Why is Bob Hope dictating?
There are several scenes showing Bob Hope dictating into a tape recorder. However, everything he is saying is being read off of a piece of paper. That means it is already written down, so why the dictation?
shareLot's of reasons, it was a fairly common practice among executives and writers back then.
So many people are used to typing now with the advent of PCs and word processing software, but back then if you weren't an experienced typist, it could take you longer to type something than to write it out. If you made a mistake, or wanted to change something, you had to yank out the paper and start all over. So, he probably can't type or doesn't want to. He mentions in the beginning that he needs to find a secretary/typist. They could play the tapes back later and type up the book while he does other things.
He probably writes out a draft, lines things out, adds things in, makes notes in the margins, etc. By the time he's done the pages look like chicken scratch only he can follow. Dictating it keeps him from having to re-write it all out neatly so someone else can read it.
As seen at a later point in the movie, he listens back to what he has recorded while getting dressed to hear how it sounds. He stops the tape at one point and takes note that he wants to improve that passage.
^Good analysis. That's the way I saw it, too.
Good reply. I actually remember my mother doing dictation work back in the 1960s on a machine called a "Dictagraph" or something like that - which used interchangeable recording "belts" that executives could read and pass along to the steno pool.
I just thought it was odd that he would read, apparently word-for-word, into a machine to have someone type it up, when he could have just as well handed a good secretary his notes.