Daily Dialogue — August 8, 2016
HISTORIAN: Now we have certain artifacts here, which we date from 1950 to 2000. We’d like any information you can give us on them. Very little exists. For instance (hands Miles a photo).
MILES: Uh, this was Joseph Stalin. He was a communist. I was not too crazy about him. Had, uh, a bad moustache, a lot, uh, of bad habits. This is…this is Bela Lugosi. He was…he was the mayor of New York City for a while. You can see what it did to him there, you know? This is, uh– this is, uh– uh, Charles de Gaulle. He, uh, he was a very famous french chef. Had his own TV show. Showed you how to make souffles and omelets and everything. This, uh, this is Scott Fitzgerald over here, a very romantic writer, big with, um, english majors, college girls, you know, nymphomaniacs. Uh, very well known. This is Chiang Kai-Shek, who I was not too crazy about either. This is Billy Graham– very big in the religion business, you know? He knew God personally. They got him his complete wardrobe. They used to go out on double dates together. He was very big thing. They were romantically linked for a while. This is some girls burning a brassiere. You notice it’s a very small fire. Um, this– I don’t know what that is. That’s a photograph of Norman Mailer. He was a very great writer. He donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School for study. And this, uh– this I can tell you– this is a centerfold from a magazine we used to call Playboy, which, um– These girls didn’t exist in actual life, you know? They were rubberized. You had to blow them up, and then you’d fasten it, and you could spread ointment on them or anything else that you– I’ll just take this and, you know, study it later and give you a full report on it.
— Sleeper (1973), written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Recollection, suggested by Will King who is also responsible for today’s post.
Trivia: Woody Allen originally intended the film to be three hours long, and in two parts. The first part would have him in the present day, coping with life, until his illness. And the second half, would be the futuristic part. But, United Artists rejected this concept.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “Awakened 200 years after going to a hospital for surgery, Miles finds himself in a dystopian world where much knowledge of the twentieth century has been lost. If you found yourself the lone survivor of an earlier age, how tempted might you be to recast history?”