Daily Dialogue — April 25, 2015

“Walker, I’m glad you’re not dead. It’s true, I really am. You ought to kill me. Can’t sleep. Haven’t slept. Keep taking pills. Dream about you. How good it must be… being dead.”

Point Blank (1967), screenplay by Alexander Jacobs and David Newhouse & Rafe Newhouse, novel by Donald E. Westlake

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Betrayal.

Trivia: The house where Walker (Lee Marvin) meets Brewster (Carroll O’Connor) was an actual house in the Hollywood Hills that was rented as a filming location. The Beatles once stayed in this house while visiting L.A. It was the basis for their song “Blue Jay Way”, which is the name of the street on which the house sits.

Dialogue On Dialogue: The draft of the script for Point Blank by Alexander Jacobs, featuring a spare writing style, influenced Walter Hill, which in turn influenced Shane Black as well as a host of action writers in the decades since. You see the lean nature of the writing in the dialogue cited above.