Great Scene: “Night Shift”

“What are we really talking about here? What’s the essence of what we’re talking about? I’ll spell it out for you. PROSTITUTION!”

One of the classic 80’s comedies is Night Shift (1982), written by the prolific screenwriting team Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, and directed by Ron Howard. And if asked if you remember one scene from that movie, it’s most likely this one: The “prostitution” scene, where Bill Blazejowski (a tremendous comic performance by Michael Keaton) attempts to sell a group of hookers on this idea: Use the night shift at the city morgue to run a prostitution ring.

Here’s the scene:

I don’t have the script, but here’s a transcript of the dialogue:

What are we really talking about here? What’s the essence of what we’re talking about? I’ll spell it out for you. PROSTITUTION! Hey, we can say. We’re big kids now. A lot of times, it really helps to understand a word if you break it down, so let’s do that now, shall we? Pros… it doesn’t mean anything, you can forget about that… Tit, I think we all know what that means, Tu, two tit and TION of course, from the Latin to shun… to say uh-uh, no thank you anyway I don’t want it, to push away… it doesn’t even belong in this word really, so let’s get rid of that.

I think writers appreciate the inspiration behind this scene even more than most because it finds the humor by breaking down — a word.

For more articles in the Great Scene series, go here.