Interesting question, Darlene, in light of what Orson Scott Card has pointed out in his workshops: novels allow the exploration of motivation internally through the point of view of the character, where film has to try to convey motivation externally, and the viewer can never be sure of the motivation from what the actor conveys.

Maybe it's something to do with so many people being so visually oriented that they want to SEE the story instead of trying to imagine it from what they read.

So it could go back to one of the oldest pieces of storytelling advice: "Show, don't tell." It may be easier to "show" in films and plays than it may be in novels.

Your question could make way for trite answers, so I'm weary that mine will be one of those. I hope, however, that my answer will be given in the spirit your question was.

I started out in theatre because I liked the performance of the text. I was able to feel things that I hadn't felt before and express things that I hadn't expressed before as an actor. It was a wonderful thing as a teenager to be in control of your own emotions whenever you wanted to be.

Then, as I got older and went to the temple, I found that there is an intense power in performance, in ritual, in repetition. In this there can be divinity. There can't be divinity in the same way in reading for several reasons, but two stand out to me: 1. The use of constructed time is different (i.e. the movie or performance stops when its over, but the reading stops when you stop reading it. It slows when you slow, it repeats when you do). So you have to get outside of yourself and your pace of doing things in order to encounter a performative art. This doesn't allow for the 'ponder' part of "search, ponder, and pray" unless the filmmaker or producer has allowed for that in their construction, so you get a different interaction with deity reading. But ideally, you can experience a more divine sense of time in film or performance.
Number 2. Is that Film and Theatre are designed and have the ability to be viewed in a group. You can never read with someone, just to someone, then it already becomes performative. There is a reason that we have sacrament meetings together and not each in everyone's home.

But I initially moved to film because I was sick of putting effort into something that could not be recorded and was always lost.

Likewise, its easier to make a living in film than theatre-- people are just more willing to watch a movie than anything else, it seems.

But eventually I was affected by the visual nature of film. Seeing is a very holy, though sometimes dangerous, thing.

I didn't intend this to be a novel. I will say something that Has been the biggest motivation for me: Eugene Ionesco, a Romanian-born French Playwright whose work Ive loved since high school, said that there are some perspectives of life that are too complex to be expressed any other way but in a play. We don't get that notion from melodrama or genre pieces, really, but I do feel that film is able to express the most complex world views that we can comprehend. Antonioni, Ermano Olmi, or Tsai Ming-Liang are filmmakers that I think would be most capable to express what Mormonism has to say at its heart. I think its incredibly complex.



But perhaps I should have just erased all this and said what I really think: Dean Duncan is the reason that so many films are being made and being watched so intelligently. But hardly anyone will last to the end of this to hear it.

I'm more on the theater side of things than the the film like Trevor and Eric, although someday I hope to crossover and do some screenwriting as well (my current fantasy is to write for my favorite show Doctor Who---sigh).
The reason I gravitate towards theater, however, is that it is a social art. And being a person who loves the idea of Zion and many people working towards a common goal, that's very attractive to me. I've loved working with numerous people, from producers to directors and even the actors-- not that I direct the actors. Oh, no, no. Except when I'm actually the director-- which I secretly love.
I love the intimacy of a good book, but I also love the inclusiveness of the performing arts, the sociality. Theater also has an elusive immediacy that film doesn't have, nor literature. You can't rewind theater, you can't turn back the page. Theater is constrained within time, you've got to pay attention, you've got to live in it. Another thing I love about.
But beyond that, on the stage the children of my imagination take on flesh and blood and movement and fabric and sound. They become more real, more tangible. It's the closest I'll ever come to actually MEETING my characters, especially on those rare occassions when I'm actually acting in one of my shows and then the bizarre transformation occurs and I BECOME one of my characters. Although I consider myself very imaginative, participating in the creative process of theater brings my imagination to another level and mixes it with other people's imaginations. I love that. I love seeing my characters through the eyes of another, whether it be a costume designer, an actor or a director. I love how they bring new layers and meanings that I may have never even intended, but which are natural by products of the characters. I love it when they surprise me like that.
However, like any art, literature has advantages that theater does not. You can imagine your characters more how you want them in literature. There are less constraints and more room for personal imagination. And NO BUDGETS. The sky (and not usually even that) is the limit.
It's interesting that Orson Scott Card started in theater (and was actually very good at it-- his Stone Tables will be in our upcoming Mormon Drama Anthology), and has tried to call out to film-- but he ended up in literature. I actually started out writing novels as well as plays in high school ( had a big 500 page fantasy I wrote), but then gravitated more and more towards theater. I still want to write novels, when I get the time. But right now playwriting is my first love.

---

Upon the stage of a theater can be represented in character, evil and its consequences, good and its happy results and rewards; the weakness and the follies of man, the magnamity of virtue and the greatness of truth. The stage can be made to aid the pulpit in impressing upon the minds of a community an enlightened sense of a virtuous life, also a proper horror of the enormity of sin and a just dread of its consequences. The path of sin with its thorns and pitfalls, its gins and snares can be revealed, and how to shun it (Discourses of Brigham Young, p.243; Bookcraft, 199

First: I have never met Dean Duncan, but can confirm that he is intensely popular among past and present BYU theatre and film students. He is, undoubtedly, the TMA professor most often listed in people's "favorite quotes" section on facebook, which is a bizarre but probably accurate measure of influence. :)

Now, to answer your question:

Like the others, I'm interested in the social environment theatre creates. It's basically the only art form you just can't get online, and that, I think, will become an ever-sharper point of distinction with other forms as technology improves. Theatre will be the only form that will, by necessity, involve any direct, face-to-face human interaction. Trevor has pointed out that there are massive downside to the unrecordable nature of theatre, and I've felt the frustration of so much work for something so fleeting, but there's also a draw to that.

I also like playwrighting as a form because of the power of voice and the way you can't get directly into characters' minds. Books are great, but there's a raw power to being stripped down to dialogue and action...there's no time for descriptions or extended internal meditations...it's all about what people WANT and that following of motive. It all exists in the social space of the need to communicate and conceal. I like all that.

One other significant thing I should mention as an advantage of playwrighting is that it's a sort-of similar skill set to screenwriting, creating possibilities for a switchover. A disadvantage Trevor mentioned that theatre has to film is that theatre is less lucrative (I got paid something like $4000 for six days of work on my last film. That's more than I've made off theatre in my life.) The advantage is that theatre is cheaper to create (The standard Mormon films costs what, half a million? As a result, you can't just walk up to someone and have a screenplay produced. The total expenses at New Play Project for getting set up and having produced sixty or seventy short plays have been a few thousand dollars. We would love to have, but don't technically need, any significant donors/investors to keep our work up.) Theatre, I think, is a good form to interact with a specific audience where there isn't a film budget readily available. As a playwright, I don't have to write things with a marketing survey in hand because I'm not going to risk squandering anyone's inheritance on any given project. I could lose a lot more money if I sucked at writing films for a real paying audience.

Anyway, all this leads to film: film is interesting for various artistic reasons other people could be much more articulate about than I am, but it's also got a strong draw as the culturally defining medium of our day. People don't quote books to each other a lot, these days, but they do quote films. It is possible that everyone in a social group will get talking about a book, but it's much more common for a film to capture everyone's imagination. Part of that is a product of the power of the medium itself, I think. Part of it also has to do with marketing: because films are so expensive to make compared to any other form, they're marketed much more aggressively and as consumers, we are affected by marketing.

In any case, any writer who wants to be a real part of the social and cultural dialogue probably at least flirts with the idea of getting into film at some point in their career. There was a time in most cultures when poetry was that way, the infectious medium that got your ideas broad and impactful exposure...anyone writing poetry now more or less has to resign themselves to the distinct possibility that their work will always be fairly obscure and marginalized. Although there is an occasional blockbuster, culture-shaking or at least -saturating book that comes out, film as a form is the king when it comes to broad impact and entry into the popular discourse.

That's why, I think, we are so sad that so many Mormon films suck. We've got good production people, and a lot of the movies look surprisingly good for their budgets. But they don't tend to be terribly well-written and many of them suffer from a chronic lack of having anything useful to say. For people so proud of their culture and with such a strong conviction that Mormonism has a whole lot to say, these films range from guilty pleasure for empty calories to aching disappointment to perceived degradation by marginalization of our culture's strength and depth.

I would love to see a generation of young artists rise who can wrestle with questions of what Mormon literature means in the cheap-to-produce forms: prose, poetry, playwrighting, and then transition to film so that we can have a satisfying film heritage. Why? Because people watch, talk about, and otherwise obsess over movies at a level other forms rarely reach in our modern culture.

Having said all this, I should also point out as an afterthought that I think every story has an ideal form and I've applied to grad school so I can go learn prose forms while continuing work in theatre and screenwriting on my own so that ultimately I'm able to choose my stories for their own merits and then tell them in whatever form fits that story best.

Hm...that's more than enough for now, I think. ;)

Trevor, I don't understand what you mean by divine time and the ways that film gives you a better experience with that than literature. I think it's an interesting idea but I just don't understand. Help me?