WHAT'S ON YOUR DESK?

BARTON FINK
(1991)

Written by:
Joel Coen
Ethan Coen


Starring:
John Turturro
Judy Davis
John Goodman


It's 1941, and a New York
intellectual playwright goes to Hollywood to write the screenplay
 for a wrestling movie.

 

SAY WHAT? Misused Words

i.e. [id est] - that is.
     We finally learned the truth, i.e., he squawked like a goose.

e.g. [exempli gratia] - for example.
     She was always doing for the neighborhood, e.g., she shopped, she mended, she delivered and embellished gossip.

A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING

In the early fifties, a young writer of the hit TV comedy "Your Show of Shows" found himself divorced and homeless. To hold down expenses, he and a recently-divorced friend moved in together. But it was a short honeymoon. Soon the differences in their personalities were so stark and their reactions so tense, the comedy writer did the only thing he knew how: he laughed. This, he thought, would make a great play!

He began the script but due to writer's block and other factors in his stressful life, he couldn't stay with it. Eventually, he handed it to his kid brother, who was also a writer, and asked him to give it a go. The kid brother sat down with pen and paper and went to work.

When The Odd Couple appeared on Broadway in March of 1965, Neil Simon was already a fairly well-known playwright. Directed by Mike Nichols, the play ran for 966 performances and won several Tony Awards, including Best Play.

But that was only the beginning. The unforgettable pair of mismatched roommates, Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, was about to help turn him into the most commercially successful playwright in the history of theatre.

"Who among us," Simon said, "sometime in his life, hasn't shared living quarters with another human being? It didn't matter whether they liked each other or not. Eventually their silent anger became audible, complaining how one whistled in the kitchen, and usually the same awful tune, while the other one claimed control of the TV clicker and blipped through a hundred stations in six seconds constantly through the night? Who hasn't experienced the sheer hatred for the sounds his roommate made while he was eating? The play represented everyone in the world."

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