You’re Not Wrong, Baron, You’re Just an Asshole creates movie script scenes based on the Coen Brothers’ movies O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski, and their respective influences.
Following my interest in fiction distillation and character-focused prose with my midterm Scarlett, negligently, automatically, I chose these three movies for two reasons. Each movie has a clear, strong main character (Everett, Barton Fink, and the Dude).
In addition, because of the kind of process the Coen Brothers employ, each movie also has an influential source text. The structure of O Brother is based on Homer’s The Odyssey, The Big Lebowski’s structure is similar to that of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and the character of Barton Fink is loosely based on the playwright Clifford Odetts.
The program generates one scene, drawing from lines of the main characters, lines from the narration of each movie, camera positions and shots from each movie, and each movie’s influential sources. Below is a diagram that explains how each of the 13 is generated. With the middle three lines–those that include text from the influential sources–are run through two steps. Once the line is generated, the program goes through and searches for referential, personal pronouns (I, me, you, we, etc). If it finds one of those words, the line is turned into a character line (the name of the character is printed and it becomes a line). If the line does not include one of those words, the lines becomes narration.
I ran the program multiple times and chose four of my favorite scenes. Each scene follows the structure above, though the last two scenes have an additional step. The program went through all the proper nouns of those two scenes and changed them to match one of the characters included in the scene. For example, if the program came across “Walter,” a character from the Big Lebowski but not one of the three I included, it would be changed to either “Barton” or “Everett.” The hope was to keep the scene more focused and bring a cohesion to the lines. The problem, though, is that the replacements aren’t particularly intelligent. A two-word proper name, “Starla McGill,” for example, becomes “Barton Barton.”
Finally, the results are best appreciated, I think, by someone particularly familiar with the films. Though someone unfamiliar can appreciate the combination of lines and sources and narration, the potential humor of the Dude calling Barton Fink an asshole is, perhaps, lost.
Our final presentation received a little press coverage! Links and more information about the class can by found on my professor Adam Parrish’s blog.
A huge thanks to Brian Jones, Chris Jennings, and Nathan Roth for reading the scenes during our final presentation. Brian read for Barton Fink, Chris for Everett, and Nathan for the Dude. I read the narration and shots.
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