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Stoppard is
distinctly postmodern in his exuberant mixture of “high art” and popular
culture throughout his career, working as a script doctor for Hollywood (he
contributed to Indian Jones and the Last Crusade, among other popular
entertainments) even at the height of his critical acclaim as a stage
dramatist. (The above caricature
indicates how Stoppard has turned his artistic endeavors into a lucrative
career commercially). And he never hesitated to use works of classic
literature as the foundation for his own witty and irreverent writings (Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern and Shakespeare in Love serve as excellent
examples). His work exhibits a
postmodern eclecticism as he continues to write for several media—film,
television, radio, and the stage—and a series of film directors with widely
varying styles. Three of his plays, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, Travesties, and The Real Thing, have won
Tony Awards for Best Play in their Broadway productions; and in 1990,
Stoppard directed his own film adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In 1999, he won an Academy Award for Best
Original Screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, which he co-wrote with
Marc Norman.
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