Malibu Fire: An actor on dialogue
And Happy New Year!
First… Welcome to 2025! It was a tough Fall for me with my dog having surgery and then an intense hospital stay on a different issue, trying to figure out how to deal with my cat’s chronic respiratory issues, my own health issues (which aren’t nearly as interesting as my animals)…
But it’s a new year and time for new tales from the trenches etc. So without further ado —
Dialogue drives my students crazy. It drives most writers crazy, to tell the truth. Characters often end up all sounding alike… and sounding just like the writer! It’s tough to teach, and I’ve developed a few activities for my classes over the years, but they all come from what I learned on one of my first Diagnosis Murder episodes.
It was a rewrite of a freelance script titled Malibu Fire that was about, duh, fires in Malibu. My showrunners had a real love of stunt casting once in a while. We brought in various Star Trek people for one episode, several actors from the Happy Days universe, former TV spies, folks from various iterations of M.A.S.H.
This time they channelled the 1970s show Emergency! which was about a fire station, EMTs, and an ER. From that cast we got Randolph Mantooth, Kevin Tighe’s daughter, Robert Fuller, and I assume a couple of others I don’t remember now.
I didn’t do much to the plot, but there was one scene I worked hard on between a father played by Randy Mantooth and his teenage daughter (who spoiler alert! turned out to have set the fire).
We were in fact on location in Malibu where coincidentally there was actually that week. We got some great B-roll of flames coming over the hills, which was only marginally terrifying and is beside the point.
Anyway, I went to a little store to watch that scene. The two actors were terrific, the dialogue flowed beautifully, no one went up on their lines, the emotions were deeply felt. Even the crew was silent, and there was a smattering of applause and head nods when they finished. Rare praise!
I was one proud writer.
Two days later, we were back on the stage. I had said something to the showrunners about the scene, and Lee took me down to meet Randy Mantooth. I thanked him for the great work, including no forgotten lines.
Then he said something that has always stuck with me: “It’s easy for an actor to memorize lines when it sounds like real people are talking and not just a writer writing.”
Fast forward a few years later and one of my last on-set producing episodes. I had a migraine and was buried under a pile of coats in the wardrobe trailer when the first AD dragged in a hapless actor who was having trouble getting through his lines.
I wasn’t terribly surprised. The poor actor was tasked with being a mustache-twirling baddie whose lines were a constant stream of cliched villainous hyperbole. And that particular spot was almost a full page monologue. I hated that script.
I had the actor do the scene, and he got stuck moving from the first paragraph to the second one. Instead, he wanted to jump to the third.
The AD said that’s where he always got stuck.
“Hand me the sides.” The AD passed the script pages over.
I glared at the offending words and remembered Randy Mantooth. So I pulled my ubiquitous pencil from my pocket, crossed out the middle paragraph, and told him to do it again without that paragraph. He nailed it. I sent the sides, the bemused AD (who had seen me do stuff like that before), and a delighted actor back to the set.
Never forget, I told myself, actors are part of the process and have a world of experience with words.
Then I crawled back under the coats, grateful for the fires of Malibu.
Image from Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/11786007@N07/32530204201