Daily Dialogue — January 12, 2014
Mother walks into the room and triggers the motion sensor.
Donald Crease: This is what’s in Cosmo’s office. Best motion sensor on the market.
Mother: And watch this.
He breathes in front of the sensor, and it goes off.
Donald Crease: Also responds to thermal differentials.
Martin Bishop: Does this have a happy ending?
Mother: Oh, yeah. We can wrap you in a full-body suit of neoprene, heat-resistant rubber. Or we can raise the temperature in Cosmo’s office to 98.6 degrees — which is probably what we’ll have to do, because the neoprene would suffocate you. Either way, you’ve got a top speed of two inches per second. Any faster than that… [alarm beeps] …and, uh, big guys with guns. But you’ll probably do fine.
Martin Bishop: Since when am I the one who’s…
Mother: This is the same model answering machine that Janek used for the shell of his box, now that’s what you’ll be carrying across the room at two inches per second. I got that for you because I figured you’d just, you know, want to practice. Remember to go real slow!
Martin Bishop: Slow. [looks at Crease]
Donald Crease: You get all the fun stuff…
— Sneakers (1992), written by Phil Alden Robinson and Lawrence Lasker & Walter F. Parkes
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Explain the mission, suggested by Shaula Evans.
Trivia: ‘Prof. Len Adleman’ is one of the three mathematicians who invented the RSA (he’s the “A”) cryptosystem, currently the preeminent method of encrypting any form of data in the world. Adleman served as a mathematical consultant on the film, and spent several days constructing the slides Janek displays at the college symposium on “unbreakable codes” (which took Adleman a considerable amount of time to create using primitive early-’90s computer graphics technology). In the end, director Phil Alden Robinson had the slides transposed as oil crayon scribbles, on account of the notion that “that’s what a regular mathematician would have done”. Adleman later remarked that this was indeed true and what he would have done, and would have saved him days if only he’d known.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Hard to imagine a caper movie without an explain the mission moment. Since this is basically exposition — laying out facts and information — if you have to do this, make sure the content of the dialogue is compelling.
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