Films › Screenwriting
His Girl Friday
Directed by Howard Hawks, 1940
Charles Lederer's adaptation runs overlapping dialogue at a speed that required overlapping microphones and careful sound staging. Information is repeated inside the overlap so nothing critical is lost at that pace. Gender-swapping the original play turned a newsroom comedy into a screwball romance without changing the plot machinery. It is the best available lesson in writing dialogue that can be spoken over.Hawks reportedly had actors deliver lines a beat early so the overlap felt natural rather than mechanical, a directing choice that only works because the script was engineered for it first. The camera stays mostly static and wide, trusting the actors' timing rather than cutting for rhythm. Sound recordist Edward Bernds had to solve overlapping dialogue capture that most studio setups of the era were not built for. Anyone writing fast dialogue should study how clarity survives at speed.
What to watch for
Watch the phone scenes and note how each key fact is stated more than once.
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