June & July 2026: THE ADAPTATION
It’s a time of big change, here at Tampa Theatre. As our historic auditorium is closed for major restoration, we have taken some our film presentations on the road to different sites in the community — the movies chosen are different, the circumstances of their exhibition are different, and in many cases the audiences are different. We’re also about to celebrate our 100th anniversary, and nothing lasts for a century without internalizing the truth: we must adapt, all the time.
Adaptation is hard. Art can resist change as stubbornly as people can. Like a person, any creative work is shaped by its native medium. What’s effective in a novel or a short story might not work in a movie. Imagine adapting a poem to a recipe. Imagine dancing about architecture. Many adaptations fail. Many more are never even attempted. In order to adapt well, it’s crucial not to get bogged down in the specific (often beloved) details of the piece as it was created but to step up and back, and see its aim and nature — its intention. Each of our selections for this round of Big Picture is a work in adaptation: starting life as a novel or short story, through gentle shaping and sometimes radical transformation, they have found themselves to be successful and interesting films as well. But seen broadly, books and movies can both be seen as simply stories, and each of these films is a story about stories themselves. The Hunger Games is about a societal revolution premised in a story a young woman tells about a friend who inspired her. Stand by Me is about a story four friends have told themselves (and each other) over decades about a trauma they volunteered for but didn’t expect. The Princess Bride is about the invincible power that stories have to transcend time and the world, the way reality can be shaped by unreal expression, the magical way stories have of never really changing. And Little Women is about how life can only be organized as a narrative and understood as a comprehensible story in retrospect.
We adapt to survive. The stories do too. We hope you’ll join us on select Sundays in June and July at Starkey Ranch Theatre Library Cultural Center in exploring the adaptation.
VIEW the Big Picture Archive to see all previous themes and currently scheduled Big Picture films.
THE HUNGER GAMES (2012)
2h 22m / PG-13 / Action, Thriller, Sci-Fi
In the grim future of The Hunger Games, the political body of North America has transformed into Panem, a nation divided into twelve largely monocultural districts. Panem is controlled by a ruling class of disconnected aesthetes from a city called only the Capitol, which requires each district to select two people each year to compete in a violent televised game of survival until only one survivor remains. This year, District 12 selects Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) and Primrose Everdeen, until Primrose is saved by her older sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteering to take her place. The sponsors and organizers of the games see big ratings in exaggerating the love story between Katniss and Peeta, and so change the rules to allow two survivors if they both hail from the same district. With erstwhile mentor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), the alcoholic and traumatized past winner from District 12, in their corner, Katniss and Peeta must win against pairs from around the country, all of whom are better trained and supplied than they are. But Katniss has a fire in her heart that none of the other contestants can match.
Every generation gets its own foundational post-apocalypse, and late millennials/early zoomers got the book and film series The Hunger Games. No longer concerned with the circumstances of the apocalypse itself, unlike the nuclear wastelands and pandemic disasterscapes of Gen X, The Hunger Games accepts as given that the destruction itself was inevitable. What remains is the human-scale process of dealing with the hand you’ve been dealt: resource wars, crushing inequality, the invincibility of the human spirit, and the knowledge that positive change will come not from the top down but only ever from the bottom up.
STAND BY ME (1986)
1h 29m / R / Drama, Adventure, Comedy
Shocked by the surprise news of the death of a dear friend, writer Gordie Lachance reminisces about a strange experience he and some friends had in the summer of 1959. After learning that a stranger has been accidentally killed near their rural homes, four Oregon boys decide to go see the body (and hopefully become heroes to the town). On the way, Gordie (Wil Wheaton), Vern Tessio (Jerry O’Connell), Chris Chambers (River Phoenix) and Teddy Duchamp (Corey Feldman) encounter a mean junkyard owner, a marsh full of leeches, and their own nested-flashback nightmares as they also learn more about one another and their very different home lives.
It’s easier to make memories as a kid. Everything is new. There are fewer days behind you, crowding the frame. Stand by Me, based on the short story The Body by Stephen King and directed by a young Rob Reiner, grapples with the psychic weight that the past takes on, and how it impacts the future. And the movie itself can’t avoid carrying that weight — the four young stars, like the characters they play, found themselves in the same place at this moment but ended up on very different paths. Jerry O’Connell had a film career he transitioned to voice over and TV; Wil Wheaton got stuck in the Star Trek system and had to reinvent his own showbiz persona to break out of it; Corey Feldman became a genuine superstar, but burned out into a tragic life of exploitation and abuse; and, most saddest of all, River Phoenix died of a drug overdose just a few years after Stand by Me’s release.
THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1987)
1h 38m / PG / Romance, Comedy, Fantasy
Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), a young woman from the land of Florin, falls in love in a somewhat complicated way with her farmhand Westley (Cary Elwes). But when Westley takes to the sea to earn his fortune and her hand, he is soon attacked by the Dread Pirate Roberts and killed. The awful Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon) desired Buttercup for himself and tasks his men — the scheming mastermind Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), the murderous swordsman Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin) and an improbably huge man called Fezzik (André the Giant) — with her capture. But the Dread Pirate Roberts himself appears to disrupt their plans, to everyone’s surprise, before Westley reveals that he has himself inherited the mantle and has returned to rescue Buttercup himself.
The Princess Bride is a story told by a grandfather (Peter Falk) to his sick grandson (Fred Savage) as he lays in bed. It’s also a story told by famed screenwriter William Goldman, the author of scripts for films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, to us in the audience. The story the kid gets is about romance and good vs. evil and swashbuckling adventure. The story we get is a story about stories — how they’re told, why, and to whom. The Princess Bride is self-consciously concerned with the purpose of telling stories, and the way that purpose inflects the stories we tell. It will remain popular for as long as love and adventure do.
LITTLE WOMEN (2019)
2h 15m / PG / Period Drama, Romance
With their father off serving in the Civil War, the women of the March family must fend for themselves. Mother Marmee (Laura Dern) does her level best to keep an increasingly chaotic household in order; Jo (Saoirse Ronan) lives in New York City and tries to sell stories in a patriarchal and close-minded culture; Amy (Florence Pugh) travels in Paris with her aunt (Meryl Streep) and hopes to marry well; Meg (Emma Watson) seeks to start a family of her own and poor Beth (Eliza Scanlen) deals with serious illness. Bouncing forward and back in time, the story follows the threads of each of the women as they intersect, pull away and return until at the end, the full tapestry of their lives is revealed.
Based on an 1868-1869 novel, this 2019 version of Little Women from director Greta Gerwig sets the story’s frame on Jo. Each of the sisters is independent, but their lives are interdependent too; relationships and circumstances push them together and pull them apart, a dimension that makes the story feel authentic to family life. But as Little Women the novel was partially based on the real experiences of author Louisa May Alcott, this version sets Jo up as the sensitive observer of the family’s life, and her creative aspirations give the story we in the audience are seeing a reason for being. Once lived, we experience our lives as stories we tell ourselves and others. Little Women makes that reality fit fiction seamlessly.