Best Screenplay 1983

1927/28 through 1997

What were the best original and adapted screenplays of 1983?

The Big Chill(Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedek)
4
10%
Fanny and Alexander(Ingmar Bergman)
13
32%
Silkwood(Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen)
3
7%
Tender Mercies(Horton Foote)
1
2%
WarGames(Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes)
0
No votes
Betrayal(Harold Pinter)
2
5%
The Dresser(Ronald Harwood)
3
7%
Educating Rita(Willy Russell)
1
2%
Reuben,Reuben(Julius J. Epstein)
1
2%
Terms of Endearment(James L. Brooks)
13
32%
 
Total votes: 41

The Original BJ
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by The Original BJ »

I caught up with both tough-to-find entries -- Betrayal and Reuben, Reuben -- on (low-grade VHS transfers) on YouTube. Certainly not my ideal viewing experience, but better than nothing.

Now that I'm complete, I'm pretty much outraged The Right Stuff wasn't included here -- I rate it clearly superior to 4 of the 5 actual nominees.

I realize there's risk in throwing brickbats at one of the giants of English-language theater, but whatever there is to get about Betrayal, I don't get it. For starters, I don't think the backwards time structure serves a purpose, and in fact even hinders the work -- the later scenes in the movie don't recontextualize what we've already seen in any compelling way (the way Memento did over and over again, in very clever ways), so I just felt like I was ahead of the story the whole time, as I witnessed story points I already knew about play out. Furthermore, the scenes themselves strike me as exceedingly mundane, adding up to a ho-hum affair plot that hardly ever sparks to life by way of dialogue or incident. And, of course, it's very, very stagy. No vote.

Educating Rita does feel a bit opened up from its stage origins, but I also think this is a pretty thin piece of work conceptually. The Walters character doesn't ever come off like someone who has immersed herself in literary culture -- she just starts quoting great books, and I guess we're supposed to believe she's actually read them? And I see no reason why, of all of Caine's many students, this one should have been THE ONE to inspire him to such a degree. Mostly this just feels like warmed-over Pygmalion.

I agree The Dresser is the best of the stage adaptations, though it, too, is a fairly lightweight piece. The backstage milieu is evocatively captured, and the central relationship -- between someone in the limelight and the person adjacent to stardom whose own life revolves around boosting someone else's -- is compellingly rendered, and not the type of relationship we typically see on screen. But in the end, the narrative just doesn't go much of anywhere, leading to a bit of a whimper of a conclusion (literally). (Side note: I'd make this last criticism of all three of the play adaptations here -- I may have more of a passion for narrative than some, but I just find it hard to get enthusiastic about scripts where the story moves just feel so simple.)

Reuben, Reuben would be my runner-up, and I'm also surprised Magilla found it so offensive. The plot is a bit lackadaisical, at least until the last reel, when big events seem to pile up. But there's a lot of good, smart dialogue throughout -- I found myself laughing out loud pretty consistently. And then there's the conclusion, quite a surprisingly ironic and sad ending for the film, which gives it a larger resonance beyond the bitter, chauvinistic antics of its protagonist. It's not a major movie, but I think it's fully deserving of this citation, and I genuinely wonder why it's dipped into such obscurity.

But Terms of Endearment is my clear choice, and I wrote in the Picture/Director thread that I think the movie has unnecessarily suffered in reputation based on superficial similarities to lesser works. Which is to say, it's easy to lump the movie in with Beaches and Steel Magnolias if you've decided that female-driven disease weepies deserve to be scoffed at outright. But to do so is to ignore both the scope of Terms of Endearment's ambition and the nuance in the writing, which eschews silly melodrama in place of thoughtful scenes about the way family members (both biological and chosen) communicate with each other, share joys and sadness, and watch their lives pass by together. There's a ton of unexpected humor along the way -- literally from the first scene, when Aurora wonders if Emma has died in her crib -- along with genuinely earned emotion. (Few hospital bed scenes in any medium have moved me as greatly as the moment Emma says goodbye to her children, and I'm not the kind of person who cries at everything.) I belatedly endorse our landslide victory for this script here.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Heksagon »

I can only vote in the Original category this time, and it's an easy choice with Fanny and Alexander. I hardly need to comment any more on that.

The Big Chill and WarGames are both films that I have seen only a long time ago, and don't have particularly fresh in my mind. I remember The Big Chill as an entertaining, but not a particularly great film. WarGames is surprisingly clever considering it's an 80s teen film starring Matthew Broderick, but not good enough that I'd be enthusiastic to see it nominated here.

Silkwood is a respectable effort, although it's too slow-paced by modern standards, and I feel it doesn't fully build up the tension towards the ending. My take on Tender Mercies is similar to BJ's. I have no idea how it managed to win this category.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by ITALIANO »

Mister Tee wrote: My private suspicions is the play goes over with certain audiences because it’s not hard to understand – it’s quite simple, really – but it has all those meaningful glares and threatening empty pauses, which make people feel they’ve had a deep experience. To me, it’s deep on the surface.

Well, now!!! I may not be as intelligent as I think I am, but I am not THAT stupid - nor I think I was at 14 :D But ok, I will watch it again...
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Mister Tee »

1983 was one of the few movie years in the 80s that didn’t make you want to shoot yourself, and the writers managed to cite most of the reasons why.

On the original side, Under Fire is the only major miss for me. Woody Allen’s Zelig was perfectly enjoyable, but seemed a trifle, more memorable as pastiche than as original creation.

I was very surprised WarGames turned up among the nominees, for the reason BJ mentions: it just didn’t seem an Oscar type movie. The summer movie was only just beginning to settle in as an entity (few then would have dreamed its longevity), and, compared to the giant hits of the years just previous, E.T. and Raiders, WarGames fell well short (and the writers had passed on Raiders). In light of history, of course, WarGames looks like quite solid entertainment – how many recent summer movies have displayed comparable wit or charm? But it was always miscast as a screenplay nominee.

BJ’s reaction to Tender Mercies could speak for me on most Horton Foote work – his stuff is way too dry for my taste, and frequently drama-deprived. But I do have a certain affection for Tender Mercies, one that arose from context (a context that may have affected Oscar voters, as well). The film opened in early March, and, from there till late June -- when Fanny and Alexander showed up -- it was the only decent movie around. This wouldn’t seem odd today, but back then we were used to decent movies year-round – films like An Unmarried Woman, The China Syndrome, Manhattan, Victor/Victoria and Diner had opened during that same Spring period in years just past. Tender Mercies, by its isolation, became an early version of what BJ himself has christened bird-in-hand syndrome: a film arrives early, is well-received, and, partly by virtue of being the only thing around, becomes a cause celebre among a certain sector of Academy voters. In this case, the love inflated the film well beyond expectation: I’d only expected it to survive as a prime best actor vehicle for overdue Duvall; the film/director/screenplay run came as total surprise. But the affection I’d developed for the film during that early moribund period made me less than resentful about the film’s Oscar success. I won’t be voting its way, but I like it well enough.

When Pauline Kael wrote about Lady Sings the Blues, she said she watched for two hours, making assorted mental objections, but when it ended she just wrote “I loved it” and closed her notebook. That’s pretty much how I reacted to The Big Chill; I just found it a hugely enjoyable time. Even back then, no one viewed it as close to profound -- it was just enormous fun, to watch a cast of the hottest up and coming actors trade rapid-fire quips. (That they happened to be representatives of my -- and my age-compatriots’ -- generation presumably enhanced the pleasure.) I actually thought the film might win the category that night, given its dialogue-heavy quality. I’m presuming that’s the basis on which a number of people here have voted – though, like BJ, I’d enjoy hearing that from someone first-hand.

Silkwood didn’t seem a particularly necessary movie – sense at the time was that, between Norma Rae and The China Syndrome, movies had covered most of the subject matter. And there was some sneering over ultimate-cosmopolite Nora Ephron writing about blue-collar Oklahomans. But I agree with BJ: this movie not only has more overall flavor than Tender Mercies, that flavor seems pretty authentic. Even putting aside the thriller-laced plot, the film was engrossing for the small details it captured about its three central characters and the world in which they lived. It would be a worthy enough winner.

But I’m another vote for Fanny and Alexander, Bergman’s last big America success, and one of his most audience-pleasing. The story has a Dickensian framework, but it’s infused with the Bergman obsessions over death, magic and ghosts. It’s a very rich, hugely satisfying narrative that takes audiences on a journey and brings them home happy. I’m probably not going to be voting for Bergman as writer quite as often as some here, but this particular time I’m happy to join the throng.

Ah, theatre! Without it, we wouldn’t have three of these nominees under adaptation -- and we might instead have more compelling work, like The Right Stuff and Star 80. Neither of those two is without flaws: The Right Stuff’s portrait of LBJ is so clownish his characterization in Selma is respectful by comparison, and Star 80, while gripping, descends into the lurid by its climax. But both films were more of-the-era than the musty theatre pieces that populated the ballot instead.

Educating Rita is a sort of movie I despise probably out of proportion to its offenses. I deeply dislike the hermetically sealed neatness of the script: the Caine character in particular is set up with easy-to-spot flaws – he’s sloppy and drinks too much – and by the end he’s got a haircut and puts away the bottle. Redemption! The script spells out every bit of this with such obviousness it feels as if the Cliff Notes are included in the text. And what was almost worse was how many people at the time recommended it to me as some height of sophistication (“You’re a writer,” they’d say; “you’ll appreciate this.”). It may be less that I hate it than I hate the number of people who swoon over such things. In any case: it’s not getting my vote.

Pinter is clearly a major name in 20th century theatre, but I’ve always viewed him as more notable for establishing a singular, innovative style than for offering much insight into the human condition. The only individual play of his I find impressive for its own sake is The Homecoming. The others “play” well enough -- actors can have fun enacting the power games – but they rest purely on the interior dynamics of the various scenes, and have no relation I can see to people I know or care about. Betrayal has always seemed to me an especially weak work. I saw it on stage 35 years ago, with solid actors (Raul Julia, Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider), and it struck me as a routine, almost generic extra-marital affair story, made distinctive only by the backward time-sequence (and, of course, those portentous pauses). This was enough to get many people raving, which they again did for this (very faithful) film version (and have continued to do over the years, as the play keeps getting revived, always with top-drawer actors). My private suspicions is the play goes over with certain audiences because it’s not hard to understand – it’s quite simple, really – but it has all those meaningful glares and threatening empty pauses, which make people feel they’ve had a deep experience. To me, it’s deep on the surface. No chance I‘d vote for it.

The Dresser isn’t a great play, either, but it’s by far the best of the three stage adaptations. I saw it on stage, as well, and I’d say the film is an improvement, largely because Peter Yates uses the theatre environment extremely well, capturing backstage atmosphere and keeping the film fleet of foot. But the script lets him down in the end. Though there are amusing moments along the way, the Courtenay character’s final speech amounts to an epic whine, and my reaction to it in both media was “Is THAT all this play amounts to?”

I’m not surprised Reuben, Reuben has proven hard for some of you to track down, but I am surprised to hear Magilla so dismissive of it. It’s 30-odd years since I saw it, but I remember it as rather a delight – full of literate cleverness, both on the plot and dialogue level. For me, it’s the clear runner-up.

But I’m a no-doubt vote for Terms of Endearment – a movie which was very highly rated in its day (best picture at NY and LA), but, perhaps because it’s female- and domestically-centered, is spoken of pejoratively by some contemporary critics. I think these people are rating the film by what it appears to be – a weeper – rather than what it is: a rambunctious, wide-ranging study of a mother and daughter and how they deal with both each other and the separate lives they’re striving to make. James Brooks works in a style I’d have thought impossible: sitcom art – he uses the tropes of the half-hour sitcom, but expands them well beyond the bounds of what any TV half-hour could offer, and paints vivid, fully-real pictures of American life in the 80s. There’s a ton of great dialogue, and many memorable scenes, both comic (the first Nicholson/MacLaine lunch) and heartbreaking (Winger’s last visit with her sons). (And sometimes both: the Nicholson/MacLaine farewell at the airport is just wonderful.) I think this is a terrific film, one of the few to emerge in the dreary 80s, and Brooks fully merits the Oscar he won, and our equivalent here.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Greg »

War Games reminds me of a subgenre from the 1980s that I enjoyed, the teen-anti-war film, including it along with Real Genius and The Manhattan Project.
Big Magilla
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Big Magilla »

Thanks. I never thought to look for Betrayal on YouTube.
Kellens101
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Kellens101 »

Btw, Educating Rita and Betrayal are also on YouTube.
Kellens101
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Kellens101 »

Yeah, the options under Adapted were so obscure. I couldn't find Reuben,Reuben but I found a really low-quality version on YouTube.
The Original BJ
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by The Original BJ »

As I wrote earlier, the relative obscurity of several of the Adapted nominees makes this the first year I'll only be able to vote in one category. Luckily, it allows me to vote against what I view as one of the most boneheaded choices (given available alternate) in the history of the Original Screenplay category (of course, the '80's were full of equally dumb outcomes in this category -- yeesh!)

Among alternates, I'd list The King of Comedy, which does sort of go off the rails a bit at the end, but has a lot of really smart and biting satirical writing throughout. Under Fire would have been a decent nominee as well.

I don't want to denigrate WarGames, because watching it I thought, this is a much better summer movie than most of what we get these days -- it has a fairly well worked-out plot, clever laughs, and a climax that's both surprising and thematically relevant. But I think it's quite miscast as an awards candidate -- it's obviously an entertainment rather than anything seriously profound, and I move past it pretty quickly here.

So far all of The Big Chill voters have remained silent -- I'd be interested to see those voters reveal themselves and make a case for that choice (hey, I admitted I voted Working Girl for Best Picture!) Because, frankly, I'm shocked it's running and neck-and-neck for the win here. The movie has a pleasant enough vibe -- there's obvious poignancy to a story about old friends gathering together for a funeral -- but I found so much of the writing to be very on the nose. For me, the movie just didn't seem to be about anything more than what the characters were all explicitly talking about. I can't say I found any great insight in the writing here.

But I wouldn't say I found the actual Academy choice to be much more defensible. Tender Mercies is a gentle movie with some pleasant textures, but I find so much of it to be, like a lot of Horton Foote's work, extremely half-hearted. The gas on the narrative rarely heats up to anything more than a simmer, the characters are all so damn pleasant to each other you half-wonder if any conflict is EVER going to arise, and the script never met a small-town rural trope it didn't want to cram in there. I just think the whole thing is a total wisp of a movie, and I need my screenwriting winners to be a lot more of ANYTHING to get my vote.

Silkwood is a worthy runner-up for the prize (and, frankly, I think a lot of the details in its depiction of rural Oklahoma feel a lot more honest than much of Tender Mercies). Its real-life story was well told, engaging as a politically charged narrative, but also thoughtful as a character study with a lot of interesting grace notes in the shadings of the Streep, Russell, and Cher characters. The script isn't wildly original -- the movie treads ground that Norma Rae and other recent working-class fight-the-man stories did about equally well -- but I rate it much more of a meal than the actual winner.

However, Fanny and Alexander is a glorious script, and my no-brainer choice in this category. It's a big, sprawling movie, that juggles a lot of tones and storylines -- it's a poignant and inspiring portrait of the wonders of childhood, a haunting and imaginative depiction of ghosts and the specter of death, a powerful and frequently chilling family drama, a richly detailed vision of a time and place, and almost incongruously, much of it was also quite funny and full of life. I think this script towers over the competition in every respect -- in terms of ambition, thematic complexity, and singular sense of imagination. A script this one-of-a-kind is pretty much exactly what the Original Screenplay category should be rewarding.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Big Magilla »

This is a tough one.

Original

I thought Fanny & Alexander was the year's best film and Bergman the year's best director, but its screenplay, though certainly one of Bergman's best, had strong competition from the Oscar winning Tender Mercies as well as The Big Chill and Silkwood, all of which were smartly written. How WarGames got into the mix over The Night of the Shooting Stars, The Return of Martin Guerre, Under Fire, Zelig and even Risky Business is a mystery. I ended up voting for Fanny & Alexander, but on another day I might have voted for either Tender Mercies or The Big Chill.

Adaptations

The Dresser and Educating Rita are well-written adaptations of popular plays, but I'm left wondering how much those screenplays owed the bulk of their success to the original material. I've never seen Betryal. It's never been on DVD or streaming and is rarely, if ever, shown on TV. I may have to read the Pinter play just to get a sense of it, but that won't satisfy my wondering what was unique to the adaptation. Reuben, Reuben is a film I absolutely loathed when I finally got to see it a couple of years ago.

I might nominate The Dresser, but I'd have a hard time doing so overThe Right Stuff, Testament, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and The Year of Living Dangerously, which are the four films I'd put up against the winner, Terms of Endearment, which get my vote here.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Kellens101 »

My votes would go to Fanny and Alexander and Terms of Endearment. The latter is definitely a lesser movie, but a very well-written, touching and funny family drama that I'm not sorry to say I like a lot.(It's really hard not to get a little teary-eyed at the end.) The former, though, is a masterpiece and one of Ingmar Bergman's greatest films(though not his ultimate greatest, for that spot would go to The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries.) Fanny and Alexander is a visually gorgeous, complex and profound epic about these children's lives and the culture they grow up in. The film is full of so many fascinating characters and so many complicated themes, to go along with the beautiful costumes, sets and above all, the cinematography by Sven Nykvist.

Though I have to call out two major omissions in both categories. In Original, it would be The King of Comedy, which I found to be one of Scorsese's most underrated and hilarious films. It's a disturbing, satirical and darkly comic story about one crazy fan's obsession with show business and becoming successful and how far he will go to achieve his ambitions. It's a shame this film has been so criminally neglected over the years and didn't get a single nomination, not even for the excellent acting by Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard. It was the third best film of the year, in my opinion, right behind Fanny and Alexander and The Right Stuff. The Right Stuff was the other major omission, this time in Adapted. This was the best film of the year, a grandly ambitious epic about the space race in America and the struggles and triumphs of the heroes that went up in space. It showed a remarkable timeline, from Chuck Yeager's amazing breaking of the sound barrier in the late 1940s all the way to the final Mercury launch in the early 1960s, while providing great insight about America and the history behind it. It's such a shock that the screenplay wasn't nominated, considering the film got so many other nominations.(As well as the script being snubbed, Philip Kaufman's excellent direction of this great epic was also strangely omitted.)
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by ITALIANO »

I am the first person on Earth who's happy when new people come to this board - it's interesting to read new ideas, new perspectives. But if the result is that The Big Chill is a better screenplay than Fanny and Alexander, well... I'm not so sure anymore. The Big Chill is nicely written, of course - and if, seen today, it seems a bit dated, that's partly because it was much-imitated, not only in the US, in the following years. But Fanny and Alexander has the scope of an important European novel - it's a much more profound, much more complex effort, really. It's probably less easily "pleasant", but then works of art don't have to be "pleasant". There are so many themes in it, so many memorable characters... It works both as an almost magical portrayal of the surreal world of childhood, and as a much wider, and more realistic, portayal of a society, a culture, a Continent even (certainly a nation). Ingmar Bergman's last movie is also one of his best screenplays - if not his best.

I have more problems in the Adapted category, but only because honestly the movie I voted for - Betrayal - is also the one I have only seen once and many years ago, so I can only remember the reaction I had back then, when I was, of course, younger and less experienced. I found it very intriguing, very intelligent, with an original (especially for those times) structure, and some rich dialogues. I don't know if I'd appreciate it so much now (and it's true that it's based on a stage play which I don't know anything about) - but at least I saw it, and I hope that those who are collectively voting for Terms of Endearment have seen it, too (I doubt). Terms is smart, Betrayal is intelligent - there is a difference.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Kellens101 »

Thank you so much, Big Magilla.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Big Magilla »

Kellens101 wrote:Oh ok sorry about that.
I fixed it.

I don't know if everyone has the option, or it's just administrators but you should see an option to allow re-voting at the bottom of the poll creatioin window. Just check off the box next to it.
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Re: Best Screenplay 1983

Post by Kellens101 »

Ugh! Why wasn't The Right Stuff nominated? That would've been my Best Adapted vote by far.
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