Writing Prompt #11: Take a famous scene from a classic story and rewrite it in a completely different era.

One of my favorite classic film scenes is from Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and Paul Henreid. The key moment I love, though, wasn’t performed by any of the three stars; it was performed by Claude Rains.

The film is set in the titular North African city. The year is 1941, Nazi Germany has occupied most of Europe, and Allied forces (including the United States) would not land on and capture Normandy beach for another two years. Morocco was ostensibly governed by France, but France itself had been occupied by Germany in 1940. As a result, French officials in Casablanca answered to German authority, and the city itself was portrayed as a last port of exit for refugees hoping to flee across the Atlantic.

Claude Rains portrays French Captain Louis Renault, the “unabashedly corrupt” commander of the Casablanca police force. The film makes clear that Renault’s only real concern is his own survival and prosperity, so he is quite happy to cooperate with visiting German military officers so long as he can remain in command and continue enriching himself at the expense of desperate residents and travelers. Early in the film, he cheerfully assures a visiting German official (in search of some letters of transit taken from a pair of murdered German couriers) that he has rounded up “twice the number of usual suspects” as a show of cooperation with Nazi forces.

Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine, an American expatriate who settled in Casablanca and purchased a nightclub that hosts a purportedly secret gambling den in the back room. Despite gambling being ostensibly illegal in occupied France, Rick’s gambling operates with a wink and a nod to the right people and is perhaps the worst-kept secret in Casablanca. Rick enjoys a special understanding with Captain Renault: he allows Renault to gamble in the back room and in return Renault pretends the gambling den doesn’t exist.

Midway through the film, Renault is under intensifying pressure from the visiting German officers to locate the missing letters of transit and arrest someone they can blame for the murdered couriers. Renault, less interested in law enforcement than he is in graft, has no prospects but understands that his continuing survival depends on satisfying his patrons. (Or as Rick wryly puts it, “Gestapo spank.”)

When German Major Strasser orders the nightclub closed, Renault immediately uses the gambling den he already knew full well existed as justification for the shutdown. When Rick approaches from the back, demanding to know what’s going on, Renault loudly declares for everyone to hear:

“I’m shocked! Shocked to find that there is gambling going on in here!”

At that moment, with impeccable timing, a cashier approaches Renault with a stack of money.

“Your winnings, sir,” he says to the French police chief. Renault doesn’t miss a beat, smiling pleasantly at the man and pocketing the cash.

“Thank you. Thank you very much,” he says, politely, before going back to shouting at customers to leave immediately.

Rains’ line, and the ironic contempt with which he delivers it, has come to represent the hypocrisy of any corrupt authority figure who feigns shock at discovering his own criminality. Unfortunately, Casablanca is such an old film at this point that most people don’t understand the reference anymore.

The other memorable thing about Casablanca, for me, is the song that represents Rick’s impossible romantic relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character: “As Time Goes By”. It always gets a reaction out of me.

I know I was supposed to rewrite it in a different era, but I think I wrote enough about it. Don't be surprised if it pops up in one of my stories at some point, though, probably in a very different setting.

Writing Prompt #5: Do you prefer taking risks or having a safety net?

I have a set of rules. They’re rules for me, no one else. They started out as Gibbs’s rules from the television show NCIS, but over the years I’ve removed a lot of the ones that didn’t apply and I’ve added a lot that were more specific to me. This is one of them.

Rule #17: Risk is part of the game.

"Risk is part of the game [if] you want to sit in that chair."

It’s a quote from Star Trek: Generations, in which Captain James T. Kirk gently admonishes a young, rookie captain that if he wants to sit in the Big Chair, he needs to understand that his job is not to play it safe. A captain’s job is to risk.

That’s not to say that anyone should take undue risks. Kirk has often been known to advise caution, or to get his ship and his crew to safety, or to not make stupid decisions. Although often remembered as reckless, Kirk was never one to take unwarranted or unnecessary risks. He wasn’t a loose cannon. But when the situation called for risk, when lives were at stake or his ship was on the line, he wasn’t afraid to take risks in the name of a greater cause. He wasn’t afraid to take personal risks to achieve his goals or complete his mission. Jim Kirk was the epitome of taking measured, calculated risks, and that’s what he was trying to impress upon his younger counterpart.

In my life, I’ve often tended to play it safe. I don’t enjoy rejection or failure; no one really does. But I’ve often felt that I’ve been rejected or hurt or embarrassed so often in my life that I never wanted to experience that again. I especially wanted to play everything safe when my kids were little because they were the most important people in my life. I never wanted them to suffer for any risks I took.

The problem, I’ve only realized in the last few years, is that isn’t living. Life involves risk and failure. Life involves picking yourself up and trying again. Sometimes life involves taking a chance in the name of something that’s important. I’ve never been very good at that, but I’m trying. I’ve never been very good at going after what I want; I always prioritize other people or other needs or the rules or anything other than myself. Sometimes it’s really just an excuse to not put myself out there, to stay in my safe place and not to engage with the world on its terms. Sometimes I lie to myself.

I’m 47 years old; breaking out of that habit isn’t going to be easy, but I’m trying.

Writing Prompt #4: What is your favorite work of art? What do you love about it?

The interesting part of this question, to me, is how to define a “work of art”. Is it a painting? Is it a selection of music? Is it a statue, a piece of architecture, a poem, or a novel? Could it, perhaps, be a dance performance, a script, a play being performed, a film or television show? Maybe it’s a mission patch from one of NASA’s Apollo missions, or a logo designed for a company. Maybe it’s even a spraypainted mural on the side of a building.

There’s so much art to choose from that it’s nearly impossible to make a single decision. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I see art everywhere in nearly everything. We express ourselves in so many myriad ways that it can be overwhelming.

One possibility for me is The Starry Night, a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. There’s something about the colors and the swirls and the darkness juxtaposed against the light that’s always appealed to me. Painted in 1889 while Van Gogh underwent self-commitment to a mental asylum, it is considered one of the most recognizable paintings in modern art.

Another personal favorite of mine (and here’s where my nerd shows through) is a concept-painting of the USS Enterprise-D created by Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach during the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation prior to the show’s premier in 1987. Originally intended to demonstrate the proposed look of the new ship, it was so well-received that it was hung on the wall of the captain’s ready room set for the entire seven-year run of the show as well as the film Star Trek: Generations.

If anyone is ever wondering what to get me for Christmas, a framed print of either of those would make me very happy.

At the end of the day, though, I’m such a voracious reader that my “favorite” work of art has to be a story, either something written in prose or something filmed. Even narrowing it down that far leaves almost too many possibilities to think about. There are so many short stories, novels, comic books, television shows and films that have moved me over the years that I could teach several college courses on the subject and still only scratch the surface.

Of all the possibilities, I’m going to go with a simple one. It’s a comic book limited series called Midnight Nation, written by my favorite author, J. Michael Straczynski. It’s the story of a detective, shot dead by a suspect, who gets stuck in a place between life and death and who goes on a cross-country road trip to regain his soul from the Devil and in the process discovers who he really is as a person. Along the way, he discovers a multitude of lost souls who have been discarded, ignored, or forgotten by the daylight world we all inhabit. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but in my twenties the ending struck me in a way that I don’t think anything else ever has. The thing I love about it is the self-discovery: our hero starts his journey wanting one thing, but at the end he realizes what he actually wants is something very different.

Even so, at the end of the day, I think trying to choose a favorite is an exercise in futility. There are far, far too many works of art out there that demand our attention, that demand our respect, to ever narrow the list down to just one or even two or three. If life is an exploration of possibilities, of ideas, then surely art is one of the tools we use in that endeavor. No matter how much we expose ourselves to, there’s always more out there, and I take comfort from that. The exploration will never be over.