Reviews for The Great American Playwrights on the Screen : A Critical Guide to Film, TV, Video and DVD

The average rating for The Great American Playwrights on the Screen : A Critical Guide to Film, TV, Video and DVD based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-05 00:00:00 Mads Brevik This is in many ways a useful book and in other ways it is quite frustrating. It purports to list every American play that has been filmed or presented on American television. The first frustration is that some playwrights are skipped. Where is William Gillette, for example, whose SECRET SERVICE was filmed and whose SHERLOCK HOLMES was filmed several times in addition to receiving a television version? The second frustration is that radio adaptations are not included. The LUX RADIO THEATRE, GREAT PLAYS, THE THEATRE GUILD and other shows put American plays on the air. Where is the NBC series of Eugene O’Neil plays from 1937? This book would be so much more useful if radio broadcasts were included. Roberts had trouble finding much information for some television productions, especially the earliest television productions. Consulting the New York Times broadcast listings would have yielded much more information for dozens on programs than you will find in this book. Roberts never gives broadcast dates, a fatal sin against all researchers who might like to learn more about these shows. This is inexcusable. A major frustration is the inconsistent formatting of the entries. The best are those that begin with a background of each play followed by each film and television version. Thus screen versions are built from a basic knowledge of the play. Often, however, Roberts begins with the film instead, then makes comments about the play. This undermines the basic knowledge of the play, building instead of what you read about the film. Those entries that begin with the play are much more informative and helpful. Roberts bounces back and forth between the two approaches, favoring the latter when there has been only one screen version of a play. A minor but final frustration, the book is formatted by skipping lines between entries for films based on the same play. It also skips lines between different plays, so the eye cannot distinguish at a glance the difference between two films of the same play and different plays. This is frustrating enough, but filmed versions of a play often change the title. On pages 216-7, for example, we have the titles GROWING UP and YOUTH’S DESIRE, but these are based on the same play. You can only know this by reading both entries. A quick glance does not reveal it. Readers can easily mistake YOUTH’S DESIRE for a different play. When these complaints are given their full weight, and they weigh a ton, this is still a pretty useful book for the wealth of information that it does contain. It could have been, should have been, so much better, but it will have to serve until somebody does it right.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-01 00:00:00 Claudio Varnerin I loathed this book. He "imagines" Shakespeare's life, with lots of talk about Shakespeare's feelings and opinions. It picks and chooses different scholars' varying theories about the details of Shakespeare's life and presents them as if they were fact. Bad, bad, bad.