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 ’, 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’, 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’, 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’, 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.
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