{"id":28865,"date":"2016-04-17T22:35:13","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28865"},"modified":"2016-04-17T22:35:13","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:35:13","slug":"the-pop-of-king-lines-to-live-by","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-lines-to-live-by\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: Lines to live by"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a> One night not too long ago, I agreed to do an appearance for a film society in upstate New York. They were showing Cujo, one of my favorites among the films made from my books and stories. They took me out to dinner beforehand (if you don\u2019t take a fee\u2014which I usually don\u2019t\u2014the best things about these gigs are good talk and free chow), and the older gentleman on my left began mourning that films had lost their language. He claimed that in what he called \u201cthe age of the director,\u201d the screenwriter has become almost dispensable, and there are no more great cinema lines. As examples of great lines he cited \u201cPlay it, Sam\u201d and \u201cWe\u2019ll always have Paris\u201d from Casablanca, \u201cFrankly, my dear, I don\u2019t give a damn\u201d from Gone With the Wind, and \u201cOh, Auntie Em, there\u2019s no place like home!\u201d from The Wizard of Oz.I didn\u2019t bother telling him that last one had moss on it long before moving pictures were invented, because I took his point, and could have added a dozen more of my own from Hollywood\u2019s supposed golden age (I\u2019d begin with \u201cRosebud!\u201d from Citizen Kane and end with \u201cIt was beauty killed the beast\u201d from the original King Kong). But I don\u2019t agree that there are no more great lines. Between you and me, I think I might have been sitting next to a gent who had grown a little deaf to them.<\/p>\n

I have a theory that Americans fall into two groups: those who are passionate about movies and those who aren\u2019t. Those who are live in families that develop a whole stock of great lines, a kind of inner slanguage that helps to trace a family\u2019s growth just as accurately (and sometimes just as poignantly) as old videotapes or Kodaks in a scrapbook. My own kids are now grown up, but they\u2019re still passionate about the movies, and when I asked them for some of their favorite lines from childhood, they were more than happy to comply.<\/p>\n

So here come some lines that track the history of my family. I\u2019m curious to know if any of these resonate with you\u2014if they call up the sort of memories we more ordinarily associate with photographs or pop music. If they do, would you write and say so? And if these aren\u2019t the ones that do the trick for you, which ones do? Please let me know.<\/p>\n

One caveat about the short list of King family picks: I\u2019ve arbitrarily excluded most \u201cpunch-out lines\u201d\u2014ones made to be repeated, crafted as carefully and cynically as advertising slogans. Ergo, no \u201cHasta la vista, baby,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m the king of the world,\u201d or \u201cHeeee-eeeere\u2019s… Johnny!\u201d It probably would be fair to add \u201cAhhh\u2019ll be bock,\u201d from the Terminator series; that one, I\u2019m convinced, became a punch-out line purely by accident (the accident being Arnold\u2019s one-of-a-kind accent). Here goes:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re gonna need a bigger boat.\u201d Roy Scheider, in Jaws. It\u2019s the shocked, wide-eyed delivery that makes the line a classic.
\n\u201cFredo, you broke my heart!\u201d Al Pacino to John Cazale, in The Godfather, Part II. (In the days before our good old Welsh corgi died, our youngest son sometimes used to give him a sturdy hug and say, \u201cMarlowe, you broke my snout.\u201d)
\n\u201cE.T., phone home.\u201d Of course.
\n\u201cI love the way you wear that hat.\u201d Ned Beatty, in Deliverance. I taught this one to the kids. Beatty\u2019s deadpan delivery still cracks me up every time.
\n\u201cSome folks call it a sling blade; I call it a Kaiser blade.\u201d Billy Bob Thornton. I sometimes think Sling Blade is nothing but good lines.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re the man now, dog!\u201d A jubilant Sean Connery, in Finding Forrester. Really about the only good thing about this movie… but it\u2019s very good.
\nThe Die Hard punch-out line everyone knows is \u201cYippie-ki-yay [expletive deleted],\u201d of course, but the one the kids and I went around saying to each other for years was \u201cOh my God, the quarterback is toast.\u201d
\n\u201cMichael could.\u201d Tom Hanks, responding to Paul Newman\u2019s exclamation that \u201cNone of us will see heaven,\u201d in Road to Perdition.
\n\u201cAnd… the flowers are still standing.\u201d Bill Murray, in Ghostbusters.
\n\u201cWhy am I Mr. Pink?\u201d Steve Buscemi, whining in Reservoir Dogs.
\n\u201cWe all have it comin\u2019.\u201d Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven\u2014a much better, truer line than the Dirty Harry make-my-day thing.
\n\u201cAre you not entertained?!\u201d Russell Crowe, in Gladiator.
\n\u201cGet away from her, you bitch!\u201d Sigourney Weaver, in Aliens. Now, you could argue this is a punch-out line, written expressly for you to tell your friends so they\u2019ll want to go see the movie, but all the other lines I\u2019ve got here are said by men. My daughter-in-law says guys get all the memorable lines in movies; the women are just there to look babelicious\u2014and this little list suggests she might be right. But maybe when you send in your favorite movie lines she\u2019ll be proved wrong. Fire away.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One night not too long ago, I agreed to do an appearance for a film society in upstate New York. They were showing Cujo, one of my favorites among the films made from my books and stories. They took me<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28865","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28865"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28869,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28865\/revisions\/28869"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}