ABSTRACT
Film has certainly had its shining dialogue moments (screen the great screwball comedies for that genre’s hallmark fast-paced, witty dialogue), but it is, first and foremost, a visual medium, so language is often regarded as the bastard child. In screenplays as in life, everybody has a combo plate. And dialogue should reveal a screenwriter characters’ rich combination of character traits. As the two scenes from Erin Brockovich so clearly show, dialogue is a function of character—it flows from who the character is and reveals the character to the audience. It is extremely useful to remember that a screenwriter is creating dialogue and subtext for actors and directors, whose connection to the characters comes more through subtext than text, as Judith Weston explains in The Film Director’s Intuition: Script Analysis and Rehearsal Techniques.
