Andrew Hearst at the invaluable Panopticist recalls one of the lesser-known Hollywood scandals of the 1980s, the aspiring screenwriter Joseph Minion mining Joe Frank's radio monologue Lies for a script that would become the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie After Hours. Frank, a God in the highly specialized field of contemporary radio drama and performance art, wrote Lies back in 1982, one of eighteen original works he created for NPR Playhouse in the early 1990s. In the opening section of the monologue, which you can listen to at Hearst's site, the hero describes visiting a diner and meeting a woman who seems to flirt with him and mentions that her roommate is a sculptor who's looking to sell some of her work as paperweights. The hero goes home, starts thinking about the woman, calls her and receives an invitation to come over, and takes a cab to her building. In the course of the cab ride, he loses the only money he has on him when the bill goes flying out the window. When he finally arrives, he discovers that the woman's roommate is a sultry type who "sleeps around" and that the two of them live in a space filled with "leaden art droppings." Alone in the bedroom, the hero observes that the woman seems unstable and possibly nuts, and that "she seemed interested and indifferent at the same time;" eventually she tells him that she's still trying to come to term with having been raped. All these details turn up transposed in the first half hour of After Hours, along with other small, strange bits that may have been indirectly influenced by Lies.
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