Cinema Science

This is an excerpt from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Apparently the milkshake line from There Will Be Blood was not an invention of Paul Thomas Anderson but was taken from an actual senator. This makes me appreciate the line even more.

Speaking of Day-Lewis and his all-consuming turn as a turn-of-the-century oilman in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, where did that whole maniacal "I drink your milkshake!" speech come from at the end of the film?

Turns out that it came from the Congressional Record - from a 1924 hearing in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal.

"You can't make this stuff up, honestly," says Anderson, who adapted Upton Sinclair's Oil! - inspired in part by the exploits of Teapot Dome-tainted petro-king Edward Doheny - and spent years researching the era, before filming Blood in Texas in 2006.

"I read the transcripts of the congressional hearings," the writer-director says, "and all these guys had to defend their honor and describe what drainage was. There was essentially a lot of shady stuff going on, and there was drainage going on from the U.S. naval fields, these reserve fields that had been set aside for the U.S. Navy.

"Anyway, I don't remember who it was - maybe it was [New Mexico senator] Albert Fall - but someone had to get up there and describe what drainage was, and his way of describing it was to say, 'Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake.'

"It was more or less like that," says Anderson, who reworked the speech into the crazed lecture delivered by Day-Lewis. "But just the idea that somebody would be describing it as a milkshake was so absurd, I thought that's too good to pass up!"