"Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!!". Frank is such a great character because he's unpredictable. We don't know what he's going to say or do which is one way to add a spark to any scene. He lives in his own world, one I don't think even Chuck Norris would want to step into. A world where women dance on top of cars like they're 16 again, even though they're not. (As an aside, I always felt like Tarantino was influenced by these scenes, especially the use of music). As for sugar rush? In college, when was writing my very first script, I would start a pot of coffee around 8pm and finish before going to bed. Lots of cream and sugar. I didn't do this so much to come up with things, but rather to problem solve. See, I knew early on growing up the affects of sugar on sleep and how it caused the mind to race. I figured, wow, I wonder would one cold accomplish if they could channel that energy, focusing it onto a single problem to solve. Sure, the mind would still be all over the place, but at least I felt like I laid some pavement down, creating a road for it to travel on in a certain direction. To this day, I still think it works wonderfully. After all, the mind works best when the body is at ease.

Is Frank an instance of the rule that you can never go too far in terms of the behavior of a character? i.e so long as the character is self consistent, and the behavior makes sense, be it violent or sexual, that anything goes?

I love Frank Booth. That is all.

Bark Bites, I felt the Tarantino in that clip as well. Check out this Siskel&Ebert movie review of Blue Velvet. When Ebert talks about humour unnecessarily mixing with shock I wondered what he would say 10 years later when he watched Pulp Fiction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_uehfL60EA4 Do you think Ebert would react to Blue Velvet differently today? Of course, maybe he just feels the nudity is too gratuitous.

I have to side with Siskel there. The movie itself doesn't feel as shocking today, but I think that's what earned some of the response it did: you didn't know whether you should be laughing or not. Tarantino pushed that envelope a bit further with the whole Marvin death scene. Then again, Ebert may have despised the whole masochist angle towards her character. If that's the case, one can only wonder how he felt about the whole gimp scene in Pulp Fiction.

Pliny, my take on matter such as this is, "The story rules." Whatever the writer feels is authentic to the characters in the context of the story universe, the plot and the other characters, that has to be the final touchstone for what goes in and what goes out. In the case of Blue Velvet, I always felt the movie was a dark, albeit really dark, comedy, a satirical look at small town life in America, Lynch pulling back the veneer of normalcy to reveal a sordid subculture. Similar terrain as "Twin Peaks." In the context of a dark comedy, Booth's character hits all sorts of emotional buttons, everything from repulsion to fascination to fear to awe at how over the top he is. He's like the deepest, darkest version of the town's shadow, unrestrained Id fueled by PBR. I still think Blue Velvet is Lynch's best achievement in movies.

This is an issue I have with a female character in a black comedy I'm writing. In this case, the outrageous behavior is intended to offset the character's darkness, but I'm concerned about going too over the top. OTOH, in Horrible Bosses, Jennifer Aniston's character was originally far more outrageously deviant sexually than the one who ended on screen, and personally, I thought the original choice was funnier and that it was a mistake to tone the character down (and to kill off the character), presumably to serve Ms Aniston's public persona as America's sweetheart. But with Kevin Spacey's and Colin Farrell's over the top performances, a part of me thinks that might not have been such a bad choice. To me there's an issue of "dynamics" here, where one would want the characters to contrast strongly, rather than each of them being a variation on the same note. I know the answer is really "what serves the story", but how do you go about making those kind of decisions?

How do you go about making those kind of decisions? Oy, if we only knew! Obviously the writer needs to decide on the tone of the piece, then they have to be consistent on that front. With comedy, this is especially tricky because everyone has a different sense of humor. I have run into this issue numerous times around the question, "Is it too broad?" One person's 'broad' doesn't necessarily translate into another person's 'broad.' Another considerable contributing factor is to really look at the characters and ask, "Would they really do this?" If what you have them doing is more about what you, the writer, want to see happen than what they, the character, would justifiably do, then that's a problem on a whole other level. At the end of the day, it's yet another one of those choices a writer makes based on their gut. But one thing you can almost always be assured of: The studios will want to trim the highs and lows off over-the-top characters a la Aniston's character in Horrible Bosses. This is their default mode because -- fear! -- they don't want to risk turning off this or that target demo.

[...] Great Character: Frank Booth (“Blue Velvet”) (gointothestory.blcklst.com) [...]

[...] Great Character: Frank Booth (“Blue Velvet”) (gointothestory.blcklst.com) [...]