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EW column
Searching for a few Cleavon Little moments
By MIKE LACKEY
James Garner once said one of the toughest things about being an actor was to rehearse a line over and over, then try to make it sound as if you’d never said it before.
Stephen King makes basically the same point in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, in an article about the greatest movie lines of all time.
The discussion started with an article King wrote several weeks ago for the same magazine, pondering movie lines that resonated in people’s everyday lives and outlived the movies in which they originated — lines like Clint East-wood’s “Make my day” from “Sudden Impact” or Cuba Gooding Jr.’s “Show me the money!” from “Jerry Maguire.”
King asked readers to send in their favorite movie lines, and he was swamped. He expected maybe a couple hundred responses; instead, he got thousands.
King, the best-selling horror novelist and sometimes screenwriter, also received a few brickbats for identifying the lines he quoted with the actors who spoke them, not the writers who wrote them. His explanation, besides the fact he was too lazy to do the research, was that a lot of movies are written by committee and besides, “the greatest line in the world is only so much dead ink unless and until a great actor gives it life.”
Most of the lines recalled in this week’s article were made memorable by great or at least famous actors. Many came out of the mouths of stars on the order of Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro, the vast majority from the likes of Faye Dunaway, Eddie Murphy or Kevin Costner.
That might make a writer wonder whether the actor makes the line or the line makes the actor, but for the most part, King is probably right. It’s often said that a good actor could read the phonebook and make it interesting; it’s also true that good scripts gravitate toward good actors.
But one of the nice things about an exercise like this one is that occasionally a great line will confer a flicker of im-mortality on a worthy actor who might otherwise be forgotten. Think of Strother Martin as the prison camp captain and amateur psychologist in “Cool Hand Luke,” with “What we’ve got here … is failure to communicate.”
Or the too-soon-departed Cleavon Little as the new sheriff in town in “Blazing Saddles”: “Excuse me while I whip this out.”
My two personal favorites didn’t make Entertainment Weekly’s list. Maybe they don’t strike a cord with many peo-ple the way they do with me, but I’ve found them words to live by that have never lost their resonance.
The first was spoken by Robert Duvall to John Wayne in “True Grit”: “I call that bold talk from a one-eyed fat man.” The phrase “bold talk from a one-eyed fat man” was once considered as a standing title for this column, and was used as the headline on one column in 2000.
My other favorite line was spoken by the grizzled, aging Wayne to James Caan in another western, “El Dorado”: “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I could know a girl?”
I thought that was a good line the first time I heard it in 1967. Now that I’m aging, grizzled and not quite as attrac-tive as your average one-eyed fat man, I think it’s a great line.
To an extent, Hollywood provides “additional dialog” for all our lives. Personally, I would have a hard time getting along without lines stolen from movies. I’ve built whole columns around movie lines; earlier this year, I even quoted a snippet from Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” speech from “On the Waterfront” — listed No. 1 on Enter-tainment Weekly’s list of 50 great all-time movie lines.
Everybody wants to be a star, or at least to feel like one once in awhile. We all want to be quicker, wittier and more clever than we really are. The movies help.
After all, we’re all just going through life looking for a few good lines.
By MIKE LACKEY
James Garner once said one of the toughest things about being an actor was to rehearse a line over and over, then try to make it sound as if you’d never said it before.
Stephen King makes basically the same point in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, in an article about the greatest movie lines of all time.
The discussion started with an article King wrote several weeks ago for the same magazine, pondering movie lines that resonated in people’s everyday lives and outlived the movies in which they originated — lines like Clint East-wood’s “Make my day” from “Sudden Impact” or Cuba Gooding Jr.’s “Show me the money!” from “Jerry Maguire.”
King asked readers to send in their favorite movie lines, and he was swamped. He expected maybe a couple hundred responses; instead, he got thousands.
King, the best-selling horror novelist and sometimes screenwriter, also received a few brickbats for identifying the lines he quoted with the actors who spoke them, not the writers who wrote them. His explanation, besides the fact he was too lazy to do the research, was that a lot of movies are written by committee and besides, “the greatest line in the world is only so much dead ink unless and until a great actor gives it life.”
Most of the lines recalled in this week’s article were made memorable by great or at least famous actors. Many came out of the mouths of stars on the order of Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro, the vast majority from the likes of Faye Dunaway, Eddie Murphy or Kevin Costner.
That might make a writer wonder whether the actor makes the line or the line makes the actor, but for the most part, King is probably right. It’s often said that a good actor could read the phonebook and make it interesting; it’s also true that good scripts gravitate toward good actors.
But one of the nice things about an exercise like this one is that occasionally a great line will confer a flicker of im-mortality on a worthy actor who might otherwise be forgotten. Think of Strother Martin as the prison camp captain and amateur psychologist in “Cool Hand Luke,” with “What we’ve got here … is failure to communicate.”
Or the too-soon-departed Cleavon Little as the new sheriff in town in “Blazing Saddles”: “Excuse me while I whip this out.”
My two personal favorites didn’t make Entertainment Weekly’s list. Maybe they don’t strike a cord with many peo-ple the way they do with me, but I’ve found them words to live by that have never lost their resonance.
The first was spoken by Robert Duvall to John Wayne in “True Grit”: “I call that bold talk from a one-eyed fat man.” The phrase “bold talk from a one-eyed fat man” was once considered as a standing title for this column, and was used as the headline on one column in 2000.
My other favorite line was spoken by the grizzled, aging Wayne to James Caan in another western, “El Dorado”: “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I could know a girl?”
I thought that was a good line the first time I heard it in 1967. Now that I’m aging, grizzled and not quite as attrac-tive as your average one-eyed fat man, I think it’s a great line.
To an extent, Hollywood provides “additional dialog” for all our lives. Personally, I would have a hard time getting along without lines stolen from movies. I’ve built whole columns around movie lines; earlier this year, I even quoted a snippet from Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” speech from “On the Waterfront” — listed No. 1 on Enter-tainment Weekly’s list of 50 great all-time movie lines.
Everybody wants to be a star, or at least to feel like one once in awhile. We all want to be quicker, wittier and more clever than we really are. The movies help.
After all, we’re all just going through life looking for a few good lines.
Comments
Also proves that SK likes a far wider variety of movies than I do. Or... it re-emphasizes the age difference between us. ;D
Either way... it was fun.
Thanks!
Anybody willing to list out the top 10 on the list?