Best dialogue writer out there
Who do you think is the best dialogist today?
Feel free to quote some orgasmic lines.
wow, that's like five new topics on your first day... i don't think i've created five topics my whole time here
i personally think cameron crowe writes wonderful dialogue.....
for example -----
ACCOUNTANT
So Lloyd, you graduated Lakeside, right?
LLOYD
Yes sir.
ACCOUNTANT
What are you going to do now?
JIM
Yeah Lloyd. What are your plans for the future?
LLOYD
Spend as much time as possible with Diane before she leaves.
JIM
Seriously, Lloyd.
LLOYD
I'm totally and completely serious.
JIM
No, really.
LLOYD
You mean like career? Uh, I don't know. I've, I've thought
about this quite a bit sir, and I'd have to say considering
what's waiting out there for me, I don't want to sell anything,
buy anything or process anything as a career. I don't want to
sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or
processed, or... process anything sold, bought or processed, or
repair anything sold, bought or processed, you know, as a career
I don't want to do that. So, uh, my father's in the army, he
wants me to join, but I can't work for that corporation, so what
I've been doing lately is kickboxing, which is really a, uh, new
sport, but I think it's got a good future. As far as career
longevity goes, I don't really know, because, you know, you can't
really tell. Your training sticks as a fighter, you know,
but it's no good, you know, you have to be great, but I can't
really tell if I'm great until I've had a couple of pro fights.
But I haven't been knocked out yet. I don't know, I can't figure
it all out tonight sir, I'm just kinda hangin with your daughter.
:-D
i think the writer with the most flowing and creative dialouge has got to be Quentin Tarantino. Also....Kevin Smith (though I don't like him much) has some good dialouge...in fact, the dialouge makes his movies. and bleck...Jersey Girl looks vomiticious.
Quote from: Cinephilliaci think the writer with the most flowing and creative dialouge has got to be Quentin Tarantino. Also....Kevin Smith (though I don't like him much) has some good dialouge...in fact, the dialouge makes his movies. and bleck...Jersey Girl looks vomiticious.
Yeah, it kinda does but I still think that Smith will pull it off, as I do like his stuff.
Tarantino's great, but his dialogue by nature, as is Smith's, is highly stylized. You hear those cadences and topics and you know that it's Tarantino (or someone pretending to be Tarantino). In fact, most notable screenwriters have highly stylized dialogue, like putting a watermark on their script (Tarantino, Kevin Smith, the Coens, Spike Lee). I'm not saying it's a bad thing; it just is the case. That's why Jackie Brown is my favorite Tarantino script (though Pulp Fiction is my favorite Tarantino FILM); outside of Samuel L. Jackson's character, the script isn't very "Tarantino-sounding." It's great to see that he can do that. The man is here to stay.
I would say that, of all the prominent filmmakers working today, that Cameron Crowe's dialogue is the most natural sounding, as eward pointed out. He's a damn good screenwriter, not necessarily my favorite but he's great for "real" conversations. PTA is another one; his dialogue is sort of stylized but not to such a degree that you'd know it was him without knowing it was him, if you know what I mean.
Going back a ways, Billy Wilder is the freakin MAN! He is one of the best comedy writers ever. The scripts he wrote with I.A.L. Diamond are just brilliant. You can feel some of their influence in the Coen brothers' work, the sort of loopiness and incredible wordplay. Check out The Apartment or One, Two, Three.
Coens.
and to a lesser degree Mamet, even though his movies suck...
PT Anderson:
"My wife has an ass in her cock in the driveway, alright. I'm sorry if my thoughts are not on the photography of the film we're shooting tomorrow."
"Okay, now you're talking above my head. I don't know all of this industry jargon, YP, MP. All I know is that I can't get a record contract, we cannot get a record contract unless we take those tapes to the record company. And granted, the tapes themselves are a uh um oh, you own them, alright, but the magic that is on those tapes. That fucking heart and soul that we put onto those tapes, that is ours and you don't own that. Now I need to take that magic and get it over the record company. And they're waiting for us, we were supposed to be there a half hour ago. We look like assholes, man."
"I will fuck you up if you fuck with me, ok? I know three kinds of Karate: Jujitsu, Aikido, and regular Karate."
David Gordon Green.
the bowling hall scenes in the big lebowski --- my god
Quote from: SHAFTRDavid Gordon Green.
yessss. i can tell he spends a lot of time on his dialogue...some of the conversations in his movies have to be prerecorded things from his life.
Quote from: phil marlowethe bowling hall scenes in the big lebowski --- my god
seriously...now that i think about it. "Shut the fuck up, Donnie." I love it.
Donny, you're out of your element!
Dude, the chinaman is not the issue here!
Also, dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
You know what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass???
Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not Mr. Lebowski. You're Mr. Lebowski. I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing
Great dialogue through the ages:
Paul Schrader: "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets."
Quentin Tarantino: "It's like a wax museum with a pulse."
Daniel Waters: "Bulimia is so 87."
Billy Wilder: "I'm ready for my close up, Mr. De Mille."
John August: "So Zack, are you open to new experiences?"
Ladies and Gentlemen; The great Paddy Chayefsky and his NETWORK
DIANA
-- Well, Max, here we are --
middle-aged man reaffirming his
middle-aged manhood and a
terrified young woman with a
father complex. What sort of
script do you think we can
make out of this?
DIANA
(pushes her ice cream
away, regards him
affably)
Terrified out of my skull, man.
I'm the hip generation, man,
right on, cool, groovy, the
greening of America, man,
remember all that? God, what
humbugs we were. In my first
year at college, I lived in a
commune, dropped acid daily,
joined four radical groups and
fucked myself silly on a bare
wooden floor while somebody
chanted Sufi sutras. I lost six
weeks of my sophomore year
because they put me away for
trying to jump off the top floor
of the Administration Building.
I've been on the top floor ever
since. Don't open any windows
around me because I just might
jump out. Am I scaring you off?
MAX
No.
DIANA
I was married for four years and
pretended to be happy and had
six years of analysis and pretended
to be sane. My husband ran off
with his boyfriend, and I had an
affair with my analyst. He told
me I was the worst lay he had
ever had. I can't tell you how
many men have told me what a
lousy lay I am. I apparently
have a masculine temperament.
I arouse quickly, consummate
prematurely, and can't wait to
get my clothes back on and get
out of that bedroom. I seem
to be inept at everything except
my work. I'm goddam good at my
work and so I confine myself
to that. All I want out of life
is a 30 share and a 20 rating.
MAX
You need me badly! I'm your
last contact with human reality!
I love you, and that painful,
decaying menopausal love is the
only thing between you and the
shrieking nothingness you live
the rest of the day!
He slams the valise shut.
DIANA
Then don't leave me!
MAX
It's too late, Diana! There's
nothing left in you that I can live
with! You're one of Howard's
humanoids, and, if I stay with you,
I'll be destroyed! Like Howard
Beale was destroyed! Like Laureen
Hobbs was destroyed! Like
everything you and the institution
of television touch is destroyed!
You are television incarnate, Diana,
indifferent to suffering,
insensitive to joy. All of life is
reduced to the common rubble of
banality. War, murder, death are
all the same to you as bottles of
beer. The daily business of life is
a corrupt comedy. You even shatter
the sensations of time and space
into split-seconds and instant
replays. You are madness, Diana,
virulent madness, and everything you
touch dies with you. Well, not me!
Not while I can still feel pleasure
and pain and love!
mamet takes the cake -- i dont care who you know, you cousion you are, whos dick your suckin' -- im gonna have yo' job shithead.
Mamet's the shit :lol:
#1
Mamet is the shit. Few movies are as quotable as Glengarry Glen Ross. Hell, in Boiler Room characters sit around watching Glengarry and quote from it. Mamet has influenced an entire new generation of writers. I can detect traces of Mamet in PT Anderson and QT's work.
As for Paddy Chayevsky, I will give him props for foreseeing the future of television when he wrote Network in the mid-70's. In many ways, the world he envisioned has come to pass. However, I think a lot of his dialogue is way too on the nose. There are lots of bombastic speeches in Network, some of them are great, others go on long after the point has been sledgehammered into the audience. Time Magazine hit the bullseye when it said Network was an anti-youth movie, as Diana represents the new generation of cutthroat executives (now known as yuppies), and William Holden represents the virtuous old guard. I agree with everything Chayevsky is saying about popular culture and corporate control of the media -- I just feel that the way he goes about making his points is way too ham-fisted (like much of Oliver Stone's output).
The opposite approach is employed by Terrence Malick, who creates characters who communicate more by what they don't say, or what they aren't able to articulate. Sometimes, one look can say as much as a page of dialogue.
It's interesting because Malick can be regarded as the few poets that have made celluloid their ink capturing the true essence of cinema with introspective images of kinetic and suspended emotional time. The other one that comes to mind would be Andrei Tarkofsky.
Bergman was the great explorer of human complexity and the unfathomable essence of the psyche.
I believe that the most profound psychoanalyst making films today is Michael Haneke.
Lars Von Trier has come to master cinematic form in such a way that his composition comes from his actors and their performances rather than from his frame.
Kubrick and Hitchcock are directors whose films can be viewed with no sound and they are still mesmerizing.
Anyway the subject of dialogue is interesting in film; it's inherited directly from theatre. Playwriting structures itself through the flow of exposition and the texture of the words.
Mamet is fascinating in the sense that his most interesting characters are the ones who can't articulate.
Woody Allen is also one of the most influential writers in modern cinema.
Dialogue has triumphed when it can be appreciated even in a language we don't speak, Denys Arcand's flair for lexicon is evident even if you don't now French.
However I'm a firm believer that film is a universal language and reducing it to a specific lingo is playing against its potential and expressive powers.
Film is first and foremost a visual medium. Great films are the ones that can balance all the different elements and create something new while bringing an emotional and intellectual awareness. From Maya Daren's and Stan Brakhage'experimental-avant garde explorations to Baraka to Gummo to Un Chien Andalou to Visconti's neo-realism to Paul Thomas Anderson's hyper-realism in a surreal context to Peter Greenaway's juxtaposed semiotics etc. etc. etc.
Film triumphs when there's a post that fails miserably in analyzing...something rambling on and on about conceptual nothingness. Like this one.
Anyway let's keep making films.