Daily Dialogue — August 13, 2018

Macon: Well, looks like you just about cleaned everybody out, fellah. You haven’t lost a hand since you got to deal. What’s the secret of your success?
Sundance Kid: [pause] Prayer.

— Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), written by William Goldman

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Gambling.

Trivia: William Goldman first came across the story of Butch Cassidy in the late 1950s and researched it on and off for eight years before sitting down to write the screenplay. He later recalled, “The whole reason I wrote the thing, there is that famous line that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, who was one of my heroes: ‘There are no second acts in American lives.’ When I read about Cassidy and Longbaugh and the super posse coming after them, that’s phenomenal material. They ran to South America and lived there for eight years, and that was what thrilled me: they had a second act. They were more legendary in South America than they had been in the old West. It’s a great story. Those two guys and that pretty girl going down to South America and all that stuff. It just seems to me it’s a wonderful piece of material.” Goldman said he wrote the story as an original screenplay because he did not want to do the research to make it authentic as a novel.

NOTE: Goldman sold this project as a spec script. I’ve seen the selling price listed anywhere between $250–400,000. It is arguably the first spec script sale of the modern era.

Dialogue On Dialogue: The gambling scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of my very favorite character introductions in any movie. The camera’s focus is square on Sundance throughout and Redford’s eye movements and facial musculature adds tension second by second. Then Butch enters and attempts to defuse the situation. It ends with a great setup for a later payoff — how Sundance shoots best when he’s in motion.