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What's "The Scorpion and the Frog" Fable?

I was not aware of The Scorpion and the Frog fable until I had met with a few development executives out here in sunny Los Angeles and they all referenced it. Knowing it's meaning pretty important when talking about story. When I tracked the legend back to its source, I was surprised to see that there were TONS of references to The Scorpion and the Frog across pop culture. There's even a website with a list of instances. Today we're going to go over this allegory, see why it's sneaked its way into countless movies and TV shows, and how it may inform your writing process even if you don't know it. So let's ford this river together. Where did The Scorpion and the Frog come from? So according to Wikipedia, the earliest publication of this allegory is from the 1944 book The Hunter of the Pamirs: A Novel of Adventure in Soviet Central Asia by Georgi Tushkan. The legend didn't really take shape until it was featured in the 1955 film Mr. Arkadin in a soliloquy delivered by Orson Welles. That speech by Welles went down in movie history. Richard Brody, of The New Yorker, had this to say about Welles in that movie: "The most famous moment of this extraordinary, and unjustly unrecognized, movie, from 1954 (and released the next year in a mutilated version), is a soliloquy that Arkadin delivers to his entourage. It stands on its own as a beacon of pulp philosophy while offering...

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Published By: NoFilmSchool - Wednesday, 28 August

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