“Tennessee Williams Returns to the Big Screen”

The Sunday NY Times had this feature on The Loss of a Teardop Diamond, a new movie featuring a screenplay by Tennessee Williams:

GORE VIDAL once remarked that if Tennessee Williams had nothing better to do, he would rewrite something he had already published. Almost until the day he died, in February 1983, Williams kept working, and not just on plays. He also turned out poems, novels, short stories, screenplays. The Williams archive is so vast that much of it is still uncataloged, and there are also works that are hiding in plain sight. “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond,” a script he wrote in 1957, when he was at the peak of his fame and powers, was collected in an anthology of his screenplays in the mid-’80s but remained unproduced until recently, when Jodie Markell, who had never directed a feature before, exhumed it.

Though he was a famously successful adapter of his own work, Williams was not a natural screenwriter, and, remarkably, of the almost 50 movies made from Williams material, Ms. Markell’s film — starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret and opening on Wednesday — is the only one that didn’t begin life as something else. It’s also the first major Williams movie in decades — a reanimation of a film career that once rivaled his stage success.

Check out some of the movies based on Williams’ works:

The Glass Menagerie (1950)

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Baby Doll (1956)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

This Property Is Condemned (1966)

The Glass Menagerie (1966)

And here’s a 1-hour A&E “Biography” special on Williams:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

The Wikipedia section on Williams here.

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