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Before the speeches of Offending the Audience begin, Peter Handke’s script contains a section titled “Rules for the actors.” The four speakers are urged to seek out forms of popular art and other experiences which, presumably, would help to free them from the methods of delivery or acting inculcated by their previous training. The actors are told to strive for a sameness of sound, without individual inflection, as if in a crowd or ritual situation; they are also told to make up the partially inarticulate lines and deliver those lines very fast in overlapping and even simultaneous fashion.

In 1967, American filmgoers were treated to two Italian-made Westerns featuring a little-known American actor, Clint Eastwood, playing a fast gun who never gives his name. Per un pugno di dollari (1964; A Fistful of Dollars) and Per qualche dollaro in più (1965; For a Few Dollars More) had already made Eastwood and director Sergio Leone celebrities in Europe since their releases. American reviewers did not react positively to the films’ grubby, unheroic protagonists, the “minimalist acting” of Eastwood, the unglamorous towns, the graphic violence, the massive body counts, the intrusive camera work, and the films’ display of cynicism toward society. The fact that Europeans peopled this Western (Spanish-Yugoslav) landscape, their lips not always synchronized with the dubbed English dialogue; the fact that the films were self-consciously based on B-Westerns, with some almost cartoon-like sequences; and finally, the fact that the films broke such time-honored Western conventions as allowing the villains to draw first blood all operated against a sympathetic critical reception. The films were derisively called “spaghetti Westerns,” but young Americans flocked to them.