“It is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.”

Samuel Johnson, The Idler (May 26, 1759)

In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I talk about how good plays get turned into bad movies—and who’s to blame. Here’s an excerpt.

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The universal critical acclaim that greeted George C. Wolfe’s superlative Netflix screen version of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is rare. First-rate plays, after all, almost never get turned into equally good films, and on occasion the result is a duck-and-cover disaster. What’s more, virtually all such disasters are caused by the same fatal error in judgment: Somebody in Hollywood thought he knew better than the playwright, and so decided to rewrite the very play whose excellence is the main reason people thought it should be made into a film.

In such fiascoes, the question, then, is not so much what went wrong as who deserves the blame. Since filmmaking is a collective art, it can be tricky to tag the guilty party, but in most of the truly ignominious cases, you can pin the tail on the donkey with embarrassing ease.

Here are four of the most notorious offenders, categorized by culprit….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Arsenic and Old Lace:

Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, five months before his death:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

From 2011:

Yesterday’s reminiscence of the first movie I ever saw in a theater has put me in a nostalgic mood, so with the help of Wikipedia, I’ve compiled a list of interesting things that happened in 1956, the year in which Mrs. T and I were born….

Read the whole thing here.

“To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year.”

E.B. White, “The Distant Music of the Hounds”

Charles Bruffy and the Kansas City Chorale perform “Nova, Nova,” the second movement from Jean Belmont’s Nativitas:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Now Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Thing