Tag: dialogue

A few of the scenes in this movie were crafted almost entirely through improvisation. (I kind of think of it as the bargain basement Mike Leigh method.) One of these scenes was the so-called “Switch Corporal Client” who comes in expecting a session with his regular mistress only to be put in his least favorite and least well-equipped room with a mistress he’s never seen before.

So when pulling dialogue out of the air, I was presented with a line I didn’t know what to do with. R approaches the client with two options — her hand or the saddest little flogger in the world. He then asks her, “Will you lick your palm?”

Take after take he said this and every time, I’m like, DUDE, no one says that. But he kept putting it in.

Flashforward to my recent rough assembly marathon, and I have a basic rule to keep everything in for the first pass, no matter how much I hate it, no matter how much I want to cut it out. So I get to this line. And I’m like, I’m going to prove once and for all that no one has ever asked anyone to lick their palm before a spanking. Google to the rescue. And sure enough, after looking through about fifty pornographic spanking sites, I have not found one solitary instance of someone asking for this.

So will the line stay in?

Remember at the end of the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch when the owner says:

I got a slug.
Does it talk?
Yeah.

Well, if I can get the delivery to sound like that, it stays in. If not, I’m shaving it off.