You probably know the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, or at least you know the famous “Always Be Closing” scene.
But just in case, lemme quickly run through it:
Picture a small, regional office for a team of door-to-door salesmen.
Most of the guys in the office are losers — they are not selling anything, and are making no money.
One rainy evening, a new, different face is waiting there in the office. He has come from the rich and distant headquarters of the company.
The new face is played by a cocky and polished Alec Baldwin, with slicked back hair and a silk suit, looking handsome and deadly.
Baldwin has a Rolex on his wrist. And, as he tells the loser salesmen, he drives an $80,000 BMW, and he makes $900k a year.
Over the course of about five minutes, Baldwin delivers a menacing pep talk to the struggling salesmen.
“ABC,” he tells them. “Always. Be. Closing.”
The gist of Baldwin’s speech is, “Start selling, or you’re fired.” This sets up the necessary chain of reactions that leads to the climax of the movie.
Fine. You probably knew all this. Or if you didn’t, now you do.
But there’s one tiny bit that I omitted in my summary above, and that you may have missed if you ever watched this scene for real.
Because everything I told you, it’s a little bit, I don’t know, too pat?
Why does this slicked-back, cocky salesmen, who makes all this money and who lives in Manhattan, why does he drive down to the suburbs to talk to these losers, and why does he do it exactly tonight, on this stormy night, so that the rest of the movie can develop just as it should?
This is the kind of question that the people in the audience might never ask out loud. But somewhere in their brains, the question is there. And if it’s not answered — well, that’s a problem.
David Mamet, the guy who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, knew this.
And so he took care of it.
As Baldwin is in the middle of his ABC speech, one of the loser salesman chuckles. And when Baldwin turns his deadly gaze on the guy, we get the following line:
“You’re such a hero. You’re so rich. How come you’re coming down here to waste your time with such a bunch of bums?”
Baldwin’s answer, when it comes, in between more insults to the other salesmen, is not much of an answer at all. The bosses asked him to come, he says, and he did it as a favor to them.
And that’s my point for you for today.
Effective screenwriting — and effective door-to-door sales, and effective copywriting, and pretty much any kind of effective communication — requires suspension of disbelief in your audience, if you have any hope of getting them to go where you want them to go.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that suspension of disbelief is often easier to achieve than you might ever believe.
Why?
Because while it’s instinctive for us to ask why… it’s also instinctive for us to be satisfied as soon as any kind of answer is provided, and to stop any further questions, at least on that one question.
Of course, it’s not always enough to say, “Because…” and then to give some kind of milquetoast reason.
Sometimes you need more powerful tricks to suspend disbelief in your audience.
And if you want those tricks, you can find them in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.
Why?
Because in Commandment I, I write about an A-List Copywriter who was a grandmaster of suppressing disbelief. And I tell you how he did it. If you’d like to find out: