The Elephant Man (film) nominated for Academy Award for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay
The Elephant Man is a 1980 British-American biographical drama film about Joseph Merrick (John Merrick in the film), a severely deformed man in late 19th-century London. The film was directed by David Lynch, produced by Mel Brooks (who was uncredited, to avoid audiences anticipating the film being in the vein of his comedic works, although his company Brooksfilms is in the opening credits) and Jonathan Sanger, and stars John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Anne Bancroft, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Michael Elphick, Hannah Gordon and Freddie Jones. The Elephant Man is generally regarded as one of Lynch's more accessible and mainstream works, alongside The Straight Story (1999).
The screenplay was adapted by Lynch, Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren from Frederick Treves's The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923) and Ashley Montagu's The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (1971). It was shot in black-and-white and featured make-up work by Christopher Tucker.
The Elephant Man was a critical and commercial success with eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actor. After receiving widespread criticism for failing to honour the make-up effects, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was prompted to create the Academy Award for Best Makeup the following year. The film also won the BAFTA Awards for Best Film, Best Actor, and Best Production Design and was nominated for Golden Globe awards. It also won a French César Award for Best Foreign Film.Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 92% based on 59 reviews, with an average score of 8.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "David Lynch's relatively straight second feature finds an admirable synthesis of compassion and restraint in treating its subject, and features outstanding performances by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 78 out of 100 based on 16 critic reviews, indicating "generally favourable reviews".Vincent Canby wrote: "Mr. Hurt is truly remarkable. It can't be easy to act under such a heavy mask ... the physical production is beautiful, especially Freddie Francis's black-and-white photography."A small number of critics were less favourable. Roger Ebert gave it 2/4 stars, writing: "I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks." In the book The Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture, Nadja Durbach describes the work as "much more mawkish and moralising than one would expect from the leading postmodern surrealist filmmaker" and "unashamedly sentimental". She blamed this mawkishness on the use of Treves' memoirs as source material.The Elephant Man has since been ranked among the best films of the 1980s in Time Out (where it placed 19th) and Paste (56th). The film also received five votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls.Accolades
The Elephant Man was nominated for eight Academy Awards, tying Raging Bull at the 53rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Actor in a Leading Role (Hurt), Art Direction-Set Decoration (Stuart Craig, Robert Cartwright, Hugh Scaife), Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Music: Original Score, and Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. However, it did not win any.
Industry experts were appalled that the film was not going to be honoured for its make-up effects when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominations at the time. A letter of protest was sent to the academy's Board of Governors requesting to give the film an honorary award. The academy refused, but in response to the outcry, they decided to give the make-up artists their own category. A year later, the Academy Award for Best Makeup category was introduced with An American Werewolf in London as its first recipient.It did win the BAFTA Award for Best Film, as well as other BAFTA Awards for Best Actor (Hurt) and Best Production Design, and was nominated for four others: Direction, Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing.
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
up for shortlisted for in the running for selected for contending for