Pulitzer-Winning 'Osage County' Will Be a Movie -- But Will It Be Good?

One of Broadway's biggest non-musical hits this year has been August: Osage County, a 3 1/2-hour comic drama about an appallingly dysfunctional family that completely falls apart when its patriarch goes missing. (The photo represents a typical moment.) It inspired rapturous reviews, won five Tonys (including best play), and won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. I saw it when I was in New York in May and can attest to its caustic, dark hilarity and its vividly realistic characters.

It's been known since at least March (thanks, Jeff Wells) that a film version was in the works, but now that Harvey Weinstein has signed on as co-producer, with The Weinstein Company taking worldwide distribution rights, things have heated up. (Not that this was a surprise, considering The Weinstein Co. co-produced the Broadway version, too.) And now the inevitable problems with a stage-to-screen translation become apparent.

First of all, there's the length. The playwright, Tracy Letts (who also wrote Bug, recently made into a weird Ashley Judd movie), is doing the adaptation. Surely Weinstein will pressure him to trim it down. Plays are allowed to run that long; movies usually aren't unless they're big, sweeping epics. Osage County takes place entirely in one house and spans only a couple days of time.

Then there is casting. The Broadway production had no major stars, no big names. The temptation would be to cast someone like Meryl Streep as the acerbic, pill-popping matriarch, Violet. But Deanna Dunagan won a Tony for playing the role, and while she may not be a marquee name, her performance is so brilliantly feisty and malevolent that she should be allowed to replicate it onscreen. She's earned it.
Finally, let's look at the history of movie adaptations of Pulitzer Prize-winning plays. It used to be quite common for such highly lauded theatrical works to get the movie treatment, but the practice has waned in recent decades. Look at the list of winners: All but one of the Pulitzer plays from the 1950s were made into films, but only two from the 1990s got the big-screen treatment, and both of those films -- Lost in Yonkers and Rent -- weren't very good. (Two more from the 1990s, Angels in America and Wit, were made into excellent TV films, though.)

From the current decade, the only Pulitzer winner to make it to multiplexes so far is Proof (with Gwyneth Paltrow? Remember...?), with Doubt joining it this winter, and August: Osage County, which doesn't have a date set yet, making three. I suspect one reason you don't see as many Pulitzer-winning plays (or even non-winning plays) being adapted anymore is that it's no longer acceptable to make "stagy" films. Audiences want more dynamic action, more movement, more settings than plays offer, so a movie translation either has to change things (which often ruins what made the play good to begin with) or else keep everything the same and deal with complaints that it's "boring" or "un-cinematic."

It can be done, though. Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer and then became a fantastic movie. It took the cinematic disadvantage of being set in only one location and turned it into an advantage -- the panicky claustrophobia is palpable. August: Osage County is actually a good comparison to Glengarry, as both are ultimately somber plays with a lot of dark humor, angry yelling, and characters who feel trapped. Osage just has the one location, but it makes sense: How better to symbolize the characters' inability to escape their family ties than by keeping them cooped up in the house they grew up in?

There's no word yet on who will direct Osage County for the screen, but I hope it's someone who will be wise enough to know what to change and what to keep. It's a great play -- just like Proof was, just like Doubt was -- so it would be a shame if movie audiences saw it and came away thinking, "Why did this win the Pulitzer?"