A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ASSEMBLING THE PERFECT TV CREAM FILM

8 - THE DIALOGUE

And so our notional perfect film, with Rodney Dangerfield and Kurt Vonnegut signed up, and Nat Cohen giving us the green light, trundles into pre-production. Reluctantly, we've now got to sit down and consider how we're going to write the bloody thing. The script is, sadly, often one of the last things considered important in many films today, and while we can't exactly point fingers, having started building this flick from the logo up, we do think a good, solid script, with believable and interesting dialogue, is essential to stop our already ricketty-looking celluloid venture tipping over into the dreaded GIGLI limbo. Let's go through the options in the time-honoured process of generic elimination, and see if we can sort out the confabulatory corn from the chatty chaff.

There are plenty of no-no options here. You've your period drama, for starters, with its constant introductions of important people to other important people at balls and garden parties ("Why, Count Rostock!" "Baron of all Prussia and Lord of the Wiltshire Hussars, 1792-1814? The very same!") Similar problems arise with the newly- popular fantasy genre which is, in dialogue terms, period drama without the textbook, and tends to make all the characters talk like over-hearty Wake Up to Wogan emails to boot ("Olreg the Thirsty! I have heard tell of your exploits in many an insalubrious watering- hole!") Sci-fi, of course, runs perilously close to becoming a textbook without the drama ("I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home," ad nauseam). It's all the same to us - characters ponderously telling each other of clumsily complicated to-ings and fro-ings they must already know about ("It's just a matter of establishing it for the viewers at home") the nadir being that interminable opening sequence in DUNE (w Herbert) with floaty heads doing a long-winded up-to-speed gabble-in that must rank as one of the most insanely wrong-headed moments in all of film. So, period, fantasy, sci-fi - genres with much to recommend them, true, but memorable dialogue is the first thing to fall by the wayside under a necessary torrent of Barons, Balrogs and Borusas. You can type this shit etc., as the carpenter once said.

At the other end of the spectrum are your terse, brooding films - monosyllabic noirs, taciturn cop dramas, stiff-upper-lipped war epics ("It's all gone quiet... too damn quiet!") and, our most hated of all genres, the tumbleweed-silent western. Well, clearly we're not going to happen upon a wellspring of vibrant conversation with this little lot and, the odd Chandler-inspired (or even written) noir aside, that isn't the point of these films at all, which is fair enough in the case of quality examples of the above. There is, however, the tendency for this sort of conservatively-written stuff to become lazily piled high with pick 'n' mix cliches, which build up and breed over the years until you're left with that mannered, halting drivel Clive James fingered as "dot dot dot" dialogue - all the noises, pauses and heightened gasps of dramatic disturbance, but with nothing actually going on underneath.

This sort of stuff provides the occasional mini-quote that lodges in the popular consciousness when it's done well enough, but between those nuggets are acres and acres of dull, functional, "hard-boiled" flummery dashed off in an afternoon by a grizzled old hack in a break between scotches. And even those favourite pub bore quotes can be falsified - as far as we know, John Wayne never said "Get off your horse and drink your milk" in his life, but thanks to Freddie Starr and others, that was the default impressionist's phrase for a couple of decades (see also "You dirty rat", "Play it again, Sam" etc.) and, while longevity of any kind is not to be sniffed at, being remembered for something you didn't do is rather a No Frills kind of fame, we think.

If we want immortality - and that's not to say we're not in it for the love of it, but one of those plaques on a park bench would be nice - the across-the-board respect of Capital D for Drama is probably our best bet. But here, as with the above, so many films descend into unthinking, cribbing-off-each-other refried verbal molasses. The basic problem with the staple of much Hollywood "and the Academy Award goes to" drama is that, with the best intentions in the world, it's nothing like life. Not slightly off, but way, way off, so far down the path of fantasy as to be approaching the Queens, Quenyas and Quadrants no man's land as detailed above. People reduced to, or on the brink of, a complete emotional breakdown don't, as a rule, retain the ability to form coherent sentences, let alone paragraphs, but so many Streepite films take the Big Blubbing Soliloquy as a given, a staple scene to secure that statuette come March, and with exceptions so rare we can't bring any to mind at the moment, we hate them.

Dramatic situations arise, a lot of the time, through people not being able to communicate, after all. Take THE CARETAKER (w Pinter), which we know was a play and all, but the film with Donald Pleasence is as fine a version as we hope to see. Three seedy types cross- talking and sussing each other out in an impossibly small Hackney house, all with small but hopeless ambitions and delusions, interrogate each other with this sort of stuff -

"You said you wanted me to get you up." "What for?" "You said you were thinking of going to Sidcup." "Aye, that'd be a good thing, if I got there." "Doesn't look like much of a day." "Aye, well, that's shot it, en't it?"

Nothing gets said there, really, but you get an idea of the unease between the characters, something that doesn't happen with the on- the-nose sob speeches of your TERMS OF ENDEARMENTs and the like. And unlike them, there's room for humour here - not up front, but behind the tense terseness. When Pleasence's shabby, Sidcup-bound old man goes off on one, it's almost like a Max Miller routine, albeit several octaves less chirpy, ten times more aggressive, and not exactly adorned with a grade A punchline, but far more realistic than anything we've seen come out of Tom Hanks' mouth lately -

"I said to this monk, 'ere, I said, look 'ere mister, he opened the door - big door, he opened it - look 'ere mister I said, I showed him these, I said, you haven't got a pair of shoes have you, a pair of shoes I said, enough to help me on my way. Look at these, they're nearly out I said, they're no good to me. I heard you got a stock of shoes here. Piss off, he said to me."

This is all well and good, of course, but, despite this, and the likes of Samuel Beckett expounding on the virtues of music hall comedians in his plays ("Right, I'm off down the pub!") we can't see Mr Dangerfield's agent agreeing to let us bury him up to his neck in dirt in the name of art, somehow. No, he wants wit, repartee, verbal sparring matches, etymological folderol, unabashed cracking wise. And so do we. After all, come on, it's Rodders! Show the man some respect! Problem is, comedy films are just as tricky to do right. Well, something like, say, THE CANNONBALL RUN (w Yates - not Eddie, sadly) is fairly easy to write - slap out a few iffy one-liners to the various assembled stars, throw in some knowing winky references to their day jobs, add a bit of softcore swearing and Frank's your Godfather. "Terrorists my dimpled ass!" De-he-helightfully un-PC, yes? Well, we might feel better disposed toward this sort of film if it weren't still very much the default setting for cinematic comedy to this Focking day. Having said that, a Captain Chaos cameo isn't something we'd entirely rule out.

So if polished zingers alone start to grate over ninety-odd minutes, what about the natural approach to comedy? Let's have a look at a recent and fundamentally decent example of the semi-improvised mockumentary, folk reunion fun-in A MIGHTY WIND (w Guest, Levy et al). Now, this probably won't illustrate perfectly what we mean if you haven't seen it, but imagine the following exchange between Lionel Crabbe, the dull, colostomy bag-selling, suburban Surrey-ish husband of former folk singer Mickey, and Mickey's former singing partner Mitch Cohen, a broken, spaced-out nervous wreck in Dana Carvey hair and specs, as the former shows the latter his model railway -

"This whole area here is called Crabbe Town. We've got a brothel down there above the saloon. And right down there, further along, I'm thinking of building a French quarter. I've actually got a bit of French blood in me... erm..." "I would love to see this town in the autumn. I think Crabbeville in autumn would look quite... magnificent. I would have made tiny little leaves... oak... poplar... maple... chestnut... and spread them across the town of Crabbe... ville... magnificent." "It's Crabbe Town, not Crabbeville."

Not screamingly funny, we know, but it's a good illustration of what we laymen like to call "clever stuff going on in the background" or, if you've got the BFI coming round to tea, "subtext". We haven't seen much of either of these characters yet, but already little bits are coming out - the way Leonard has boringly and pompously named the town after himself, yet is quick to point out the brothel in a sort of fumbling attempt at laddish bravado. Then Mitch steams in with his acid casualty poetic vision (it helps if you imagine his line delivered in a cross between William Burroughs and Emo Phillips). Finally, the pedantic non-sequitur at the end provides both a neatly bathetic punchline and confirms the mental gulf between Mickey's past and present suitors - a baroque duet of non- communication. The trick, so often missed by lesser practitioners of the improv game, is to make neatly-drawn situations and sketches merely look like a careless shambles, using the verbal fumbling to hide the lavishly-tooled work that's really going on. It's the dialogue equivalent of a Laurel and Hardy bit of business - they know precisely what they're doing, but it never, ever looks that way, and therein lies the fun. But in the end, this sort of stuff is ridiculously hard to pull off properly, and the crash and burn factor when it falls apart is high indeed (see recent sitcoms passim), so we'll skip the "extreme naturalism" world of ums and trailing sentences, we think. We want realistic dialogue, but that doesn't have to mean a faltering, pause-strewn wilderness of inelegance, it just has to sound like something somebody conceivably could, rather than necessarily would say.

So if the improvised format is overused and unsteady in the wrong hands, let's do as we always do and volte-face to the opposite shore, namely the voluminously verbose gagfests of the thirties and forties, and in particular the masterpiece that is HIS GIRL FRIDAY (w Hecht/MacArthur/Lederer). It's impossible to mention this film without the word "quickfire" cropping up in the same breath, but what interests us is not (just) the fact that the dialogue rattles along at a phenomenal speed of 200-plus words per minute (with director Howard Hawks stepping up the pace of the actors all the while), but that it's all such brilliant stuff. Never mind films that need a second or third viewing to take in, you're still uncovering gems from this one on watch nineteen. Take this bit of quickfiring between Louis the gangster and Rosalind Russell -

"What's the matter, Hildy?" "Don't give me that innocent stuff! What did you pull on Mr. Baldwin this time?" "Who, me?" "Yes, you and that albino of yours!" "You talking about Evangeline?" "None other!" "She ain't no albino!" "She'll do till one comes along!" "She was born right here in this country!"

Now, that lasts all of fifteen seconds on the screen, but how much is happening there? The rhythm's being set off (you could time crossfire exchanges like this with a metronome), a reversal of the usual character traits is being pulled (Russell's the dominant inquisitor, Louis the stumbling patsy), and there's the albino gag of course, but between the set-up and the punchline to that gag, Russell inserts another one ("She'll do till one comes along!") without losing the momentum or the sense. If the characters in a Pinter play all went on a two-week assertiveness and elocution course, they'd start to sound like this. And despite all the verbal ping-ponging, it never turns into a tedious all-aces tennis match, as Lederer's careful to slot in words and phrases that keep the flow lively and varied. The whole exchange above, for instance, turns on Russell's delivery of "None other!", which stands out clear and crisp where a simple "Yes" or something would get lost in the gathering mayhem. And if the dialogue is superincumbent, when one of the characters gets the chance to string a few pearls together, the result is uncanny. Take this example of Russell laying into the hapless Cary Grant when the story goes tatas up. Never mind that bit in Hamlet where he's worrying about whether to go to bed or not, this is poetry -

"Now get this, you double-crossing chimpanzee! There ain't gonna be any interview and there ain't gonna be any story. And that certified cheque of yours is leaving with me in twenty minutes. I wouldn't cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up! And if I ever lay my two eyes on you again, I'm gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours till it rings like a Chinese gong!"

We won't insult that speech by dissecting it. Just print it out, lock yourself in a cupboard somewhere, and read it out loud about twenty times. That's all that's needed to verify the genius at work here. You could sing this stuff - in fact, Rosalind Russell's "duelling banjos" swooping twang very nearly does just that at points. But again, this is insanely difficult stuff to write, and, sad to say, this type of film-making may be locked in the past. For all the endless talk of how much faster films are paced these days (usually uttered by folk who've never sat through an M Night Shayamalan bore-in) that sheer speed of invention seems out of place in today's actually rather staid feedline/pause/punchline/reaction shot comedy universe. The Coen brothers gamely tried to update the screwball genre with THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, but, the sterling efforts of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jim True aside, ended up with an admirable but rather funless agglomeration of Hawks/Capra set piece homages, a feelgood movie it's extremely hard to love.

Stepping down a gear, then (and giving the Robin Williams school of show-off monologuery a wide berth - anything described as either "high octane" or "speedfreak" is right out, we're afraid) the sort of thing we're groping towards is something between the twilight fug of mumbled ultra-realism and the pin-sharp perfection of the criss-cross quip act. Step forward, then, Woody Allen - an ex stand-up (like Rodney!) who's adapted his monologues and one-liners seamlessly into believable scenarios populated by living characters, without losing an ounce of funny in the process. Here's a low-key chunk of MANHATTAN (w Allen, clearly) with Diane Keaton at loggerheads with Woody that shows the sort of thing we mean -

"Don't psychoanalyse me, I pay a doctor for that." "Hey, you call that guy that you talk to a doctor? I mean, you don't get suspicious when your analyst calls you at home at three in the morning and weeps into the telephone?" "All right, so he's unorthodox. He's a highly qualified doctor." "He's done a great job on you, y'know. Your self esteem is, like, a notch below Kafka's."

The great bit here is getting gags into a tense argument without losing the tension. The first gag (the weeping shrink) is brilliantly absorbed into the drama with Keaton's response, which reveals it as a real situation, and one which in her opinion doesn't merit so much as a batted eyelid. So the gag gets a laugh, her reaction defuses the gag-ness of the gag and gets another laugh into the bargain. Then the Woodmeister follows up hard on its heels with the Kafka line, a classic Allenism, but also a real, believable gag on the character's part this time, one used as a weapon, a variation on the Jewish "you see what I have to put up with?" exasperated aside addressed to no-one and everyone simultaneously. All of this expertly brought into the situation without breaking the seams of reality (though they do come in for a fair stretching). Unlike HIS GIRL FRIDAY this is compact, finely-wrought speech that doesn't leap into the spotlight in a smart suit and demand respect. Ironically, this is exactly what Rodney used to do, but we'll write off that paradox as we reckon he'd be great doing this sort of stuff. He may no go in for Kafka and Freudian analysis, granted, but here's another exchange from the underrated HUSBANDS AND WIVES, with Woodola and Mia Farrow this time -

"I do not flirt!" "Don't tell me you don't flirt because I've seen you do it. At parties you put on a whole other personality." "Oh, you're crazy!" "Of course you do! You get all soulful and pretend to want things that you really can't stand." "Like what? What are you talking about?" "Like moving to Europe. That's just a flirting technique. You couldn't survive off the island of Manhattan for more than 48 hours."

The build-up to the Europe gag - delivered by Farrow this time - is a great bit of slow build up/rapid deflate craftsmanship of the sort Dangerfield would thrive on. Again, the gags are there, but never at the expense of the surrounding dramatic woodwork. And to work the necessary timing into such a frantic exchange is a lot harder than it looks (and a nod here, too, for the fantastic opening office duel between Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in THE PRODUCERS (w Brooks) - "I'm in pain! And I'm wet! And I'm still hysterical!") Well, we've been very refined with our examples here, but we can't resist ending on this exchange from, yes, BACK TO SCHOOL (w Dangerfield et al) -

"Mr. Melon, your wife was just showing us her Klimt." "You too, huh? She's shown it to everybody." "Well, she's very proud of it." "I'm proud of mine too. I don't go waving it around at parties, though." "It's an exceptional painting." "Oh, the painting!"

Corny? Yes. Puerile? Oh, no doubt. But it's also got top rhythm, and it gleefully rides a potentially tired bit of innuendo for all it's worth, staving off Dangerfield's eventual realisation just long enough. This is exactly what we're after here - trash with class! So, we've arrived at the Earth-shattering conclusion that the best sort of dialogue for Rodney Dangerfield to say is, er, Rodney Dangerfield-style wisecracking dialogue. Bit of a waste of time, wasn't it? Still, the scenic route, and all that.

"Let's have another look at the pictures in today's story!" Kyle MacLachlan swots up on his exceptionally tedious family history in preparation for another pointless chunk of expository speech.

Mythical Dairy Council endorsing quote not pictured.

"And to put the old tin lid on it, you stink from arsehole to breakfast time!" Pleasance gets unpleasant in The Caretaker.

Who needs wisecracks when you look this good eh, Burt?

Spaced-out folk freak meets anal Hornby freak - A Mighty Wind's collision of personalities writ small. "Magnificent!"

"Greetings, verbal grapple fans!" Grant and Russell enter the ring for some good old 200-words-per-minute roll-top sassiness.

A one-way conversation with the couch - Woody gets it taped in Manhattan.

Another fragile relationship goes out the window in Husbands and Wives.

Back where we started, Rodney can tame our shrew any time he likes! (In quickfire dialogue terms, you undertsand.)