Stephen Adly Guirgis Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The practice of adapting plays to cinema is as old as cinema, itself. In fact, many of the earliest narrative films were nothing more than existing plays, which were staged in front of a stationary camera. Aside from the fact that these films weren't much to look at, the absence of sound in cinema's first thirty years made for an awkward marriage between the silent pictures and plays, which typically feature a lot of dialogue. Fortunately the adaptations got better, not just because of the addition of a soundtrack, but mostly because filmmakers learned to open them up to the scope that cinema allows for. After a century, we've come a long way from those first moving dioramas that were passed off as a new medium, enough that we can even forgive all the talky, visually static films of the '90s. So, when a movie comes along that bears more resemblance to a filmed play than to a film version of a play, I feel that I must call it out as being format-inappropriate.

Such is the case with my feelings on Jailbait, a mostly inactive, primarily single-scene waste of film (or, actually, digital memory, as it was shot on video) written and directed by the playwright Brett C. Leonard. Although not actually based on one of Leonard's plays, or on a play at all, Jailbait stinks of the theater, and would most certainly work better on the stage rather than on the big screen.

First we have the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Then Ring of Fire, an apparently very bad Cash musical opens on Broadway. Plus, there's a documentary called Ring of Fire, but that's about a boxer named Emile Griffith, not Johnny Cash. And now Columbia and Paramount are making a fiction film called Ring of Fire - also about Griffith. Man, I'm already confused.

Emile Griffith's story is a tragic, fascinating one, about a man who moved from a career in fashion into the boxing ring, where he eventually killed a man. Griffith's alleged (please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that he's never actually called himself gay) homosexuality was a factor in that deadly fight, as it has been in his life from that moment on - he was beaten almost to the death in the 1990s in what appeared to be an incident of gay bashing - and, given both the riveting nature of his story and the growing acceptance of films with gay themes, it's certainly understandable that a studio would see this as a good time to tell his story.

Ring of Fire was a hit last year's Sundance, and a solid team has been assembled for the big studio, fictional treatment. The screenplay is being penned by playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, and multiple Tony-winner George C. Wolfe (who also helmed HBO's highly-praised Lackawanna Blues) has been tapped to direct.