Movie Topics

Turning one’s novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)

The stage is three-dimensional, the movie multi-dimensional.... The stage play can create epic, for example, only by borrowing movie methods. The movie, likewise, can debate ideas only by imitating the relative stasis of theater and, in pursuit of ideas or not, it unnaturally limits its prowess by containing action within one room or other closely confined area.... The imperative of movie motion makes any concession to the working principles of theater a retrograde act, for the form of a play must be violated in order to be converted; if this violation is shirked, the movie’s integrity will be sacrificed for that of the play. One cannot possibly imagine a fluid movie adapted from a play by Moliere, Chekhov, Sternheim, or Pirandello, unless the original content were disastrously modified. Nor can the social dramas of Ibsen and the discursive comedies of Shaw profit from the movie medium. Their action, in the literal sense, is not going anywhere; their moods and theses can only be dissipated by a compulsively mobile camera.
—Vernon Young (1912–1986)

The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.
—Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)