Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000).

It paved the way for more outside-the-box Shakespeare movies by the end of the decade like Julie Taymor’s deconstructionist Titus (1999) and the A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1999 where Kevin Kline turns into an ass and makes out with Michelle Pfeiffer.

The Birth of the Teenage Shakespeare Remix (and Austen, and Chaucer, and…)

As popular as the Shakespeare movie became in the ‘90s, what’s curiously unique about this era is the simultaneous rise of movies that adapted either the Bard or other highly respected literary writers and turned them into a pure teenage dream. We’re talking moving past modernizing Romeo and Juliet like Luhrmann did, or repurposing it for high New York society like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim aimed with West Side Story.

These were straight, unapologetic youth films that also proved clever reworkings of classic storytelling structure. Among the best directly derived from Shakespeare is the movie that made Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger Gen-X icons, 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), a happily campy update of The Taming of the Shrew set in a fairytale high school also populated by future Christopher Nolan favorites like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz. Stiles would, in fact, do this kind of remix a number times in the more serious-faced modernization of Othello, O (2000), which also starred Mekhi Phifer as a tragically distrusting high school sports star instead of warrior, and Michael Almereyda and Ethan Hawke’s own Hamlet (2000), the third Hamlet movie in 10 years, albeit this one set in turn-of-the-century NYC.

Ledger also returned to the concept by adapting another, even older literary giant, in this case the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, for A Knight’s Tale (2001), an anachronistic blending of the medieval and modern where peasants grooved in the jousting tournament stands to Queen. There was also the strange attempt to turn Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons from 1782 into an erotic thriller for teens (the ‘90s were weird, huh?) via the lusty Cruel Intentions (1999).

However, easily the best of these remains Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), a pitch perfect transfer of Jane Austen’s Emma from the Regency period to a fairytale version of 1990s Beverly Hills. Foregoing modern fads and simply inventing her own—with the assumption anything she wrote in 1994 would be dated by ’95—Heckerling create a faux yet now authentically iconic language and fashion style via Cher (Alicia Silverstone), a charmed SoCal princess who is so well-meaning in her matchmaking mischief that she defies any attempts to detest her entitlement or vanity. You kind of are even low-key chill that the happy ending is she hooks up with her step brother (Paul Rudd). It’s a classic!

And the Rest

There are many, many more examples we could examine from this era. These can include the sublime like the Gillian Armstrong-directed Little Women of 1994 starring Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, and Kirsten Dunst; and they can include the wretched like the Demi Moore and Gary Oldman-led The Scarlet Letter (1995). There were more plays adapted, a la Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (again with Ryder and Day-Lewis!), and then those that just had some fun with playwrights, as seen in the over-celebrated Shakespeare in Love (1998). The inklings of the sword and sandals’ return in 2000 was even hinted at by Mel Gibson going full medieval (and ahistorical) on the costumed drama in Braveheart (1995).

More than a few of these won Best Picture Oscars as well, including Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and James Cameron’s little 1997 movie you might have heard about elsewhere: Titanic. And yet, this type of film has by and large gone away. Once in a while one comes along that still works, such as Greta Gerwig’s own revisionist interpretation of Little Women. That beautiful film was a good-sized hit in 2019, but it did not exactly usher in a new era of literary adaptations.

Now such projects, like everything else not considered four-quadrant intellectual property by studio bean counters, is mostly relegated to long-form stream series. Which in some cases is fine. Many would argue the best version of Pride & Prejudice was the BBC production… also from the ‘90s, mind. But whether it is original period piece films or adaptations, unless you’re Robert Eggers (who arguably isn’t making films for the same mainstream sensibility the likes of Gerwig or, for that matter, Coppola were), period piece storytelling and “great adaptations” have been abandoned to the small screen and full-on wish fulfillment anachronisms like Bridgerton.

This seems due to studios increasingly eschewing anything that isn’t reliably based on a brand that middle-aged adults loved. But in that case… it might be worth reminding them that ‘90s kids are getting older and having children of their own. There may again be a market beyond the occasional Gerwig swing, or Eggers take on Dracula, for classic stories; a new audience being raised to want modern riffs inspired by tales that have endured for years and centuries. These stories are mostly in the public domain too. And recent original hits like Sinners suggests you don’t even need a classic story to connect with audiences. So perhaps once again, a play’s the thing in which they can catch the conscience of the… consumer? Or something like that.

The post The 1990s Were a Golden Age for Period Piece Movies and Literary Adaptations appeared first on Den of Geek.

But what on earth is a passionate burnout?

Imagine a person determined to do it all. She has two wonderful children whom she, along with her father who is also working mildly, is homeschooling during a crisis. She has a demanding customer weight at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in ( or frequently catch up on work ), does meal training as the children are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth quality” to listen in as she juggles clients, jobs, and expenses. Sound like a bit? Yet with a supportive group both at home and at work, it is.

Sounds like this person has too much on her disk and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have occasion for that. In truth, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. No accomplishing much. There’s not enough of her to be here and that, she is trying to divide her head in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to fear herself. And as those thoughts creep in more and more, her domestic tale becomes more and more important.

Immediately she KNOWS what she needs to do! She really Would MORE.

This is a challenging and dangerous period. Understand why? Because when she doesn’t end that new purpose, that storyline will get worse. Immediately she’s failing. She isn’t doing much. SHE is not enough. She may fail, she might fail her home… so she’ll get more she should accomplish. She doesn’t nap as much, proceed because much, all in the attempts to do more. Caught in this period of trying to prove herself to herself, not reaching any purpose. Always feeling “enough”.

But, yeah, that’s what zealous burnout looks like for me. It doesn’t happen overnight in some magnificent sign but rather carefully builds over weeks and months. My burning out process looks like speeding up, not a man losing target. I rate up and up and up… and therefore I simply stop.

I am the one who was

It’s amusing the things that shape us. Through the camera of youth, I viewed the worries, problems, and sacrifices of someone who had to make it all work without having much. I was happy that my mom was so competent and my dad sympathetic, I never went without and also got an extra here or there.

Growing up, I did not think pity when my family paid with food stamps, in truth, I’d have probably taken on any debate on the topic, orally eviscerating anyone who dared to criticize the crippled woman trying to make sure all our needs were met with so little. As a child, I watched the way the fear of not making those ends meet impacted people I love. As the non-disabled person in my home, I would take on many of the physical tasks because I was” the one who could” make our lives a little easier. I learned early to associate fears or uncertainty with putting more of myself into it— I am the one who can. I learned early that when something frightens me, I can double down and work harder to make it better. I can own the challenge. When people have seen this in me as an adult, I’ve been told I seem fearless, but make no mistake, I’m not. If I seem fearless, it’s because this behavior was forged from other people’s fears.

And here I am, more than 30 years later still feeling the urge to mindlessly push myself forward when faced with overwhelming tasks ahead of me, assuming that I am the one who can and therefore should. I find myself driven to prove that I can make things happen if I work longer hours, take on more responsibility, and do more.

I do not see people who struggle financially as failures, because I have seen how strong that tide can be—it pulls you along the way. I truly get that I have been privileged to be able to avoid many of the challenges that were present in my youth. That said, I am still” the one who can” who feels she should, so if I were faced with not having enough to make ends meet for my own family, I would see myself as having failed. Though I am supported and educated, most of this is due to good fortune. I will, however, allow myself the arrogance of saying I have been careful with my choices to have encouraged that luck. My identity stems from the idea that I am” the one who can” so therefore feel obligated to do the most. I can choose to stop, and with some quite literal cold water splashed in my face, I’ve made the choice to before. But that choosing to stop is not my go-to, I move forward, driven by a fear that is so a part of me that I barely notice it’s there until I’m feeling utterly worn away.

So why all the history? You see, burnout is a fickle thing. I have heard and read a lot about burnout over the years. Burnout is real. Especially now, with COVID, many of us are balancing more than we ever have before—all at once! It’s hard, and the procrastinating, the avoidance, the shutting down impacts so many amazing professionals. There are important articles that relate to what I imagine must be the majority of people out there, but not me. That’s not what my burnout looks like.

The dangerous invisibility of zealous burnout

A lot of work environments see the extra hours, extra effort, and overall focused commitment as an asset ( and sometimes that’s all it is ). They see someone trying to rise to challenges, not someone stuck in their fear. Many well-meaning organizations have safeguards in place to protect their teams from burnout. But in cases like this, those alarms are not always tripped, and then when the inevitable stop comes, some members of the organization feel surprised and disappointed. And sometimes maybe even betrayed.

Parents—more so mothers, statistically speaking—are praised as being so on top of it all when they can work, be involved in the after-school activities, practice self-care in the form of diet and exercise, and still meet friends for coffee or wine. During COVID many of us have binged countless streaming episodes showing how it’s so hard for the female protagonist, but she is strong and funny and can do it. It’s a “very special episode” when she breaks down, cries in the bathroom, woefully admits she needs help, and just stops for a bit. Truth is, countless people are hiding their tears or are doom-scrolling to escape. We know that the media is a lie to amuse us, but often the perception that it’s what we should strive for has penetrated much of society.

Women and burnout

I love men. And though I don’t love every man ( heads up, I don’t love every woman or nonbinary person either ), I think there is a beautiful spectrum of individuals who represent that particular binary gender.

That said, women are still more often at risk of burnout than their male counterparts, especially in these COVID stressed times. Mothers in the workplace feel the pressure to do all the “mom” things while giving 110 %. Mothers not in the workplace feel they need to do more to” justify” their lack of traditional employment. Women who are not mothers often feel the need to do even more because they don’t have that extra pressure at home. It’s vicious and systemic and so a part of our culture that we’re often not even aware of the enormity of the pressures we put on ourselves and each other.

And there are prices beyond happiness too. Harvard Health Publishing released a study a decade ago that “uncovered strong links between women’s job stress and cardiovascular disease”. The CDC noted,” Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, killing 299, 578 women in 2017—or about 1 in every 5 female deaths”.

This relationship between work stress and health, from what I have read, is more dangerous for women than it is for their non-female counterparts.

But what if your burnout isn’t like that either?

That might not be you either. After all, each of us is so different and how we respond to stressors is too. It’s part of what makes us human. Don’t stress what burnout looks like, just learn to recognize it in yourself. Here are a few questions I sometimes ask friends if I am concerned about them.

Are you happy? This simple question should be the first thing you ask yourself. Chances are, even if you’re burning out doing all the things you love, as you approach burnout you’ll just stop taking as much joy from it all.

Do you feel empowered to say no? I have observed in myself and others that when someone is burning out, they no longer feel they can say no to things. Even those who don’t” speed up” feel pressure to say yes to not disappoint the people around them.

What are three things you’ve done for yourself? Another observance is that we all tend to stop doing things for ourselves. Anything from skipping showers and eating poorly to avoiding talking to friends. These can be red flags.

Are you making excuses? Many of us try to disregard feelings of burnout. Over and over I have heard,” It’s just crunch time”,” As soon as I do this one thing, it will all be better”, and” Well I should be able to handle this, so I’ll figure it out”. And it might really be crunch time, a single goal, and/or a skill set you need to learn. That happens—life happens. BUT if this doesn’t stop, be honest with yourself. If you’ve worked more 50-hour weeks since January than not, maybe it’s not crunch time—maybe it’s a bad situation that you’re burning out from.

Do you have a plan to stop feeling this way? If something is truly temporary and you do need to just push through, then it has an exit route with a
defined end.

Take the time to listen to yourself as you would a friend. Be honest, allow yourself to be uncomfortable, and break the thought cycles that prevent you from healing.

So now what?

What I just described is a different path to burnout, but it’s still burnout. There are well-established approaches to working through burnout:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat healthy.
• Work out.
• Get outside.
• Take a break.
• Overall, practice self-care.

Those are hard for me because they feel like more tasks. If I’m in the burnout cycle, doing any of the above for me feels like a waste. The narrative is that if I’m already failing, why would I take care of myself when I’m dropping all those other balls? People need me, right?

If you’re deep in the cycle, your inner voice might be pretty awful by now. If you need to, tell yourself you need to take care of the person your people depend on. If your roles are pushing you toward burnout, use them to help make healing easier by justifying the time spent working on you.

To help remind myself of the airline attendant message about putting the mask on yourself first, I have come up with a few things that I do when I start feeling myself going into a zealous burnout.

Cook an elaborate meal for someone!

OK, I am a “food-focused” individual so cooking for someone is always my go-to. There are countless tales in my home of someone walking into the kitchen and turning right around and walking out when they noticed I was” chopping angrily”. But it’s more than that, and you should give it a try. Seriously. It’s the perfect go-to if you don’t feel worthy of taking time for yourself—do it for someone else. Most of us work in a digital world, so cooking can fill all of your senses and force you to be in the moment with all the ways you perceive the world. It can break you out of your head and help you gain a better perspective. In my house, I’ve been known to pick a place on the map and cook food that comes from wherever that is ( thank you, Pinterest ). I love cooking Indian food, as the smells are warm, the bread needs just enough kneading to keep my hands busy, and the process takes real attention for me because it’s not what I was brought up making. And in the end, we all win!

Vent like a foul-mouthed fool

Be careful with this one!

I have been making an effort to practice more gratitude over the past few years, and I recognize the true benefits of that. That said, sometimes you just gotta let it all out—even the ugly. Hell, I’m a big fan of not sugarcoating our lives, and that sometimes means that to get past the big pile of poop, you’re gonna wanna complain about it a bit.

When that is what’s needed, turn to a trusted friend and allow yourself some pure verbal diarrhea, saying all the things that are bothering you. You need to trust this friend not to judge, to see your pain, and, most importantly, to tell you to remove your cranium from your own rectal cavity. Seriously, it’s about getting a reality check here! One of the things I admire the most about my husband ( though often after the fact ) is his ability to break things down to their simplest. ” We’re spending our lives together, of course you’re going to disappoint me from time to time, so get over it” has been his way of speaking his dedication, love, and acceptance of me—and I could not be more grateful. It also, of course, has meant that I needed to remove my head from that rectal cavity. So, again, usually those moments are appreciated in hindsight.

Pick up a book!

There are many books out there that aren’t so much self-help as they are people just like you sharing their stories and how they’ve come to find greater balance. Maybe you’ll find something that speaks to you. Titles that have stood out to me include:

• Thrive by Arianna Huffington
• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
• Girl, Stop Apologizing by Rachel Hollis
• Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Or, another tactic I love to employ is to read or listen to a book that has NOTHING to do with my work-life balance. I’ve read the following books and found they helped balance me out because my mind was pondering their interesting topics instead of running in circles:

• The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
• Superlife by Darin Olien
• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford
• Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway

If you’re not into reading, pick up a topic on YouTube or choose a podcast to subscribe to. I’ve watched countless permaculture and gardening topics in addition to how to raise chickens and ducks. For the record, I do not have a particularly large food garden, nor do I own livestock of any kind… yet. I just find the topic interesting, and it has nothing to do with any aspect of my life that needs anything from me.

Forgive yourself

You are never going to be perfect—hell, it would be boring if you were. It’s OK to be broken and flawed. It’s human to be tired and sad and worried. It’s OK to not do it all. It’s scary to be imperfect, but you cannot be brave if nothing were scary.

This last one is the most important: allow yourself permission to NOT do it all. You never promised to be everything to everyone at all times. We are more powerful than the fears that drive us.

This is hard. It is hard for me. It’s what’s driven me to write this—that it’s OK to stop. It’s OK that your unhealthy habit that might even benefit those around you needs to end. You can still be successful in life.

I recently read that we are all writing our eulogy in how we live. Knowing that your professional accomplishments won’t be mentioned in that speech, what will yours say? What do you want it to say?

Look, I get that none of these ideas will “fix it”, and that’s not their purpose. None of us are in control of our surroundings, only how we respond to them. These suggestions are to help stop the spiral effect so that you are empowered to address the underlying issues and choose your response. They are things that work for me most of the time. Maybe they’ll work for you.

Does this sound familiar?

If this sounds familiar, it’s not just you. Don’t let your negative self-talk tell you that you “even burn out wrong”. It’s not wrong. Even if rooted in fear like my own drivers, I believe that this need to do more comes from a place of love, determination, motivation, and other wonderful attributes that make you the amazing person you are. We’re going to be OK, ya know. The lives that unfold before us might never look like that story in our head—that idea of “perfect” or “done” we’re looking for, but that’s OK. Really, when we stop and look around, usually the only eyes that judge us are in the mirror.

Do you remember that Winnie the Pooh sketch that had Pooh eat so much at Rabbit’s house that his buttocks couldn’t fit through the door? Well, I already associate a lot with Rabbit, so it came as no surprise when he abruptly declared that this was unacceptable. But do you recall what happened next? He put a shelf across poor Pooh’s ankles and decorations on his back, and made the best of the big butt in his kitchen.

At the end of the day we are resourceful and know that we are able to push ourselves if we need to—even when we are tired to our core or have a big butt of fluff’ n’ stuff in our room. None of us has to be afraid, as we can manage any obstacle put in front of us. And maybe that means we will need to redefine success to allow space for being uncomfortably human, but that doesn’t really sound so bad either.

So, wherever you are right now, please breathe. Do what you need to do to get out of your head. Forgive and take care.