Amadeus on stage and screen

From Winter, 1997, issue of Creative Screenwriting

Fine-Tuning Villainy

Salieri's Journey from Stage to Screen

by Charles Deemer

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Peter Schaffer had to be convinced to adapt his stage play Amadeus to
the screen.  In an "Introduction to the Film Edition" of the published
stage script, he writes:

        "The cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to
        work in.  Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone
        living largely by the spoken word.  Increasingly, as American
        films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent
        that the most successful are being spoken in 'Screenspeak,' a
        kind of cinematic Esperanto equally comprehensible in Bogota
        and Bulawayo.  For example, dialogue in heavy-action pictures,
        horrific or intergalactic, now consists almost entirely of the
        alternation of two single words - a cry and a whisper -
        needing translation nowhere on the planet: 'Lessgidowdaheer!"
        and "Omygaad!"  Mastery of this new tongue is not easy for
        older writers." (pxiii)

Nonetheless, the playwright was persuaded to write a new screenplay
for his story about Mozart and his jealous rival Salieri, much of
which was done in secluded collaboration with film director Milos
Forman.  Shaffer himself realized many of the compromises he would
be forced to make: "...its operatic stylization would probably have
to go, and its language would have to be made less formal, though
not automatically more juvenile." (pxv)

Read the essay.