From Booklist
Doctorow is not only one of our most significant living novelists, he is also a highly creative screenplay writer. Adaptating novels for movies is a tricky and often thankless endeavor, one many novelists haven't the stomach for. But because Doctorow is profoundly intrigued with film's seductiveness, a frequent motif in his fiction, he has performed this arduous task to fine effect.
Three Screenplays presents the screenplays for
Daniel (produced in 1983 under the direction of Sidney Lumet),
Ragtime, a magnificent adaptation that perfectly mirrors the panoramic novel but which was never made (a shorter screenplay was commissioned for the Milos Forman film), and
Loon Lake, which has yet to be produced. Doctorow's remarks, meticulous commentary by film and American literature professor Paul Levine, and interviews with Doctorow and Lumet coalesce to form a provocative inquiry into "the process of artistic alchemy" that attempts the nearly impossible, the translation of fiction into film.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"[Doctorow] is at once a radical historian, a cultural anthropologist, a troubadour, a private eye, and a cost-benefit analyst of assimilation and upward mobility in the great American multiculture." -- New York Review of Books
