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Across 110th street1/2/2024 They were movies large and small, poignant and melodramatic, heated and melancholy, nobly intentioned if flawed and near lyrical. Perhaps most prominent among them were movies focusing on the issue of race. Post-WW II, the loosening grip of the Old Hollywood moguls, the rise of myriad independent production companies, the rising social consciousness of postwar America, and a need to take on riskier material to combat the migration of the movie audience to the living room TV produced any number of movies on the social issues of the day: the corporatization of the American soul, the threat of nuclear war, anti-Semitism, and so on. And I doubt anybody remembers there had ever been a novel. On the flip side – making Fox’s point – Orson Welles took potboiler Touch of Evil (1958), and came up with a noir classic, few people remember (thankfully) that Jaws (1975) was a badly-written book with a great hook before Steven Spielberg and a parade of writers reshaped it into one of the all-time classic adventure thrillers, and in the hands of Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo’s lurid Mob tale which he’d only written to pay off some gambling debts was turned into not one but two of the greatest films in the American cinema canon: The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974).Īcross 110 th Street (1972) is hardly The Godfather (or even Touch of Evil, for that matter), but it’s a hell of a tough little crime flick, unjustly dismissed in its time, written off (and possibly tainted) by the torrent of blaxploitation shoot-’em-ups of which it was judged – not quite accurately – to be a part. Randomly, I think of John Sturges’ stale adaptation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1958), John Huston’s noble but flawed attempt at Melville’s Moby Dick (1956), and all those runs at Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926, 1949, 1974, 2013). ![]() While I’m sure with enough googling one can find a fair number of exceptions to the rule, as I’ve gotten older (and also written for both mediums), Fox’s point has come to seem truer and truer…at least to me. Fox – perhaps benefitting from his vantage point of being a writer of both prose and for the screen – asserted it was easier to make a good film out of a bad book rather than a good film from a good book. I don’t remember how, since Fox never worked from a lesson plan, but at some point, the classroom discussion roamed around to adaptations. ![]() About a million years ago, give or take a millennium or two, I was an undergrad at the University of South Carolina taking a screenwriting class under William Price Fox, a southern author of some repute who had also worked in the movie business for a few years.
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