Living Up to the Legends

I really shoulda picked something I didn't give a crap about.

For our latest speech assignment, we had to find a piece of...lemme see the wording...we had to find "a provocative piece of comtemporary literature." This could be anything from a speech to a poem to a monologue to any piece where someone talks for roughly 3 minutes.

I picked the "Mad As Hell" rant from Network. Now, I LOVE Network. It's on my big list (35ish) of my favorite movies, and would almost certainly make my desert-island Top 10 (the Top 5...probably not so much). First, if any of you wish to at all have any insight into the state of television, especially the news department, in recent years, you owe it to yourself to see this movie. It's frighteningly (word?) brilliant work. And the "Mad As Hell" speech is its most famous part. And it involves a lot of screaming. It's a wonderful speech and I'm thrilled that I can get away with doing it (well, I guess that has yet to be seen). But it's up there with the best monologues ever in film history from one of the best screenplays ever written, delivered by an actor who would later (justly) win an Academy Award for the role.

And especially not being...an actor...that's pretty daunting stuff.

But I'm going in with my lucky brown three-piece suit (which will totally come off as a specific choice that I'll be unable to explain), and I love the piece enough that I hope at least that comes out. For now, I gotta write another two pages on the "choices" I made to deliver it (I'm pretty much mimicking, to the best of my ability, the guy's performance).