Episode 083 - Round Up The Usual Suspects

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

Over the course of these podcasts, I have mentioned several times that I first became interested in personal growth around the time that the Beatles went to India to study meditation in February of 1968. My interest wasn’t particularly deep. The only thing deep about me at the time was how deeply I was being influenced by the world around me, and I basically mirrored every move the Beatles made. They said that meditation was great, so I thought I’d check it out.

My search didn’t go very far. Just far enough to understand that I didn’t understand anything about anything to do with it. And I had no real interest in it either. But that changed as the next few years went by in a flash.

One thing I haven’t mentioned about those days is that at one point I began taking random, but detailed notes on anything that I came across that helped to expand my inner awareness, even in the smallest of ways. I never stopped this notetaking process and I never threw any of it out, either. That began half a century ago so, as you can imagine, I have an enormous amount of material stored away in my office.

As I was recently considering what to do with all of it, an interesting idea occurred to me that involved our podcast series. But before I tell you the idea, first let me tell you a fascinating story that I once heard that served as a significant inspiration for me to begin making notes in the first place. It’s the story about how the ending of the movie, Casablanca came to be, and once you hear it, I’m sure you’ll understand how all these strings tie together.

So, it started back in my college days. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, in my junior year, I had spent a full semester working as an intern on Capitol Hill, with my major in Government and Public Administration. But by the end of the semester, my experiences on the hill led me to conclude that the world of politics was not one that I wanted to set up shop in. Maybe it was just what was going on in the country during the late sixties, as extreme societal turbulence violently eradicated any semblance of normality. But from my perspective the hill seemed like one big snake pit, constantly churning through never-ending rounds of ego-based struggles for money and power.

After considering a few different options, I finally decided to change my major to American Literature. For some unknown reason, the idea of possibly becoming a writer seemed to hold a much bigger draw for me, not that I had any talent or experience in the field. Now that I have been working at it for several decades, I can hypothesize with some degree of certainty that at least I’ve gained a modicum of experience.

Anyway, around that time, I came upon an interview with Julius Epstein who, along with his identical twin brother Phillip, had written the movie, Casablanca. I, like millions of other motion picture enthusiasts, had always been a major fan of that film, ever since I first saw it in a film club in high school. And being a would-be writer, anything a successful author had to say about the craft of writing was naturally interesting to me.

But in this interview, Julie Epstein began describing an element of the making of the movie that I had never heard before and it really got my attention. According to him, as screenwriters, he and his brother had never been able to come up with an ending to the story and they still didn’t have one even when shooting began.

If you’ve never seen it, on a basic level, it’s a bittersweet story about a love triangle and throughout the piece, you never know which of the two men the woman will end up with. But its classic ending reveals the fact that it also has profoundly noble themes as well, one of which is the critical importance of performing individual duty.

Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, ultimately sacrifices his love for Ilsa Lund, portrayed by Ingrid Bergman, for the greater good. Ilsa's husband, Victor Laszlo, is a renowned Czech resistance leader, and he needs her support to continue his vital work in his uphill battle against the Nazis. Rick finally recognizes the significance of Victor's mission and the importance of Ilsa's role in it.

In the final scenes of the movie, even though he is clear that Ilsa would rather stay with him, Rick puts his personal feelings aside and helps her escape with Victor, understanding that their mission is far more important than any of their own personal feelings. As he puts it, “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

This incredibly climactic ending is truly a piece of cinematic history and I was a deep admirer of it, but I never knew until listening to Epstein that the ending wasn’t written or even decided upon until the shooting was well under way.

And then, in the interview, he went on to tell the story of how he and his brother came up with the ending. To me, it was a remarkable tale and it stuck to me to this day because it speaks volumes about the role that instinct plays in our intelligence.

He said that as writers he and his brother would routinely write down any notes that struck them about anything at all., It didn’t matter if the idea had no context or relationship to anything they were working on. In fact, the ones that seemed to come to them completely out of the blue, often ended up being the most usefully creative ones in the long run. And that was especially true when it came to writing dialogue. He said this form of note taking was a well-known method of the craft and they had been doing it for their entire careers.

Then he shifted back to talking about the difficulties they had run into in coming up with the ending of Casablanca. They just couldn’t decide if Ilsa should go with Victor to America or stay with Rick in Casablanca. And as shooting continued, this lack of an ending had become a real problem for everyone involved in the film, especially the actors and the director.

As the pressure continued to mount, they started rummaging through their huge file of random ideas and at one point, they found a line of dialogue that stopped them dead in their tracks. The line was, “Round up the usual suspects.” They had no real recollection of when or how it was written. They just knew it was a great line, and given the gripping drama of the story line, they instinctively knew that if it was used in the right way, at the right time, it could really take the movie to a whole different level.

By the way, no one involved with picture at that time thought that it was going to be any good at all. They all thought it seemed destined to be a flop.

They started to try to figure out where to use this terrific line. The first question was - who could say it? It quickly became clear that the only character who could deliver it was the police captain, Captain Renault, played by Claude Rains.

But what would lead him to speak that line? Well, it might be great if he spoke it after somebody killed somebody. Then they thought, “Who would the audience most like to see killed?” Again, it became obvious fairly quickly that the audience would love to see the villain killed. The villain was Major Strasser, a high-ranking Nazi officer.

Now the big question came up - who should kill him? They considered all the key players and Humphrey Bogart’s character was far and away the favorite. Ultimately, he was the central hero of the plot and it’s always most satisfying when the hero defeats the villain.

So, when should he kill him? Suddenly the resolution of the ending began to emerge. The most dramatic time would be if the Major tried to stop Victor and Ilsa from escaping and Rick eliminates him, opening the way for them to escape. And with all these plot elements in place, it only made sense for Rick to remain in Casablanca and become pals with Captain Renault, who had used that great line to save his life.

The film was released in early 1943 and despite the premonition of doom and gloom that pervaded the cast and crew during the filming, it quickly gained significant approval. But over the years that followed, the ending became one of the most renowned and respected in Hollywood history and catapulted the film into movie immortality. And eighty years later, it is still one of the most beloved movies of all time.

And hearing that the ending wasn’t the result of a planned-out strategy but was reverse-engineered from a random line of dialogue really impressed me. I don’t remember whether it was a conscious or an unconscious decision about it, but I found myself making notes about anything and everything related to personal growth that impressed me, and as I said, I never threw any of it away.

Now, let’s go back to the idea that occurred to me regarding all this personal growth material I have in my files. So far, in preparing these podcasts, I generally pick out one central them for an episode and weave the entire episode around that theme. At this point, we’ve produced over eighty episodes and they have all followed this format.

But as I was looking over all of this material I have collected it hit me that while a lot of it is extremely valuable, it may not be a large enough topic to build a complete episode around. And then I thought that it might be a great idea to develop a different format. Rather than building a whole episode around one particular theme, maybe I should just present the ideas without thinking about developing a context at all. Maybe I should just present them to you and you can just take them in and see where they may lead you.

So, I am going to incorporate this creative free-flow format into the next few episodes and see what happens. Again, these will not be teachings of any kind, just some intriguing ideas you might like to consider. They will still be coming from Ancient Wisdom through to modern neuroscience, along with personal experiences and observations that have been particularly helpful to me.

If you just relax and let them come into your consciousness, it’s quite possible that they may bring you some interesting and maybe even enlightening realizations. You might even play with the concepts in a reverse engineering, “Casablanca” ending kind of a way, where you let one idea lead to another. Maybe you’ll experience your own “Round up the usual suspects” effect. With inner growth, you never know where you may uncover your next masterpiece of wisdom.

So, we’ll begin the new format in the next episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open and lets get together in the next one.