Daily Dialogue — November 12, 2015

The Ghost: Well don’t tell me you’re going to read it now.
Richard Rycart: Not all of it, just the beginning. There’s something very important about it.
The Ghost: Yeah, it’s the cure for insomnia.

— The Ghost Writer (2010), screenplay by Robert Harris & Roman Polanski

The Daily Dialogue theme for the month: Writers and Writing.

Trivia: Writer Robert Harris is a former BBC TV reporter and political columnist who actively supported Tony Blair until the Iraq War, which Harris felt was a mistake. Blair resigned June 26, 2007, spurring Harris to drop his other work to write The Ghost, which was published Sept. 26. Similarities between Blair and Adam Lang, Cherie Blair and Ruth Lang, Hatherton and Halliburton, etc., are clearly intentional. Mo Asumang appears briefly as a Condoleezza Rice look-a-like Secretary of State in a photo op with Lang.

Dialogue On Dialogue: In case you missed the movie, here is the plot summary: “A ghostwriter hired to complete the memoirs of a former British prime minister uncovers secrets that put his own life in jeopardy.” Similar in spirit to Three Days of the Condor — “A bookish CIA researcher finds all his co-workers dead, and must outwit those responsible until he figures out who he can really trust” — only Turner (Robert Redford) wasn’t a writer, but a reader.