Ok, but even that instance is way too clean for reality. It’s still small talk, but with extra-dramatic pauses, and cooler lines. I’ll grant that in that case a lot of what perks it up is delivery, but if it’s realistic small talk, it’s at least the best possible realistic small talk. To see what I mean, try taping some small talk and listening to it later. It’ll meander more, it won’t be a nice, discreet chunk that you can get into and out of easily with no context, and it won’t flow as nicely. If it is as good as that scene, you have a future as an improv actor.
Well those are stylistic elements of delivery. Yeah even when characters are making small talk in a film, their lines are clearer, crisper, and more coherent than a lot of what people say in reality. But the point stands that conversations that don’t necessarily advance or relate to the plot can serve the function of making a character seem more real or likeable to the audience.
Has anyone ever tried to challenge this assumption? You’re probably right that it wouldn’t work dramatically, but it would be interesting to know if someone created a movie that didn’t follow this rule.
There’s always Clerks.
I feel a need to point out what my be intuitive to us, with our omnipotent view of the storyline, might not be so obvious to the character in the situation being portrayed.
Of course the biggest example I can think of is Michael from Lost, with his screaming WAAAALT through the jungle and shooting people left and right.
I was talking about what Just Some Guy mentioned:
Clerks had very articulate characters. People don’t talk like that in reality.
Here is a better description. It also answers my own question. I forgot about shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, which sound natural because most of the dialog is improvised.
Take House M.D. for example. No one ever says goodbye or see you later they just walk out of the room. Everyone just hangs up the phone without saying anything, and every time there’s any technical diagnosis they explain it which any intelligent doctor talking to other doctors wouldn’t do. The writers have to cut dialogue or add it to make it a better show realism be damned.
Character development comes in identifying with a person even if you don’t necessarily agree with them. If it’s done well you can agree with both sides of the argument at the same time (the hockey game scene in Chasing Amy is a great example)
Not even Reality TV is reality, few capture what people are really like and I’m not sure that’s all bad.
I’m not asking that characters maintain an absolute fidelity to reality. Movies are an artform and a certain degree of artifice is required. However, there are cases of seriously egregious mischarecterizations which are simply awful by any objective standard. Check into any of the more recent Lost or Heroes threads and it’s full of complaining about how the characterization has been falling apart.
It’s either laziness or deadlines. If you don’t know the writers involved the answer depends on how cynical you’re feeling.
Sorkin never finished a West Wing script on time, but he created four of the best seasons of drama on network television. It’s a difficult task to accomplish when you’re on a network deadline.
OK, I’ll bite. Why can’t people write out the whole season’s script well in advance so that the deadline is not an issue? Do they have to dynamically change the script according to the whims of the viewing audience?
I do a lot of comedic writing and I found that when characters change, it’s often a result of too many writers. Often in comedy writers will throw away contiuity if they can get a good joke out of it.
The writers for “I Love Lucy,” have said (I read in a book about them) that you can do unrealstic parts so long as the entire reason for those unrealistic parts are real. In this instance, they were referring to Lucy being able to put on a mustache and pass as a man, and the audience will accept this, which never would happen in real life, so long as as the motovation, (Lucy’s curiosity to see a stag party) is believable.
Bob Denver says unrealism isn’t a problem as long as the idea isn’t real. He pointed out that they were going to do a bit where the castaways found a trunk of clothes, to explain the wardrobes of the Howells, Mary Ann and Ginger, then he said “The more we thought about it, we decided who needs that, it’s just a silly TV show anyway.”
I think today’s problem is there are too many writers and they don’t learn the history of the character. Also TV has one poor rule, that is “Don’t use two characters to do what one can do.” So let’s say they have a character trait they REALLY want to use but it doesn’t fit in with an established character. Instead of bringing in a new character, they assign that odd character trait to a regular, even though that trait isn’t right. If the bit goes over well, it now becomes part of that character and stays with them. Along comes another writer who doesn’t know it should a one time bit and writes the character that way. If the actor, who plays character, doesn’t speak up about it not fitting the character, it gradually gets assigned to him
I’m not sure if it’s been done on television, but it sure has for stage, and it’s fucking exhausting as an actor. It’s incredibly hard to do and make it sound natural AND get across the important stuff.
In college I did Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (shoot me now!) and she put marks into the script to indicate where overlapping dialogue should overlap. Pages 9 and 10 in the Actor’s Script you can see here explain the system. It is brilliant writing, which, if you paced it right, made it so that you hear the important bits of Line One, then a bunch of garbled gibberish useful for it’s emotion, with a few important words or phrases that make it out intelligibly before hearing the end of Line Two. It was almost like singing, the timing was that delicate.
If you mess it up, it sounds terrible AND the audience misses crucial information. This makes Churchill’s plays both great teaching pieces and potentially dreadful college theater productions. (The fantasy and nonlinear plotting of Top Girls don’t help the audience one bit, I have to say.) I love her work, but it took me six weeks of rehearsals and study before I was able to understand what the heck was going on in terms of plot, nevermind theme and character.
David Mamet’s probably the most famous playwright doing naturalistic dialogue, and you can see examples of his style in *Oleana *(which is on VHS, don’t know if it made it to DVD) with Bill Macy, one of Mamet’s pets, and a very wonderful actor at this style. I’ve noticed “Mametian” dialogue in some of his more well known movies, but not so much as in *Oleana *(which came from the stage.)
Generally, I think most television writing is still done with the idea that you have to spoon feed everything to your audience, so this sort of dialogue hasn’t been tried much. It’s too easy to confuse people and then they turn the channel.