TODAY'S NUGGET: Charley Varrick (1973) - Allowing the Audience to Add 2 + 2

[Quick Summary: After Charley and sidekicks rob a bank, they discover it's unreported mob money and are hunted by an unrelenting enforcer.]

I really liked following these characters around because they always surprised me.  

Or as screenwriter Josh Olson put it better:

You wanna tell a story that, going forward, seems pretty continuously surprising and then going backwards seems pretty inevitable that it ended up there (…) That’s something I think Charley Varrick actually pulls off.

One of the surprises was how the script "let the audience add up 2 + 2."* 

In the scene below, I love how we learn so much without being told:
- Boyle, the president of the bank, is crooked.
- Boyle has previous dealings with Molly, the enforcer.
- The scene flows from Boyle to Molly, like a letter sent from one to the other.

INT. CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY

We are angled on the doors of the Conference Room.

Boyle enters, closes and locks the doors, then automatically rubs an Oriental carving, the God of Money, on the belly, passes down a long conference table and takes a chair at the very end. He pulls a rolling table toward him. This table has a cassette on it which he loads with a blue, translucent plastic tape. He clicks it on, then speaks into a hand mike.

BOYLE: This morning a Western Fidelity Branch Bank in Tres Cruces, New Mexico, was robbed of roughly three quarters of a million dollars. The size of the take...

                                                                              CUT TO

INT. MOLLY'S CAR - BLUE CHEVROLET - DAY

We are close on an identical cassette, playing the same tape as:

BOYLE'S VOICE: ...Plus the urgency of the situation makes it inevitable that I should call on you personally to become involved.

We are pulling back to include the driver of the car, Molly, maybe fifty. He is a powerful man, smooth-faced and piggy-eyed. He is heavy bodied but moves easily and is enormously light on his feet. He has a faint southern accent, a little pussy cat smile and an IQ of 154. He wears a beautifully cut pale gabardine suit, slightly western in tailoring and off-white Stetson, not too wide in the brim. He smokes a heavy, leather-covered pipe. 

BOYLE'S VOICE: All the arrangements will be the same as last time. I hope and fully expect the same kind of outcome. I know you realize that there is extraordinary concern from this end, so please expedite. Good luck.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED: Don't overload the information, but do make it clear. 

ex. We expect a bank president to ask for help, but not from an enforcer = It is pretty clear that a bank president is up to no good.

Charley Varrick (1973)(8/11/72 draft)
by Dean Riesner
Adapted from the novel, "The Looters," by John Reese

* From Billy Wilder's 10 Rules of Good Filmmaking (h/t to Lubitsch).