Mark,
Re the following excerpt from the BOOKS magazine
parameters:
". . . rank the top 100 characters in literature since
1900."
Literature means the written word, not necessarily the
printed word. And if you're using the BOOKS list as a
template, you should note one of the characters on that list,
Gus MacRae, was created for a movie script.
When the screenplay failed (at first) to be produced,
Larry McMurtry novelized the script into LONESOME DOVE.
Ultimately, the movie WAS produced, only it was for
television and it became an expanded
"mini-series," and it didn't reach the airwaves until the
book had been published, hit the best-seller lists, won a
Pulitzer, and been accalimed a classic
(not bad for that bastard form, the "novelization"). The only
difference between Friday and MacRae in terms of their
eligibility is that the dramatic script featuring MacRae,
though written first, wasn't produced until after the prose
form was published, and with Friday it was the reverse.
If HAMLET or MACBETH had been written in the 20th Century
instead of the 15th, would you really say that neither of
those characters was worthy of being put on a list of the
most important characters in the era's literature because
they appeared in stage plays instead of books?
And if you are willing to stretch a point for an essentially
visual medium like comic strips, why not for film or
television which, like any dramatic form, begins with the
written word?
As for supporting characters, I've already conceded that
point.
JIM DOHERTY
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? Yahoo! Movies - coverage of the 74th Academy Awards®
http://movies.yahoo.com/
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Mar 2002 EST