I said before that too many of the things that happened to me seem like I made them up. I also pointed out that I wish I had made them up. I am an excellent writer but I can’t “plot,” which means I can’t make up stories and become a writer of novels.
But I finally figured out why so many of the things real people in real situations say to me sound like they come out of movie scripts. The reason they sound like they came out of movie scripts is because they DID come out of movie scripts.
In the 1920s and thirties, they made a lot of gangster movies. John Dillinger was killed while he was walking out of the theater after watching one of them.
I was watching a documentary that pointed out that gangsters who saw those movies actually tried to model themselves after the gangsters in the movies. Today’s gangster show, “The Sopranos,” shows Tony Soprano’s gang constantly quoting and acting like characters in the movie, “The Godfather.”
One example of real people using movie language has haunted me through the years, until I realized the fact that reality often follows movie scripts.
I was in a big city election, and the Republicans decided that black militants, since they were in competition with the respectable black “leaders” who are slavish liberal Democrats, might be willing to ally with conservative Republicans.
That is an excellent theory, but Yuppie Republicans can’t carry it out, as you will see.
So the Republicans got in contact with some black militants. The blacks militants insisted that the Republicans go into the ghetto at night for a talk. The blacks wanted to impress them, so they wanted the thing on their turf.
I, of course, insisted on going along. I told the Yuppies that I would sit quietly and listen. I fully intended to do just that.
Well, the Republican delegation got to the black headquarters, and they were sure as hell impressed.
It looked like a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie. There were fully automatic weapons in plain sight. The Republicans were in coats and ties, the blacks were in “tough” clothes.
No Republican said a word. A black guy was talking fast.
Finally the only redneck the Republicans had with them started talking back.
A buddy of mine in Washington, who shared a coat-and-tie job with me, once said, “What scares me about Whitaker is that any time we get on an elevator or we’re walking down the street, he picks the biggest, meanest looking black around us and starts talking with him.”
So since the rest of the crowd I came with seemed to have developed laryngitis, I talked.
As we were riding back, the Yuppies who were supposed to do the talking at the meeting finally started talking again. I asked them why they didn’t say anything. One of them said, “You started ARGUING with that guy. I was just hoping to get out of there alive!”
Actually, I wasn’t arguing. We were talking loud and our conversation didn’t sound suburban, but it was friendly enough.
Now comes the movie line. The black spokesman call the next day and said he wanted to get together again. He wanted to talk to Whitaker. The Republican on the phone, who had heard about that encounter, asked why Whitaker? Whitaker had been the disagreeable one.
The black guy said “He’s a white MAN. We can talk to him.”
Unfortunately no one in our camp was interesting in a second encounter, so the thing died there.
When I tell this story, that last line always bothers me: “He’s a white man. We can talk to him”
It sounds like a line from a movie. Nobody would believe it.
I now realize it WAS a movie line. The black guy used a line he had seen or heard somewhere. I don’t feel so stupid telling the story now.
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