Spring Break Story Stub 3
So I wanted to use dialog. Then I thought about doing it all in dialog. Then I somehow thought about the dead parrot sketch.
"Why don't you add some dialog?"
"I don't know how to write dialog. I'm no good at it. My characters always come off as wooden, unfeeling, you know?"
"You're a screenwriter who can't write dialog? You've got a backup job lined up, right?"
"I was hoping to only write art films, you know? Things where the cinematography carries the story with very little speech from the actors. Or action films, you know? Lots of effects and big good versus evil plots where the longest bit of talking is the bad guy badly delivering a long-winded monologue about what a badass he is. Maybe the main character could be almost silent through the whole thing, and people will think he's deep."
"Like 'No Country for Old Men'?"
"Yeah, exactly! Tommy Lee Jones was like the only character who talked in that movie."
"Not a bad idea. Small problem, though."
"What?"
"'No Country for Old Men' had a story. You? You've got nothing. You've got a story about a man trying to get a refund for a parrot he bought, which turned out to be deed. You spend five pages describing the man's life up to the purchase of the parrot, two describing his agony at the parrot's unfortunate lack of vitality, and another page describing the thought processes leading up to the decision to tray and return the parrot. Once that difficult mental climb has been achieved, you spend two pages describing the train ride back to the pet shop, three pages describing the street the pet shop is on, and another page describing the pet shop clerk's general appearance and state of dress. You only reach the first line of dialog after nearly twenty pages of description, twenty pages that feel like 50 and read like an armadillo swimming through molasses. It is possible that I have read drearier description, but if so it was in a textbook on government accounting practices of the previous century.
"To top it off, when the dialog is actually reached, it consists of three lines that basically say 'I need a refund for this parrot, it is dead', 'That is indeed a dead parrot, how sad, here is your refund', and 'Thank you.' The story ends with the man going home and spending twenty pages of description mentally contemplating the role of money in society, the meaning of life, and whether the refund for a dead parrot is enough to buy a dolphin. You've created a script that spends more time detailing the feathers on a dead parrot than some scripts spend setting the location for the entire film. Reading this thing was like having teeth pulled by a chimp with ADD and without the use of anesthetic. I thought about burning it, but was afraid of the demons of death by boredom I would inevitably release!"
"Right. So what are you saying?"
"Have you thought about going into advertising?"