When Harry Met Sally Read Free

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 inthe 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 sitaround 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:
    DOCUMENTARY FOOTAGE

of an OLDER COUPLE, a MAN and a WOMAN. They’re sitting together on a love seat looking straight at the CAMERA
.
    MAN     I was sitting with my friend Arthur Kornblum, in a restaurant, it was a Horn and Hardart Cafeteria, and this beautiful girl walked in—
(he points to the woman beside him)
—and I turned to Arthur and I said, “Arthur, you see that girl? I’m going to marry her.” And two weeks later we