Adaptation for the Screen

A one-day workshop for playwrights and screenwriters with Robert Geller, producer of the award-winning PBS series, The American Short Story, and Obie Award-winning playwright Jeff Wanshel. The workshop will address the challenges faced when a screenwriter adapts prose fiction material for the screen or TV–how to remain faithful to the original while balancing the sensibility of the author with the need to create beautiful cinema.

Robert Geller was executive producer of twenty-four films based on America’s finest writers. He received a Peabody Award for The American Short Story series, which premiered on 250 television stations nationwide. He was honored by the Museum of Broadcast and TV for his ongoing body of work. Feature-length productions include James Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain and Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day, both cited as “best TV films of the year.” Too Far to Go, based on 10 Updike stories and featuring Blythe Danner and Michael Moriarty was seen on NBC by 18 million viewers and presented at the Cannes Fillm Festival by Francis Ford Coppola. Mr. Geller has been an adjunct professor of film and screenwriting at Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program; instructor of film and media studies at the New School, Educational Director at the American Film Institute, and a charter board member of the Sundance Institute. Publications include his memoir What if Someday I Could Make a Movie.

Jeff Wanshel’s plays The Disintegration of James Cherry and Isadora Duncan Sleeps with the Russian Navy have been produced by A.C.T., The American Place, BBC Radio, Circle Rep, The Dodgers at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center Repertory, Magic Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, National Playwrights Conference, National Public Radio, National Theatre of the Deaf, Yale Repertory Theater, and many others. Awards include two NEA grants, two from the New York State Council on the Arts, and three Rockefeller Awards in Playwriting. His teleplay adaptation of Thurber’s The Greatest Man in the World was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. Metamorphosis in Miniature, a Kafka adaptation for director Martha Clarke, won Wanshel an Obie Award for Best New American Play.