Daily Dialogue — April 22, 2014

Stansfield Turner: Aliens and robots?
Tony Mendez: Yes sir.
Stansfield Turner: You’re telling me there’s a movie company in Hollywood right now that’s funded by the CIA?
Tony Mendez: Yes sir.
Cyrus Vance: What’s wrong with the bikes again?
Jack O’Donnell: We tried to get the message upstairs — 
Stansfield Turner: You think this is more plausible than teachers — 
Jack O’Donnell: Yes, we do. One, there are no more foreign teachers in Iran.
Tony Mendez: And we think everyone knows Hollywood people. And everyone knows they’d shoot in Stalingrad with Pol Pot directing if it would sell tickets. There are only bad options. It’s about finding the best one.
Stansfield Turner: You don’t have a better bad idea than this?
Jack O’Donnell: This is the best bad idea we have, sir. By far.

— Argo (2012), screenplay by Chris Terrio, based on a book by Tony Mendez and an article by Joshuah Bearman

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Sales Pitch. Today’s suggestion by Michael Corcoran.

Trivia: According to Tony Mendez, the fake production office known as Studio Six was so convincing in the real-life Argo plan that even several weeks after it folded and the Iranian rescue was complete, “we had received twenty-six scripts. One was from Steven Spielberg.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: There’s the sales pitch when you know you have a winning hand. Then there are those where you’ve basically got nothing. Here in Argo, Tony and Jack are working from a position of next to nothing. In this case, the only thing they have for them, other than a crazy scheme, is brutal honesty.

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