Drawing inspiration from real life: Dishwashing
This is a fun story. We’ve all heard the old adage about writers drawing inspiration from real life. In this LA Times article, Jenny Lumet, screenwriter of the recently released movie Rachel Getting Married, recounts how she came up with the idea of that movie’s dishwashing scene:
“RACHEL Getting Married,” a new movie from director Jonathan Demme and starring Anne Hathaway, opened this month and quickly became a surprise hit. In the film, Hathaway plays a recovering drug addict who’s released from rehab to join her sister’s raucous Connecticut wedding.
Another surprise came for screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney Lumet, who didn’t foresee tapping into a widespread obsession with loading the dishwasher.
A crucial scene in “Rachel” involves a dishwasher-loading contest, in which the father of the bride and the bridegroom battle against the clock to discover who has the better dishwasher-loading moves. According to Jenny Lumet, the scene is based on an event she witnessed in the late 1970s, when she was 11.
The legendary, late choreographer Bob Fosse was hanging out at the Lumets’ New York apartment. “Bob was this glamorous, elegant guy,” she said. “He was dressed all in black, with his sweater over his shoulders, smoking a cigarette.” Sidney projected a different image. “My father was usually wearing a sweatsuit stained with vinaigrette.”
Fosse watched Sidney load the dishwasher. At one point Fosse said, “You know, if you put the containers from Zabar’s [the New York gourmet shop] in the top rack, you’ll have 10% more room for other stuff in the bottom.”
Sidney’s reaction came swiftly and in the form of a classic unprintable command. Jenny recalled that for the next hour, the two men loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, testing the Fosse technique for dishwasher loading.
“It was really disturbing,” she said, caught unawares by the fact that grown men could become so combative about a mundane domestic task. Who would imagine that two serious American artists could also be dishwasher geeks?
I imagine an event like that would make quite an impression on an 11 year-old girl, especially given the fact that the participants were Sydney Lumet and Bob Fosse. Beyond that, it’s instructive for writing because dishwashing is one of those perfect ‘bits of business’ around which you can construct a scene: In the External World, you’ve got characters washing dishes, arguing about what should get stacked where, but in the Internal World, the subtext and intention of the character’s words and actions, that can be about something else altogether — old emotional wounds, present tensions, an opportunity to make a confession.
I’ve got a dishwashing story. When I was about 10, my family lived at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. My mother had let it be known that she really wanted a dishwashing machine for Christmas. My father bought a portable one and stored it in our friend’s garage across the street in order to surprise Mom on Christmas morning. So on Christmas Eve, late at night, with the temperature about minus twenty degrees, my brother, father and I donned our winter gear, trudged over to that garage, then rolled that dishwasher across the icy street into our house. It was such an absurd moment that we all started laughing, then trying to shoosh each other — sound carries amazingly well when it’s that cold — which only caused us to laugh that much more. The payoff was well worth it as Mom was surprised on Christmas morning by the sight of a dishwasher next to the tree.
Each of us has an enormous reservoir of memories from which we can pull ‘bits of business’ to use in our stories.
How about you? Any dishwashing sagas?