Sometimes More is Less: Fellini's Otto e mezzo to Kopit's Nine

Sometimes More is Less: Fellini's Otto e mezzo to Kopit's Nine TOBY ZINMAN We are beset by self-defeating translations from genre to genre, suggesting not only a dismaying lack of originality but a failure to recognize that most art is medium-specific, and that to try to dislodge a work from its nature is likely to deform if not destroy it. Recently the movies have come out in a stubborn rash of Jane Austen and Henry James adaptations, while in another direction, many contemporary plays have appeared unsatisfyingly on the screen, purportedly widening the audience for drama but in fact only proving what "they" -that non-theatregoing public - thought they knew all along: theatre is boring and pompous and slow.' What other conclusion could the uninitiated come to having seen the cinematic versions of Mamel's Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo (despite the most attractive casts imaginable), or For Gillian on Her Thirty-Seventh Birthday, or Love! Valour! Compassion! or Marvin 's Room? with many more on the way: Master Class, The Designated Mourner, The Substance of Fire, Bent, Dancing at Lughnasa, Rent, Chicago and Fences. If the motives fueling this high-risk adaptation impulse are money and popularization/ then the most peculiar decision is to take genre translation in the opposite direction, from screen to stage where both audience size and profits diminish radically. Recent experiments in this fad for adaptation include VictorlVictoria, Paper Moan. Big and Cooley High, among a number of others; the most artistically successful is probably Sondheim's A Little Night Music adapted from Bergman's Smiles ofa Summer Night. Perhaps the most wrenching of these screen-lo-stage translations is Nine, the adaptation of Federico Fellini's legendary film, 8 v,J Nine is a musical theatre piece for which Maury Yeston wrote the music and lyrics and playwright Arthur Kopit wrote the book. Directed by Tommy Tune, it received twelve Tony nominations and won the Tony Award for Best Musical in t982.' The interesting and enormous translations problems it presents - from film to stage (and thus from celluloid image to corporeal presence), from European to Modem Drama, 41 (1998) 146 Otto e mezzo to Nine 147 American (which involves a shift in sensibility as well as the linguistic shift from Italian to English),5 and from speaking to singing (which necessarily alters pacing) - affect every aspect of the work. Perhaps the quirky titles are the obvious place to start. There are several variations on the explanation why Fellini called his film Otto e mezzo, but the basic story is this: throughout the massive preparatory chaos, the film 's production team referred to the project as "La bella confusione " - this functioned as both sarcasm and title.6 Fellini began referring to it as "Otto e mezzo," since he would, he said if one counted his shares of Luci del Varieta [Variety Lights], Un'agenzia matrimoniale [A Matrimonial Agency] and Boccaccio '70 as halves, he would have made eight-and-a-half films by the time he finished this one7 Thus, the film's title refers to its complex self-reflexivity: a film by a famous Italian director about a famous Italian director whose creative block is the theme and whose artistic inner life - the processes of the ornate relation between memory and desire - is the subject. This springs from a philosophically sophisticated view of the creative psyche, and a European view (particularly one charged with residual Roman Catholicism ) that an artist - and perhaps any human being - is defined by his relation to his work, to history, to culture and to sexuality, rather than the American view which follows the psycho-sociological inclination to see a person defined by his relation to his nuclear family. Like 8 'l'z, Nine takes place at a spa where a distinguished filmmaker has gone to try to invent the movie his producers, agents, actors and designers all expect him to be making; Guido is already a culture hero, lionized beyond his - or perhaps anyone's - capacity to cope with the pressures of such celebrity. He is surrounded by wife, mistress, old friends and colleagues: he is badgered, hounded and plagued by them all, but...