The World of Raymond Chandler by Raymond Chandler

Author:Raymond Chandler [Chandler, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35237-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

I don’t think any of the changes made were in conflict with your basic conception. In fact, you would have had to make them yourself. I do not doubt that some of them might have been made better, but they had to be made.

A curious matter I’d like to call to your attention … is your dialogue. Nothing could be more easy and natural and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn’t quite play. We tried it out by having a couple of actors do a scene right out of the book. It had a sort of remote effect that I was at a loss to understand. It came to me then that the effect of your written dialogue is only partly sound and sense. The rest of the effect is the appearance on the page. These unevenly shaped hunks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen this is all lost and the essential mildness of the phrasing shows up as lacking in sharpness. They tell me that is the difference between photographic dialogue and written dialogue. For the screen everything has to be sharpened and pointed and wherever possible elided. But of course you know far more about it than I do.

—Letter to James M. Cain—March 20, 1944

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