Fun_People Archive
4 Jun
Who would like to pass this on to Brad Fraser and Quentin Tarantino?

Date: Sun,  4 Jun 95 11:36:08 PDT
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Who would like to pass this on to Brad Fraser and Quentin Tarantino?

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: thorntn@cc.umanitoba.ca (Duncan Thornton)
Forwarded-by: qotd-request@ensu.ucalgary.ca (Quote of the day)

"Let us suppose that in _The School for Scandal_, Sheridan had decided
that Sir Peater Teazle had called in two ruffians who beat up Lady Teazle
so that she fell, bleeding and senseless. Or, that in _Pride and
Prejudice_, Mr Bennet, unable to endure Mr Collins any longer, had knocked
his brains out with a paperweight. Neither the play nor the novel would
be a classic but only a curiosity, known to a few scholars. But what I am
doing now, just being silly? Not at all. I am offering a little advice to
the new playwrights and novelists. If they are creating plays and novels
about violence and crime, well and good. But if they are writing plays an
novels, for example, that are concerned with why Henry and his father
misunderstand each other, they must avoid scenes so violent that we want
to scream for a doctor and the police. Once we are shot into this
atmosphere, the subtleties of personal relationships, pyschological lights
and shadows, diminish and probably disappear. I admit that men of genius,
working on a great scale, have successfully taken us from one atmosphere
into another.  But, still advising new playwrights and novelists, I would
suggest they assume they are not men of genius, about to work on a great
scale. Even the geniuses were nearly always cautious at first."
		-- J.B. Priestley:

© 1995 Peter Langston