Find out if someone ever translated it to French or something and recorded a soundtrack. You could enjoy the music without having the lyrics distract you

With regards to adapting stage works for the screen, Sydney Lumet talks about filming "12 Angry Men" in his book, "Making Movies" by using lenses, composition, staging, and so forth to tell the story.

Don't have it in front of me to quote, but well worth the read.

Last edited by Brian (2010-10-28 02:17:23)

Then again, 12 Angry Men isn't a musical, and it certainly doesn't have elaborate dance numbers and set pieces. Also, Sidney Lumet is a good filmmaker. Chris Columbus, I think we can all agree, is not.

I remember hearing an interview with Peter Morgan about Frost/Nixon, in which he said that he had written the original play with the idea that it would be extremely difficult to adapt to film. He went on to praise Ron Howard for doing just that. Again, that's because Ron Howard knows how to shoot a movie. I was watching the second Potter film the other night, and there are some really terrible shots that I had never noticed before. Sorry Chris Columbus, you just aren't that great.

I beat you to it, but I never wrote it. It's the story of an entomologist who discovered that the larvae of a certain Amazonian flying beetle secrete an amazing narcotic that he has become addicted to. But said beetle larvae live only in the rotting corpses of primates. Now, in the Amazon, there are plenty of monkey carcasses for the beetles to live on. But in New York City.....

Development note: the larvae should require a live host. If they only need corpses, it's just a serial killer movie. If the host needs to be live, then the horror comes from his victims being forced to survive as long as possible while being consumed.

Say it takes a few months for the little buggers to come to full potency. He'd kidnap his victims, implant them, then let them go to just live their lives until the time is right -- too risky to try to keep them locked in a basement that whole time. You could play with almost an inversion of stalker tropes, where they're being stalked by someone intent on keeping them alive at all costs.

But, of course, he's less concerned with their quality of life, so by the end of the film -- in which we've been following the story of one of his victims; a woman, naturally -- it's turned into MISERY while he waits for the final stage.

Bonus horror points if the beetles eat the brain as they grow. Then the victim goes slowly insane and suffers the psychological horror of losing a hold on herself while undergoing the physical horror of having her brain eaten, trying to kill herself, and being hobbled in some maniac's spare room. In the final sequence she could escape and manage to triumph over the killer just before going completely insane and/or having her head burst open and a bunch of bugs come pouring out.

...

Okay, in all seriousness, if one of you doesn't write this, I will. I've got a RED, friends who are actors, makeup artists, and VFX artists, and this would be totally cheap to produce. Someone writes a script, we set this in L.A. and I could totally have this shot by this time next year. Who's in?

EDIT:

I liked DONNIE DARKO way better before I had it explained to me.

I'm tentatively in based on how much I like the script.

I'm in.

... and wow...way to much to back write on sooo I'll make it simple.

Producers...love.
Rent (In all it's incarnations)...love with a passion.

I think it'd be cool if we involved the whole forum in the production of the project. Then Down in Front would *really* be a screenwriting tool.

We could even make a board for it. It would archive the whole writing process for posterity, and if the project gets made, be a very cool resource for future screenwriters to see how ideas get weeded out and developed.

No, no, it's Mike's idea. Too many cooks and all that.

There should be a car chase, a fist fight and an adorable animal sidekick. Maybe an orangutan.

I'll settle for an Executive Producer credit.

I'm in.

I wanna play … but I'm already in development on another feature project. Time for me to learn some of that time-management voodoo I keep hearing about!