The Scene Stealers

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THE REAL THING Tom Stoppard His witty wordplay would make even the Bard proud

As attuned to the absurdities of modern life as anyone, the British playwright Tom Stoppard nevertheless cannot believe something he has heard about Shakespeare in Love. "Is it true that in America you can't see this film if you're 15?" he asks, his understanding of an R rating only slightly off. "That glimpse of nipple, and we lose 10 million viewers!"

He might well be confused. The unlikely hit Stoppard has co-written with Los Angeles screenwriter Marc Norman is indeed daring--but only in its literary aspirations. Shakespeare in Love boldly imagines young Will, played by Joseph Fiennes, struggling with writer's block and a script called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter, until he falls in love with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), who becomes his Juliet. Fact weaves with fantasy, verse with demotic dialect, low comedy with high passion; and as director John Madden puts it, "Who dares put words in Shakespeare's mouth and get away with it?" The answer is Stoppard, who says, "It never occurred to me to worry about Shakespeare's language butting up against mine. It's not a competition."

Still, the movie took a decade to happen. Norman, whose previous films include Cutthroat Island, got the idea in 1988 from one of his sons, who was studying Elizabethan drama, and eventually produced a script for Universal. In 1992 Stoppard--who wrote the movies Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Brazil, among others--came in to do a rewrite. The film fell apart over casting and languished until Miramax bought the rights from Universal in 1997.

Though there is no dispute over the writing credits, Norman admits he is beginning to feel "burned" by hearing the movie repeatedly called Stoppardian. He says, "In terms of the story, structure and the language--I accomplished that in my screenplay." But both men confirm that many of the jokes that dazzle past--the Stratford-upon-Avon mug; the pub waiter offering a special of "pig's foot marinated in juniper vinegar served on a buckwheat pancake"--are indeed Stoppard's.

The final scenes are also Stoppard's, and, like his Will, he was rewriting the ending practically until the moment of filming. "We seemed to have a romantic comedy where the boy didn't get the girl," Stoppard explains. "This troubled people, but the whole point was that the experience led him to write the greatest love tragedy of all time, not the greatest love comedy." Instead of that final shot of the beach, he says, "I shouldn't be telling you these things, but in my first go I had a sort of ghostly Manhattan in my mind as she walked off--but that was a ghostly skyscraper too far."