An excerpt from my script review for The Tragedy of Macbeth which will be available 03/07/22:
1.) Marketability of the Idea
Not sure what I was expecting when I decided to tackle this particular script.
Maybe it’s because the clips of Denzel I’ve watched on YouTube won me over.
About halfway through my read, I came downstairs to have dinner, telling the family I was struggling my way through the dialogue.
“That’s why Shakespeare stinks,” my son replied.
But, he doesn’t.
The one thing that kept running through my mind, even as I struggled to comprehend what was going on, was the genius it took to construct the poetry of these plays.
Sure there’s a bit of antiquated dialect in them, but we struggle with creating basic sentences for our character entries.
Here we’re experiencing the subtext and interesting characteristics spoken thoughts and they’re in poetic pentameter?
Fucking crazy!
So no, he doesn’t “stink” just that we may be too simple to get it without a bit of effort.
But marketability…
*DISCLAIMER* I’m not a lawyer, but…
Everything I found points to the original works of William Shakespeare being in the public domain, meaning you can adapt them to your liking.
Factor that into the equation if you’re looking for “based on” material, since as amateur writers we rarely have access to such existing properties.
Second, and one of the reasons I ultimately decided to check this out, was the fact that it starred Denzel Washington and written/directed by Joel Coen.
Those last two things are enough to get industry folks to look at it.
But swing back to the “public domain” aspect and think about some of the works you could implement into your own writing.
Would it work?
Can you modernize it?
Something to at least consider, after you pen that contained horror of course.
The Tragedy of Macbeth Box Office Reception
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