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Karen Lowe
LOS ANGELES, FEB 12: The oxygen-starved love scenes between Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in the movie Shakespeare in Love -- nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture -- are fueling a trend that is turning the 16th century bard into a pop icon, and his works into a renewable film franchise.
Two books -- Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and Shakespeare: A Life -- have become surprise best-sellers. And Shakespeare performances are doing brisk business across the United States.
The renewed interest in Shakespeare shows how his work remains fresh and relevant even hundreds of years after his death.
The BBC, which sells the British playwright's work on tape, has even named William Shakespeare `Man of the Millennium.'
``Today, I've had huge purchases of Shakespeare,'' said Kevin Spachuk, sales clerk at the mega-bookstore chain Borders Books. ``Things really picked up after Shakespeare in Love came out. A lot of studio people are buying his complete collectedworks.''
Independent studios have found gold in the bard's silver tongue, with Shakespeare in Love picking up 13 Oscar nominations, just one short of last year's blockbuster Titanic.
The film, a romantic romp about the bard's behind-the-scenes love life, has been included in best picture category, a slot it shares with Elizabeth, another 16th-century British period piece.
Shakespeare companies are reporting a surge in ticket sales, and even reporting some advance performance sellouts.
Hollywood has warmed to Shakespeare over the past years, and now has a slew of the bard's plays due to hit the screen.
Scheduled for the spring is <>A Midsummer Night's Dream, which promises to be a fanciful, voluptuous affair starring Michelle Pfieffer and Kevin Kline. Ethan Hawke will then tackle Hamlet, with Bill Murray as the blustery, cantankerous Polonius.
Then there are Shakespeare spin-offs like the teen movie, Ten Things I Hate About You, based on The Taming of theShrew and set in a modern high school. O, about the college basketball world, is based on Shakespeare's Othello.
Over the next three years British actor Kenneth Branagh's Shakespeare Film Company will be making three films with a twist, beginning with Love Labour's Lost set to music by Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin.
The tormented Scottish couple in Macbeth will be fast-forwarded into modern high finance as a power-hungry Wall Street duo after the millenium, and As You Like It will follow, to be set in Kyoto, Japan.
Branagh, who rose to fame in the 1989 movie Henry V, directed and starred in a lavish, lengthy production of Hamlet in 1997.
Filmmakers have long fancied Shakespeare because his universal themes of love, death and betrayal are easily made contemporary -- and he demands no gross percentages or royalties.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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