“Uh well, I’ll tell ya, I remember this one time – I’m in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there’s no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone… because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was – it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I’m lookin’ down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can’t even tell now what my altitude is. I know I’m running out of fuel, so I’m thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there’s this uh, there’s this green trail. It’s like a long carpet that’s just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was – it was – it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn’t shorted out, there’s no way I’d ever been able to see that. So uh, you, uh, never know… what… what events are to transpire to get you home.”
Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Apollo 13 (1995), screenplay by William Broyles, Jr.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEl0NsYn1fU]
I love dialogue like this. Done well, telling a story, even allowing for,uh, the character to think as he speaks, it offers character revelation and entertainment value that a prescribed, three-line-max side of dialogue simply cannot do.
It also does a yeoman’s job of foreshadowing the adventure of Apollo 13′s perilous return to earth.
Judy, one of the best aspects of working with historical material is that a writer can often cull great lines of dialogue from actual participants. Not sure if the Daily Dialogue quote is representative of that, however it reads pretty ‘realistic.’