“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” says Rick while looking into his glass, “she walks into mine.”
Rick’s piano player Sam is there in the back of the darkened room, softly rolling out some hokey-pokey tune.
“What’s that you’re playing?” Ricks asks him.
“Just a little something of my own,” says Sam over his shoulder.
“Well stop it,” Rick tells him. “You know what I wanna hear. You played it for her, you can play it for me.”
Sam stops playing. He turns around carefully. “Oh, I don’t think I can remember.”
“If she can stand it, I can,” barks Rick. “PLAY IT!”
You probably recognize this as one of the most dramatic of all the scenes from all the films in all the Hollywood. It’s from Casablanca, and it’s one of a couple of scenes that gets close to using the famous line “Play it again, Sam,” which doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the movie.
To my mind, this scene is a great illustration of 1) an important point about writing and 2) something more.
The writing bit is something that I read in a New Yorker article about big-name playwright, director, and screenwriter David Mamet. Mamet has written movies like “Glengarry Glenn Ross” (“Always be closing”) as well as The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, Ronin, and a bunch more. Anyways, here’s the Mamet quote I read today:
“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want… Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama… People only speak to get something… They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective.”
You can definitely see the protagonist’s “absolutely frustrated” wishes in the Casablanca scene. A few indirect words, mostly about what song to play, reveal the desperate psychological setup of Rick’s character in that moment.
You want to show, not tell. And you want to make the dialog about what the protagonist wants, whether he’s getting it or not.
That covers the first half of the Mamet quote above.
But like I said, there’s something more in that Casablanca scene and in that Mamet quote. It has to do with a really fundamental truth about human psychology. And it’s very useful to know if you are ever looking to influence people, or to understand them better.
But I can’t talk about this second thing today. Because I have a rule, “One post, one topic.” However, read my post tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all about this fundamental truth about the human mind, and how it fits into the Casablanca scene above.