infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

This Screenhead piece about the hardest novels to film reminds me of a game I’ve played with other Radio-TV-Film graduate students. Instead of adapting novels to film, we ask what movies would make bad Broadway musicals. While some films like The Lion King and, of course, The Producers lend themselves to the middlebrow stage, other movies probably should just stay movies. The student who introduced the game contends Agnes of God would make an awful musical. I don’t disagree, but my nominations were Nanook of the North and Derek Jarman’s Blue. One of my professors pointed out that Nanook might actually lend itself to a Disney-style musical. It would be a spectacle of otherness with Inuits and polar creatures dancing in the snow. I do think that you would have to be pretty ingenious to adapt Blue to the stage.

I’ll point out that I would have thought Tristam Shandy would be darn-near impossible to adapt into film, but I’ll put novels aside, and ask readers what films they think would make terrible Broadway musicals.