Cut It Out

When a Hollywood screenwriter gets tired of cliches, it's news. Last week in the Screen Writer, Scenarist Ken Englund (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) begged his colleagues to please avoid:

P: That old cinemusical shot of "the circular iron ladder backstage [with] the chorines descending."

P: Such romantic dialogue as: "Listen, darling, they're playing our song"; "Violets ! Oh darling, you remembered"; "Oh, Keith, darling, look! The stars are so close you could reach out and stir them around"; "Oooh! The bubbles tickle my nose!"

P: The aquatic love scene: "Maureen O'Hara playfully pushes John Payne into the water, dives in and a gay race ensues. Boy & Girl clamber onto the raft. . . . After they get tired laughing, he gives her a hard, intense, libidinous look and seals her mouth with a very long passionate kiss . . . so that the screenwriter won't have to think up any dialogue."

P: The costumed duel-to-the-death in which "the two antagonists lock wrists . . . their sweat-drenched faces only an inch apart . . . and swap talk: 'Norman dog! Anglo-Saxon lilies will grow over thy bones ere yon sun sets!' "

P: The whodunit sequence in which Sidney Greenstreet plays Brahms's Lullaby while he tells Peter Lorre how to rub out Humphrey Bogart.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.