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Faulkner on Stage and Screen

Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road.

Faulkner on stage and screen

The vast Internet Movie Database has a comprehensive filmography of movies Faulkner played a part in, either as screenwriter or writer of the source text.

And while we're on the subject of Faulkner and movies, here is a movie review of one of Faulkner’s best screenplays, The Big Sleep.

Several of Faulkner’s short stories were produced for television in the 1950s. Faulkner himself adapted teleplays for two of his stories for the Lux Video Theatre; long believed lost, the teleplays were recently re-discovered and are described on this page. You can read more about how the lost teleplays were found in this article in The Chronicle at Duke University.

It was reported in early 1998 that a big-screen adaptation of Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying was to be filmed that year in Mississippi, with Sean Penn in a starring role, and Leonardo DiCaprio pining to appear as well,  but despite an article in Variety and this blurb from E! Online.com, to date, no such filming has occurred.  A more recent report (December 1999) indicates the project never got off the ground, though I've been hearing rumblings once again that the project may be on again.

A scene from the Threshold Theater's production of As I Lay Dying

Despite its big-screen woes, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying remains fairly popular as a stage drama. It was performed on stage by Chicago's legendary Steppenwolf ensemble in an adaptation by ensemble member Frank Galati in August 1995. You can read some additional history of the ensemble. Kingston, Ontario's Threshold Theater also performed As I Lay Dying in August 1995. Their outdoor production, adapted and directed by Mark Cassidy, received good reviews. And in 1998, Swine Palace Productions of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, staged a production of As I Lay Dying directed and adapted by Edward Kemp. It was the American premiere of Kemp's adaptation of the novel, following a successful run at the Young Vic Theatre in London, England.

Neva Hutchinson and Robert Parnell in Faulkner’s Bicycle.

It was probably just a matter of time: Faulkner to be the subject of someone else's fiction. Heather MacDonald's 1984 play Faulkner’s Bicycyle does just that. The performance was reviewed in the March 13, 1996, issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian (performed as part of the Working Women's Festival).