Abstract
This article was a study of different but synchronized discourses mirrored in Tennessee Williams’s Hollywood adaptations in the 50s. It discussed the effect of artistic agencies of censorship on the hows and whys of Willaims’s adaptations. Most notably, PCA and HUAC were in charge of cultural and political regulations that no Hollywood film was immune from. Until the early 60, HUAC and PCA imposed religious values to supplant Communism, happy ending to replace the intellectual fad of pessimism and strict dressing code to restore the innocence of the Freud-conscious moviegoers. However, these agencies were not omnipotent. The voice of those discourses that the agencies were fighting against were heard in Hollywood. Hollywood achieved the subversion with the help of William’s controversial plots albeit tamed by some reinforcing discourses of optimism and diluted religious values.
Highlights
Williams‟s fame in the course of cinematic representation was mostly restricted to his adaptation in Hollywood of the 50s and early 60s
Motivated by the pre-sold qualities of the film, the studios didn‟t even wait for the plays to go off the stage
Did the adaptability mean that Williams and Hollywood were communicating with audience through homogeneous discourse or they shaped different but complementary discourses? This article tried to answer the question by illustrating the hows and whys of Williams‟s process of adaptation
Summary
Williams‟s fame in the course of cinematic representation was mostly restricted to his adaptation in Hollywood of the 50s and early 60s. The story was upside down: it was Williams who brought class and sophistication to Hollywood‟s entertaining simplemindedness The movie-crisis era of the 50s, pushed big Hollywood studios like MGM, Warner Bros., Colombia Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Twentieth-Century Fox to court seriously with Williams for film rights over the financially successful plays like The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and. The case of Glass Menagerie was a battlefield for MGM and Warner Bros. Did the adaptability mean that Williams and Hollywood were communicating with audience through homogeneous discourse or they shaped different but complementary discourses? It would be interesting to mention that both Williams and Hollywood challenged the categorization and genre definition of art: they ceased to be one-discourse bound
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