The Shakespeare Teen Movie Trend

VICKI BOTNICK: There are two directions in which Shakespeare's gone in the past twenty years, probably. One of them is not very Americanized and that is the sort of classic, more literal, prestige projects done by, typically with, a big star, often with a European director, usually they're speaking with a British accent. That would be maybe Mel Gibson's Hamlet, or more recently, Al Pacino's Merchant of Venice, and those are not Americanized.

But there's another direction that cinema has gone more recently, that you could certainly call Hollywoodized, and that's the teen adaptations, and that's films like O, 10 Things I Hate About You, Scotland, PA, She's The Man, which is an interpretation of Twelfth Night starring Amanda Bynes. So these are very loose interpretations made to attract a teenage crowd. Certainly that's because Hollywood wants to appeal to a teen demographic. They're supposed to have a lot of disposable income, it's a very flashy demographic to get.

One thing that Hollywood is focused on right now is the high concept film. And that's where you have a fairly simple concept with a hook that can be described in one sentence, and Shakespeare is really easy to reduce to that because the plots are so classic and so primal. So you could take something like Romeo and Juliet, which people would typically think of as being complex and intellectual, and you could give it this great pitch sentence like, "two gorgeous teenagers desperately in love, and their parents want so badly to keep them apart that they end up killing themselves for the ultimate romance." And you could really sell it to a studio head that way, so it is very easy to market.

There's also the prestige that comes with using Shakespeare's name, and there's the fact that you can attract really great stars with the project, because obviously the characters in Shakespeare are so fantastic, so multi-layered, so complex. The women are just as strong as the men. So it's easy to get stars attached.