Paddy Chayefsky

Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky (29 January 1923 – 1 August 1981) was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for writing both adapted and original screenplays.

You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.

Quotes

Television Plays by Paddy Chayefsky (1955)

• CANTOR: And ye shall know Him in the strangest costumes and in the strangest places.
  • TV Play, Holiday Song (1952) (Adapted from a Reader's Digest article titled It Happened on the Brooklyn Subway.) - Act III (p.31) [Page numbers per the Simon and Schuster Inc. 1956 paperback collection of six of Paddy Chayefsky's plays written for television, each of which is followed by the author's comments on the play in question. (These plays are peppered with multitudes of interesting directions showing how an author might write notes within a play for filming to have his intentions more clearly understood.)]

• MR FAULKNER: Give the facts a good look in the face, John.
  • TV Play, Printer's Measure (1953) (A TV play based on a short story Paddy Chayefsky had written in college.) - Act I (p.53)

• MR HEALY: Are the people any wiser than they were a hundred years ago? Are they happier? This is the great American disease, boy! This passion for machines. Everybody is always inventing labor-saving devices. What's wrong with labor? A man's work is the sweetest thing he owns. It would do us a lot better to invent some labor-making devices. We've gone mad, boy, with this mad chase for comfort, and it's sure we're losing the very juice of living.
  BOY: The world changes, Mister Healy. The old things go, and each of us must make peace with the new.
  • TV Play, Printer's Measure - Act III (p.77)

• DAUGHTER: Life doesn't dovetail so nicely . . .
  • TV Play, The Big Deal (1953) - Act II (p.112)

• Now, the word for television drama is depth, the digging under the surface of life for the more profound truths of human relationships. I cannot help but feel that this is where drama is going. People are beginning to turn into themselves, looking for personal happiness. The jargon of introspection has become everyday conversation. The theater and all its sister mediums [i.e. film; TV; books] can only be a reflection of their times, and the drama of introspection is the drama that the people want to see.
  • Paddy Chayevsky's discussion of The Big Deal, titled Television Craft (p.126-132, at p.132)

• TWENTY-YEAR-OLD: I gotta girl, she's always asking me to marry her. So I look at that face, and I say to myself: "Could I stand looking at that face for the resta my life?"
  • TV Play, Marty (1953) - Act III (p.170)

• Most movies, even the good ones, are based upon the extraordinary incident and the exceptional character.
  In writing the stage play, it is necessary to contrive exciting moments of theater.
  Marty and The Mother are bundled together in one discussion because each represents in its own way the sort of material that does best on television. They both deal with the world of the mundane, the ordinary, and the untheatrical. The main characters are typical, rather than exceptional; the situations are easily identifiable by the audience; and the relationships are as common as people. The essence of these two shows lies in their literal reality. I tried to write the dialogue as if it had been wire-tapped. I tried to envision the scenes as if a camera had been focused upon the unsuspecting characters and had caught them in an untouched moment of life.
  • Paddy Chayevsky's discussion of Marty (also discussing The Mother (1954)), titled Two Choices of Material (p.173-179, at p.173)

• Marty was a comment on the social values of our times.
  • Paddy Chayevsky's discussion of Marty, at p.176. [i.e. A main point in Marty being whether a male should pursue a female because of her beauty, or because of the rest of who she is.]

• It is my current belief that the function of the writer is to give the audience some shred of meaning to the otherwise meaningless pattern of their lives. Our lives are filled with endless moments of stimulus and depression. We relate to each other in an incredibly complicated manner. Every fiber of relationship is worth a dramatic study. There is far more exciting drama in the reasons why a man gets married than in why he murders someone. The man who is unhappy in his job, the wife who thinks of a lover, the girl who wants to get into television, your father, mother, sister, brothers, cousins, friends - all these are better subjects for drama than Iago. What makes a man ambitious? Why does one girl always try to steal her kid sister's boy friends? Why does your uncle attend his annual class reunion faithfully every year? Why do you always find it depressing to visit your father? These are the substances of good television drama; and the deeper you probe into and examine the twisted semiformed complexes of emotional entanglements, the more exciting your writing becomes.
  • Paddy Chayevsky's discussion of Marty, at p.178.

CHARLIE: That's what marriage is, Arnold. It's a job. You work at it. You work at it twenty-four hours a day. It's your job to make that person feel happy. You have to sit and think, "How am I going to make that person feel happy?" It's your job to make that other person happy. And, if your girl is halfway decent, she's going to make it her job to make you happy. Then you get to feel, I can depend on this person. And that's love, man. That's the greatest thing in the world. There's nothing like it. Arnold, I don't know how to explain this to you . . . but that's what my wife does for me. She's the one that makes life worth living.

• Nearby is the boss, a man in his thirties. He is bent over a machine, working on it with a screw driver. The boss is really a pleasant man; he works under the illusion, however, that gruffness is a requisite quality of an executive.
  • From Paddy Chayevsky's author direction notes on The Mother (1954). At p.195.

• OLD LADY: I'm sixty-six years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was.
  SON-IN-LAW: Missus Fanning . . .
  OLD LADY; An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what? [She is beginning to cry now] Is this what it all comes to?
  • TV Play, The Mother (1954) - Act III (p.216)

• CHARLIE: That's what marriage is, Arnold. It's a job. You work at it. You work at it twenty-four hours a day. It's your job to make that person feel happy. You have to sit and think, "How am I going to make that person feel happy?" It's your job to make that other person happy. And, if your girl is halfway decent, she's going to make it her job to make you happy. Then you get to feel, I can depend on this person. And that's love, man. That's the greatest thing in the world. There's nothing like it. Arnold, I don't know how to explain this to you . . . but that's what my wife does for me. She's the one that makes life worth living.
  • TV Play, The Bachelor Party (1953) - Act III (p.256)

• The writer [i.e. at rehearsals] should stay away from the actors except to let them know how much he is delighted by them. Actors, like everyone else in show business, need this constant reward. Don't flatter an actor unless he deserves it, but most professional actors, if they are responsive, will give you frequent cause for praise. Other than this, don't meddle with them. Actors will always come up to the writer, if he is around at rehearsals, and try to talk their parts out with him. The writer must refer them to the director. The director has his own idea of how to approach each actor, and advice from the writer will just confuse the actor and diffuse the director's authority.
  • From Paddy Chayevsky's writer discussion of The Bachelor Party, at p.267.

Marty (1955)

You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.

• All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you become a professor of pain.
  • Marty Pilletti.

• You don't like her. My mother don't like her. She's a dog and I'm a fat, ugly man. Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm gonna get down on my knees and I'm gonna beg that girl to marry me.
  • Marty Pilletti.

• I used to adore my old man because he was always so kind. That's one of the most beautiful things I have in my life — the way my father and mother were. And my father was a real ugly man. So it doesn't matter if you look like a gorilla. You see, dogs like us, we ain't such dogs as we think we are.
  • Marty Pilletti.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things.

• I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.
  • Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison.

• You've done the morally right thing. God save us all from people who do the morally right thing. It's always the rest of us who get broken in half.
  • Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison.

• You're forever falling for men on their last nights on furlough. That's about the limit of your commitments, one night, a day, a month. You prefer lovers to husbands, hotels to homes. You'd rather grieve than live.
  • Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison.

• We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on the ministers and generals, or warmongering imperialists, or all the other banal bogeys. It's the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers. The rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, Mrs. Barham, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.
  • Lt. Cmdr. Charles E. Madison.

• There's lots of things I'd die for, Emily; my home, my family, my country. But that's love, not principle.

• War isn't a fraud, Charlie, it's very real. At least that's what you always tried to tell me, isn't it? That we shall never get rid of war by pretending it's unreal? It's the virtue of war that's the fraud, not war itself. It's the valor and the self-sacrifice and the goodness of war that needs the exposing. And here you are being brave and self-sacrificing, positively clanking with moral fervor, perpetuating the very things you detest merely to do "the right thing". Honestly, Charlie, your conversion to morality is really quite funny. All this time I've been terrified of becoming Americanized, and you, you silly ass, have turned into a bloody Englishman
  • Emily Barham

The Hospital (1971)

• Now what in hell am I going to tell this boy Schaefer's parents? That a substitute nurse assassinated him because she couldn't tell the doctors from the patients on the floor?
  • Dr. Bock.

• When I say impotent, I mean I've lost even my desire to work. That's a hell of a lot more primal passion than sex. I've lost my reason for being. My purpose. The only thing I ever truly loved. … We have established the most enormous, medical entity ever conceived and people are sicker than ever! WE CURE NOTHING! WE HEAL NOTHING! The whole goddamn wretched world is strangulating in front of our eyes. That's what I mean when I say impotent. You don't know what the hell I'm talking about, do you?...I'm tired. I'm very tired, Miss Drummond. And I hurt. And I've got nothing going for me anymore. Can you understand that?...And you also understand that the only admissible matter left is death.
  • Dr. Bock.

• It's hard for me to take your despair very seriously, Doctor. You obviously enjoy it so much.
  • Barbara Drummond.

Network (1976)

• I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
  • Howard Beale.

• You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion!

• Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, a football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.

• We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Altered States (1980)

The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real.

• I was in that ultimate moment of terror that is the beginning of life. It is nothing. Simple, hideous nothing. The final truth of all things is that there is no final Truth. Truth is what's transitory. It's human life that is real.
  • Eddie Jessup

• We all live with it. That unbearable terror is what makes us such singular creatures. We hide from it, we succumb to it, mostly we defy it! We build fragile little structures to keep it out. We love, we raise families, we work, we make friends. We write poems...
  • Emily Jessup

External links

• Paddy Chayefsky at IMDb