Daily Dialogue — November 7, 2015

Tom Oakley: We open outside the largest penitentiary in California. It’s night. It’s raining. A limousine comes through the gate… past demonstrators holding a candlelight vigil. The candles under the umbrellas glow like Japanese lanterns.
Griffin Mill: That’s nice. I haven’t seen that before. That’s good.
Tom Oakley: A lone demonstrator, a black woman, steps in front of the limousine. The lights illuminate her like a spirit. Her eyes fix upon those of the sole passenger. The moment is devastating between them.
Griffin Mill: He’s the D.A. She’s the mother of the person being executed.
Andy Civella: You’re good! (to Tom) I told you he’s good.
Griffin Mill: Go on.
Tom Oakley: The D.A. Believes in the death penalty. And the execution is a hard case. Black, and definitely guilty. The greatest democracy in the world, and 36% of people on death row are black. Poor, disadvantaged black. He swears the next person he sees to die… will be smart, rich and white.
You, me, whoever.
Andy Civella: What a hook! Beauty hook. Cut to the chase.
Tom Oakley: Cut from the D.A. To an up-market suburban neighborhood. A couple have a fight. He leaves in a fit, gets in a car. It’s the same rainy night. The car spins out and goes into a ravine. The body is swept away. When the police examine the car, they find the brakes have been tampered with. It’s murder, and the D.A. decides to go for the big one. He’s going to put the wife in the gas chamber.
Griffin Mill: But the D.A. Falls in love with the wife.
Tom Oakley: Of course! But he puts her in the gas chamber anyway. Then he finds that the husband is alive. That he faked his death. The D.A. Breaks into the prison, runs down death row… but he gets there too late. The gas pellets have been dropped. She’s dead. I tell you, there’s not a dry eye in the house.
Griffin Mill: She’s dead?

— The Player (1992), screenplay by Michael Tolkin based on his novel

The Daily Dialogue theme for the month: Writers and Writing.

Trivia: Writer Michael Tolkin actually had a film company ring him up and try to option Habeus Corpus, the blatantly ludicrous film that is pitched within the movie.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This movie has screenwriters interwoven throughout including studio executive Griffin Mill killing a writer whom he mistakenly believes is stalking him. But I just love this whole subplot with Tom Oakley and his ridiculous movie project. In the scene above, an impromptu pitch to Mill with oodles of subtext running through it considering Mill’s involvement with a murder of his own. I wish I could find the ending of the subplot which features Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts in an hysterical bit, but trust me, it’s worth seeing the movie just to track this particular storyline.