Daily Dialogue — August 6, 2012

Louie: Five bucks.

Frankie Machine: Last time it was two.

Louie: That was more than six months ago before you went away. They keep raising the price on me.

Frankie Machine: I keep doing that, I’d have to find something to take its place.

Louie: The monkey is never dead, Dealer. The monkey never dies. When you kick him off, he just hides in a corner, waiting his turn.

Frankie Machine: The monkey will die waiting. He ain’t climbing up on my back no more. Never again. I mean it.

Louie: Sure. Sure.

— Louie (Darren McGavin), Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra), The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), screenplay by Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer and Ben Hecht (uncredited), from the novel by Nelson Algren

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is drug deals suggested by Jonathan Webb. Today’s suggestion by Teddy Pasternak.

Trivia: Ray Bradbury turned down offers to collaborate on the screenplay, along with the screenplay for Anatomy of a Murder, which Bradbury claimed was $200,000 worth of work. Bradbury said of the refusal “I don’t give a goddamn about drugs; it bores the hell out of me. I don’t understand the people who take them. So why would I write a screenplay? I’d get a writer’s block immediately.”

Dialogue On Dialogue: There is often an emotional subtext to drug dealing scenes, the physical addiction of the buyer implicit in their words.