When Harry Met Sally (2 page)

All this is a long way of saying that movies generally start out belonging to the writer and end up belonging to the director. If you're very lucky as a writer, you look at the director's movie and feel that it's your movie, too. As Rob and Andy and I worked on the movie, it changed: it became less quirky and much funnier; it became less mine and more theirs. But what made it possible for me to live through this process—which is actually called “The Process,” a polite expression for the period when the writer, generally, gets screwed—was that Rob and I each had a character we owned. On most movies, what normally happens in the course of The Process is that the writer says one thing and the director says another thing, and in the end the most the writer can hope for is a compromise; what made this movie different was that Rob had a character who could say whatever he believed, and if I disagreed, I had Sally to say so for me.

And much as I would like to take full credit for what
Sally says in the movie, the fact is that many of her best moments went into the script after the three of us began work on it together. “We told you about men,” Rob and Andy said to me one day. “Now tell us about women.” So I said, “Well, we could do something about sex fantasies.” And I wrote the scene about Sally's sex fantasy. “What else?” they said. “Well,” I said, “women send flowers to themselves in order to fool their boyfriends into thinking they have other suitors.” And I wrote the scene about Marie sending flowers to herself. “What else?” Rob and Andy said. “Well,” I said, “women fake orgasms.” “Really?” they said. “Yes,” I said. There was a long pause. I think I am correct in remembering the long pause. “All women?” they said. “Most women,” I said. “At one time or another.”

A few days later, Rob called. He and Andy had written a sequence about faking orgasms and they wanted to insert it at the end of the scene that was known (up to that time) as the andirons scene. He read it over the phone. I loved it. It went into the script. A few weeks later, we had our first actors' reading, and Meg Ryan, who by then was our Sally, suggested that Sally actually fake an orgasm in the delicatessen at the end of the scene. We loved it. It went into the script. And then Billy Crystal, our Harry, provided the funniest of the dozens of funny lines he brought with him to the movie; he suggested that a woman customer turn to a waiter, when Sally's orgasm was over, and say: “I'll have what she's having.” The line, by the way, was delivered in the movie by Estelle Reiner, Rob's mother. So there you have it—a perfect example of how The Process works on the occasions when it works.

I don't want to sound Pollyannaish about any of this. Rob and I disagreed. We disagreed all the time. Rob believes that men and women can't be friends (HARRY: “Men and women can't be friends, because the sex part always gets in
the way”). I disagree (SALLY: “That's not true. I have plenty of men friends and there's no sex involved”). And both of us are right. Which brings me to what
When Harry Met Sally
is really about—not, as I said, whether men and women can be friends, but about how different men and women are. The truth is that men don't want to be friends with women. Men know they don't understand women, and they don't much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they're not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sports, and I have no idea what else.

Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don't understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what's more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help. Women think if they could just understand men, they could
do something
. Women are always trying to
do something
. There are entire industries based on this premise, the most obvious one being the women's magazines—there are hundreds of them, there are probably five of them in darkest Zaire alone—that are based completely on the notion that women can
do something
where men are concerned: cook a perfect steak, or wear a perfect skirt, or dab a little perfume behind the knee. “Rub your thighs together when you walk,” someone once wrote in
Cosmopolitan
magazine. “The squish-squish sound of nylon has a frenzying effect.”

When a movie like
When Harry Met Sally
opens, people come to ask you questions about it. And for a few brief weeks, you become an expert. You seem quite wise. You give the impression that you knew what you were doing all along. You become an expert on friends, on the possibilities of love, on the differences between men and women. But the truth is that when you work on a movie, you don't sit
around thinking, We're making a movie about the difference between men and women. Or whatever. You just do it. You say, this scene works for me, but this one doesn't. You say, this is good, but this could be funnier. You say, it's a little slow here, what could we do to speed it up? You say, this scene is long, and this scene isn't story, and we need a better button on this one.

And then they go off and shoot the movie and cut the movie and sometimes you get a movie that you're happy with. It's my experience that this happens very rarely. Once in a blue moon.
Blue Moon
was another title we considered for a minute or two. I mention it now so you will understand that even when you have a movie you're happy with, there's always something—in this case, the title—that you wish you could fix. But never mind.

FADE IN:

FADE OUT
.

FADE IN:

EXT. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CAMPUS—DAY

CARD: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
—
1977
A couple in a clinch
.

The young man involved is named HARRY BURNS. He's twenty-six years old, just graduated from law school. Wearing jeans and a sweatshirt
.

He's kissing a young woman named AMANDA. She has long, straight hair that she irons. She's about twenty. The embrace is fairly melodramatic. They pull back to look at one another
.

AMANDA
    I love you.

HARRY
    I love you.

They begin to kiss again
.

A car pulls up right beside them. Stops. Sits there
.

Driving the car is SALLY ALBRIGHT. She's twenty-one years old. She's very pretty although not necessarily in an obvious way. She sits there waiting for the kiss to end. It doesn't end. She clears her throat
.

Amanda sees Sally, and she and Harry move over to the car
.

AMANDA
    Oh. Hi, Sally. Sally, this is Harry Burns. Harry, this is Sally Albright.

HARRY
    Nice to meet you.

They shake hands
.

SALLY
    
(to Harry)
    You want to drive the first shift?

HARRY
    No, no, you're there already, you can start.

SALLY
    Back's open.

Harry looks meaningfully at Amanda
.

Then he starts to put his stuff—a duffel bag, a box of records—into the back seat of the car, where Sally's stuff is, too—suitcases, stereo speakers, a guitar, boxes of books, a small TV
.

AMANDA
    Call me.

HARRY
    I'll call as soon as I get there.

AMANDA
    Call me from the road.

HARRY
    I'll call before that.

Harry and Amanda exchange longing looks outside the car
.

AMANDA
    I love you.

HARRY
    I love you.

They kiss again
.

Sally sits waiting, waiting. She shifts position and accidentally-on-purpose hits the car HORN, which beeps and startles Amanda and Harry into breaking off their clinch
.

SALLY
    Sorry.

HARRY
    I miss you already.

AMANDA
    I miss you.

HARRY
    Bye.

Harry gets into the car, and Amanda watches it pull away
.

CUT TO
:

INT. CAR—DAY

Harry takes out a bunch of grapes, starts to eat them
.

SALLY
    I have it all figured out. It's an eighteen-hour trip, which breaks down to six shifts of three hours each. Or, alternatively, we could break it down by mileage. There's a map on the visor that I've marked to show the locations where we change shifts.

HARRY
    
(offering her one)
    Grape?

SALLY
    No. I don't like to eat between meals.

Harry spits a grape seed out the window, which doesn't happen to be down
.

HARRY
    I'll roll down the window.

After a lengthy silence
.

HARRY
    (
CONT'D
)    Why don't you tell me the story of your life?

SALLY
    The story of my life?

HARRY
    We've got eighteen hours to kill before we hit New York.

SALLY
    The story of my life isn't even going to get us out of Chicago. I mean, nothing's happened to me yet. That's why I'm going to New York.

HARRY
    So something can happen to you?

SALLY
    Yes.

HARRY
    Like what?

SALLY
    Like I'm going to go to journalism school to become a reporter.

HARRY
    So you can write about things that happen to other people.

SALLY
    
(after a beat)
    That's one way to look at it.

HARRY
    Suppose nothing happens to you. Suppose you live there your whole life and nothing happens. You never meet anyone, you never become anything, and finally you die one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway.

Sally looks over at Harry. Who am I stuck in this car with? She looks back at the road
.

EXT. CAR—TRAVELING SHOT—DAY
As the car turns onto the highway
.

SALLY
    
(Voice-over)
    Amanda mentioned you had a dark side.

HARRY
    That's what drew her to me.

SALLY
    Your dark side?

HARRY
    Sure. Why? Don't you have a dark side? I know, you're probably one of those cheerful people who dot their “i's” with little hearts.

SALLY
    
(defensively)
    I have just as much of a dark side as the next person—

HARRY
    
(pleased with himself)
    Oh, really? When I buy a new book, I read the last page first. That way, in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.

SALLY
    
(irritated now)
    That doesn't mean you're deep or anything. I mean, yes, basically I'm a happy person …

HARRY
    
(cheerfully)
    So am I.

SALLY
    … and I don't see that there's anything wrong with that.

HARRY
    Of course not. You're too busy being happy. Do you ever think about death?

SALLY
    Yes.

HARRY
    Sure you do. A fleeting thought that drifts in and out of the transom of your mind. I spend hours, I spend days—

SALLY
    
(interrupting)
    —and you think this makes you a better person?

HARRY
    Look, when the shit comes down, I'm going to be prepared and you're not, that's all I'm saying.

SALLY
    And in the meantime, you're going to ruin your whole life waiting for it.

DISSOLVE TO:

EXT. CAR—DAY

The car tooling along a beautiful stretch of highway
.

SALLY
    
(Voice-over)
    You're wrong.

HARRY
    
(Voice-over)
    I'm not wrong.

SALLY
    
(Voice-over)
    You're wrong.

HARRY
    
(Voice-over)
    He wants her to leave. That's why he puts her on the plane.

SALLY
    (
Voice-over)
I don't think
she
wants to stay.

HARRY
    (
Voice-over)
Of course she wants to stay. Wouldn't you rather be with Humphrey Bogart than that other guy?

EXT.—CAR EXITING (INDUSTRIAL)—MAGIC HOUR

EXT.—DINER—NIGHT