SOURCE: Shaffer, Peter. “Making the Screen Speak.” Film Comment 20, no. 5 (September-October 1984): 50-1, 56-7.

In the following essay, Shaffer—the author of the play that Amadeus was based on—discusses his working relationship with Forman, describing the process of how they adapted the play into film.

The cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to work in. Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone living largely by the spoken word. Increasingly, as American films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent that the most successful are being spoken in Screenspeak, a kind of cinematic esperanto equally comprehensible in Bogota and Bulawayo. For example, dialogue in heavy-action pictures, horrific or intergalactic, now consists almost entirely of the alternation of two single words—a cry and a whisper—needing translation nowhere on the planet: ‘Lessgidowdaheer!’ and ‘Omygaad!’ Mastery of this new tongue is not easy for...