Daily Dialogue — June 2, 2018

Butch: What was the matter with the old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful.
Guard: People kept robbing it.

Butch starts to walk away across the street to a barn of a building with a sign outside: “Macon’s Saloon”. In the middle of the street, he turns and stares back at the bank. It is new, and functional, and ugly, and squat, and built like a tank.

Butch [yells at guard]: That’s a small price to pay for beauty.

— Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1960), written by William Goldman.

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Bank.

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.

Dialogue On Dialogue: These are the opening lines of the movie. It’s not only funny due to the irony that the robbers included Butch himself. It’s also the first in several references to the changing times which is a central theme of the movie: Times ARE changing… but Butch and Sundance cannot make the transition into the present.