Daily Dialogue — October 13, 2018

Billy Hoyle: What a great no-look pass. The mustard is off the hot dog, you big corn-fed mule you.
Girlfriend: (on sidelines watching her boyfriend losing badly) My man ain’t getting nothing tonight.
Billy Hoyle: Lurch. I looked up basketball player in the dictionary and it said ‘not you’!

— White Men Can’t Jump (1992), written by Ron Shelton

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Basketball. Today’s suggestion by Nathan Eyre.

Trivia: Normally a slow writer, Shelton wrote the first 37 pages of the script in one day. It helped that Shelton already had the basic idea of the movie in mind, and was an L.A. street basketball player himself.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Nathan: “Although he had a big list of his own, Shelton canvassed the actors for “Yo mamma” jokes, many of which were not included to avoid an NC-17 rating. Some of the actors had extensive basketball experience of their own and much of the dialogue in this movie is trash talk — one of the most expressive forms of language there is.”