And now, here he is -- the man whose words steer the ship of this Golden State of ours, the governor of California ... William Wisher!
Stop! Cut! Who?
Advertisement
It's Popcorn Politics, and a Movie-Dazed Public Eats It Up
Commentary | PATT MORRISON
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday August 04, 2004 Home Edition California Part B Page 15 Editorial Pages Desk 1 inches; 72 words Type of Material: Correction
Movie quotes -- In a July 28 commentary on movies and politics, Jack Haley was incorrectly credited with singing "If I Only Had a Brain" in "The Wizard of Oz"; it was Ray Bolger. And the movie line "Go ahead, make my day" came not from "Dirty Harry" but from "Sudden Impact" (written by Charles B. Pierce, Earl E. Smith, Joseph C. Stinson; characters created by Harry Julian Fink and R.M. Fink).
Advertisement
Down, boys. Arnold Schwarzenegger is still governor. But some of his bring-down-the-house zingers, exported from Hollywood to Sacramento, were written for him by Wisher and director James Cameron, who together crafted the scripts for "Terminator" 1 and 2.
Statecraft by screenplay: "Hasta la vista, baby." "Terminate them." "I'll be back." And now "girlie men," lifted from an old "Saturday Night Live" sketch and slapped onto the California Legislature like a bumper sticker. (I tried to find out which "SNL" wit concocted "girlie men," but it seems lost in the mists of the 1980s.)
If Wisher got residuals every time Schwarzenegger threatened to "terminate" some budget proposal or the legislator proposing it, he could outsource writer's block, should he ever have any.
I asked Wisher how he liked being the "shadow governor," and he just laughed. He likes Schwarzenegger, likes what he's doing in Sacramento, and the movie-script vocabulary "is how people know him.... He takes that language with him." What worked for Schwarzenegger in films, Wisher said, "works for him in politics. He's got heavy lifting to do, and if borrowing the language of films is going to help him out, I think it's a smart thing to do."
Time was, politicians cribbed from one another, or at least from foreigners or dead guys. Now they lift lines that screenwriters crafted for movie characters.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: "You ain't seen nothin' yet." (Alfred A. Cohn for "The Jazz Singer,'' the first "talkie," which is why it was originally "You ain't heard nothin' yet.")
Ronald Reagan: "Go ahead, make my day." (Harry Julian, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner for "Dirty Harry.")
George Bush I: "Read my lips." (Authorship disputed -- either another Eastwood film or speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Also the title of a 2002 French film, so let's not go there.)
John Kerry, about George W. Bush, and Bush, about Iraqi insurgents: "Bring it on." (Not a sound bite, but the title of a movie about dueling cheerleaders and a good description of the way we've abandoned government by process for government by pep rally.)
