Using overheard dialogue
Let’s say I’m at work and I overhear some great dialogue. Can I use it, or should I worry about my co-workers suing me when they hear it in my movie?
– Kobe
via imdb
Use it. Just as a photographer freely captures the visible world with a lens, a writer needs to record not just what people say, but how they say it. Ninety-nine percent of the spoken word is lost forever, which mean you have the liberty, nay, the obligation to poach dialogue from real life.
Just don’t be a dick about it. There’s a moral equivalent of the “fair use” law: don’t take whole speeches, and don’t leave in details that would reveal who the real-life speaker was. Also, keep in mind that certain co-workers might be writers themselves. If Witty Writer says something clever, there’s a good chance she’s going to want to keep it for herself. And she should.
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October 23rd, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Also remember that if a line sounds a little too clever, it is likely that the speaker heard it somewhere else. So you may end up stealing a line from an existing movie without knowing it…
October 23rd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
I once gave a fellow writer my spiel on what’s so great about Great Britain, why not call it “Decent Britain”, or better yet “Not Bad Britain”, etc. etc. I later heard he used it in a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” spec that got him an agent, or a gig, I can’t remember.
October 24th, 2006 at 1:50 am
I edited a script for a director & from the mediocre lines that were on the page, I came up with these great lines/moments, which I decided to keep for myself for use in one of my own scripts: ) I think we all do it, when we hear a great line & the person who delivered it doesn’t realize how great it is, we feel it’s our obligation as writers to let everyone know how great it is. We are all about the sharing:) & a little bit of selfishness.
October 24th, 2006 at 2:47 am
“Just don’t be a dick about it.”
Why don’t more people follow this philosophy?
October 24th, 2006 at 6:14 am
Talking about overheard dialogue, please allow me to tell something that happened yesterday. While I write at nights, I have a day job : I teach French, in France. One of my pupils, half-dumb, started to sing the Chocolate Factory song after the end of my lesson, leaving the classroom as quietly as an elephant, and I swear I cursed the guy who wrote it first place ! See you !
October 24th, 2006 at 8:31 am
“Just don’t be a dick about it.” That’s one of the central tenets of my life.
October 24th, 2006 at 11:33 am
I remember seeing a white Ford Pinto on the freeway years ago. In big block letters, the car owner had painted the phrase “If you hit me, we both explode” on the back of his car. I thought that was hilarious and used in a short story for a fiction writing class. I asked the professor if it was okay for me to use that and he insisted that it was imperative for writers to steal from everyday life, including overheard conversations.
Of course, if that had been Elmore Leonard’s Pinto, I may have been in trouble.
October 24th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
“Elmore Leonard’s Pinto” — that’s a great title for a script. I think I’ll steal that…
October 24th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Yeah, another writer may just want to use it is right: I was at a party in Hollywood a while back, with another friend of mine (who is also a writer) and we were cracking wise and had the entire table breaking up, and one of the other people — an aspiring screenwriter — whipped out her pad and paper and said “Oh, I have to get this down…this is so good.”
No problem, baby. First one’s free.
May 24th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
What about the perfect piece of dialogue you hear in a documentary? Can I use something I hear a real person say in a doc as dialogue in my script?
The character I am considering having speak the lines in question is completely unrecognizable in name, age, occupation, etc, if that matters.