Over on Adam-Troy Castros page he posted a pet peeve of his regarding Aaaron Sorkins writing. Heres my take on the points he raised, that too many of Sorkins characters take off on a bit of dialogue and end up makings speeches to each other. Im more forgiving of that flaw than others, I guess, because to me his speeches are really good. However, Ill also point out that his three TV shows--Sports Night, West Wing, and The Newsroom--along with films like A Few Good Men and Charlie Wilsons War revolve a lot around people in different levels of authority, a program director v. sports anchors, from The President down to interns in the West Wing, and the hierarchy in the show under discussion. Usually his character speeches, tend to be (roughly) broken into two types, Im your boss, so Im going to talk and youre going to listen, and OK. now Im going to shut up and tell me exactly whats on your mind. Now, this is about as far away from, say, Howard Hawks, whose hallmark was having characters talking over each other. In American President, Misery, and the Social Network, there were fewer instances of that. Now, IMHO, Sorkin hangs a lantern on the reality that TV/Film dialogue isnt like real life. Look at most shows from NCIS to Once Upon A Time all the way back to Magnum P.I. to Highway Patrol back to . . . ? as far back as you want to go, and youre see that TV dialogue isnt real dialogue. Take a show like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, and youll see that Steve Bochco also did what Sorkin does, but the speeches are shorter; Bochoco love pith. Real life dialogue includes repetition, disfluencies ( place holders like you know, ah, right? whats it called? yes? no? get it?), bad grammar, correcting ones self, interruptions, tangents, non-verbals (coughing, swallowing, burping, sneezing, etc.) sentence fragments, non-sequential self-interrupts (staring a list of things, going to a second list, remember something from the first list you forgot, which is sort of recursive), and a host of other things our brains tune out in real life and we wouldnt abide in drama. My editor once commented me on how real my dialogue read. I didnt bother to debate the point, and took it as a complement. My linguistics courses paid off, I guess, because I did literary dialogue (avoiding all the real life stuff above and more) yet made him think it sounded real. I think I do very good dialogue, but I am in awe of Sorkin, especially his work on West Wing. Well, this is going on longer than I intended, and Im not really trying to debate ATC, who is more than adequately gifted and experience to justify his own perspective on the subject, but simply trying to explain my POV and why its different.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 20:23:00 +0000
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