Thursday Oct 20, 2016
7:00pm – 10:00pm
$12
Instructor: Dennis Paoli
Dennis Paoli, screenwriter for director Stuart Gordon’s film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon, and for the cable television series “Masters of Horror,” Dreams in the Witch House), will lead a two-hour master class on adapting Lovecraft for the screen—the challenges, techniques, and insights into the works gained in the process. The class will also explore the collaborative nature of adaptation—the writer, in as real a sense as possible, collaborates with the original creator of the literary work—and of film-making, by nature a cooperative, if sometimes contentious, undertaking.
The enduring popularity of Gordon and Paoli’s film versions of Lovecraft’s fiction speaks to the enduring popularity of the original tales, but also to their capacity for updating, re-casting, and expanding. These specific adaptations will be examined in scenes from each of the films. Paoli will also discuss his long-time collaboration with Stuart Gordon, their methods of working together and roles in the process, based on their strengths.
Paoli, who runs writing programs and teaches Gothic Fiction at Hunter College, will also consider Lovecraft’s work in the larger context of the literary genres of horror and science fiction, the major themes and working principles of Gothic literature, and their long history of cinematic adaptation.
About the Instructor:
Dennis Paoli has written for film, TV, the stage, and the internet. His feature films include Bodysnatchers (with Stuart Gordon, for Warner Brothers), adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator (with Stuart Gordon and William Norris), From Beyond (for Empire), and Dagon (for Filmax). For the stage, he wrote the one-man show Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe, which has been performed internationally; co-wrote the script for Re-Animator: The Musical, for which he won several LA theater awards; and co-wrote with the Organic Theater Company, the baseball comedy Bleacher Bums, which ran Off-Broadway, through three revivals in Chicago, and over seven years in Los Angeles. The television version for PBS won an Emmy, and the film version (which he co-wrote with Mitch Paradise) aired on Showtime. The HBO film The Dentist (with Stuart Gordon) and his work for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series—adaptations with Stuart Gordon of H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat—brought the horror genre to cable television. His adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Hound was streamed on Halloween 2015 by the genre website Tales from Beyond the Pale (talesfrombeyondthepale.com). Dennis is also an academic, a teacher and administrator at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He has taught Gothic and Irish literature and 20th century drama. He has written criticism and articles for the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, and various volumes, periodicals, and online blogs. The most important work he does is as Donor-Advisor of The Heidi Paoli Fund, a philanthropic organization that supports cancer patients and their caregivers.
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