Great Scene: “Night Shift”

One of the classic 80’s comedies is Night Shift (1982), written by the prolific screenwriting team Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, and directed by Ron Howard. And if asked if you remember one scene from that movie, it’s most likely this one: The “prostitution” scene, where Bill Blazejowski (a tremendous comic performance by Michael Keaton) attempts to sell a group of hookers on this idea: Use the night shift at the city morgue to run a prostitution ring. Here’s the scene:

I don’t have the script, but here’s a transcript of the dialogue:

What are we really talking about here? What’s the essence of what we’re talking about? I’ll spell it out for you. PROSTITUTION! Hey, we can say. We’re big kids now. A lot of times, it really helps to understand a word if you break it down, so let’s do that now, shall we? Pros… it doesn’t mean anything, you can forget about that… Tit, I think we all know what that means, Tu, two tit and TION of course, from the Latin to shun… to say uh-uh, no thank you anyway I don’t want it, to push away… it doesn’t even belong in this word really, so let’s get rid of that.

I think writers appreciate the inspiration behind this scene even more than most because it finds the humor by breaking down — a word.

[Originally posted September 11, 2009]

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