After Hours — the diner

Observation

The film opens in an office. Paul Hackett is teaching a new hire the word-processing system, and the new hire makes it clear this job is not what he plans to do with his life. Paul listens with the face of a man who once said the same thing.

That night he eats alone in a coffee shop with a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. A young woman at the next table, Marcy, recognises the book and quotes it at him. They talk. She is staying with a friend downtown who makes plaster paperweights shaped like bagels with cream cheese, and she leaves him the number. At home, bored, he calls it.

Everything the night will use is laid out here: the job he wants to get away from, the woman, the sculptor, the address, and his own politeness.

What the sources say it is

Kelly's summary is the plain version: Paul is "a nondescript computer programmer who meets a strange but beautiful girl, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), in a midtown Manhattan coffee shop. She gives him her phone number. He calls" (Kelly, unpaged). Ebert's 1985 review adds the loneliness: "a Midtown Manhattan word-processing specialist who hates his job and his lonely private life" ([[Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert|Scorsese by Ebert]], unpaged).

The camera is the thing to watch, and Michael Ballhaus explains the move he is proudest of:

In the beginning, in the coffee shop, the camera jumps over Rosanna Arquette to Griffin as if it were a hawk grabbing this guy. These moments look easy on-screen, but it's not so easy to figure out how to execute them.

— Ballhaus, in Kelly, unpaged

He did it with "a thirteen-foot arm" that "moves up and down fast", and he did it on a budget: "We knew we had to do the film for less than $4 million" (Kelly, unpaged).

Connotation code by code

Camerawork

The hawk move tells you who the prey is before the story does. Marcy is the one talking, and the camera ignores her to swoop on Paul. It is also the first appearance of the film's method: Scorsese wanted dollies rather than zooms "because the dolly you can feel. The audience can feel itself propelled into action. We used a lot of that in After Hours—dollies instead of zooms" (Kelly, unpaged). A zoom looks at Paul. A dolly goes at him.

Character

Paul is built from absences: no friends shown, a job he tolerates, an apartment he sits in. Kelly's one-line version of his ambition is exact: he "just wants to get uptown" (Kelly, unpaged). In the diner he wants something smaller, a conversation, and the film takes it as a provocation.

Spoken language

The dialogue is what sold Scorsese. His first reaction to Minion's script: "I liked the dialogue and almost everything up to the ice-cream truck character" (sos 97). To Kelly he put it more warmly: "The first sixty-five pages were fascinating and the dialogue was very funny, and I realized what I could do with it" (Kelly, unpaged). Hold on to that. The pages he liked first are the pages with a debt attached.

Acting

Scorsese wanted Dunne played like a vaudeville straight man: "Griffin, I wanted his timing to be like Jack Benny's—those pauses" (Kelly, unpaged). The comedy of the diner is in the pauses where Paul decides whether to take the next step, and takes it.

Production context: whose opening is it?

The diner, the paperweights, the cab ride and the story Marcy tells later all appear in "Lies", a monologue the radio artist Joe Frank broadcast in the early 1980s (the dates vary by source: 1981 on WBAI, 1982 or 1984 on NPR). Minion's working title was Lies (Kelly, unpaged). Decades later Minion said so himself:

I had at one point definitely heard the Joe Frank short story "Lies" that he read on late-night radio, and details from it unfortunately wound up in the first section of the script, and I got walloped for that in every way imaginable.

— Joseph Minion, in After Hours oral history outtakes (2023)

Frank's widow, Michal Story, lists what he recognised: "the plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights, the money blowing out of the window of the cab, and the girl who tells a story of having been raped". Frank "threatened to file a lawsuit, and the filmmakers settled for about $30,000" (same source). Frank was generous about the rest: "the remainder of the film was the work of the writer", he wrote in 2007, as quoted on the Joe Frank Wiki. See The first half hour came from a radio monologue.

Audience

A 1985 audience saw a young man's lucky night beginning. The film is betting that you have been Paul, or been the woman at the next table, and that you know how thin the line is between a pick-up and an ordeal.

Compare

• After Hours — back at work — the ending returns him to the same office, which is the whole joke of the structure.
• Mean Streets — the opening — another opening that lays out a man's problem before the plot arrives, and another film where the credit for what we hear is complicated.
• Taxi Driver — the phone call — Paul calls a woman from a lonely room and the call goes better than Travis's. That is the last thing that goes better.

Writing leads

• Watch the hawk move twice: once for the story, once only for where the camera starts and stops. Whose side is it on?
• Ask whether the "Lies" settlement changes how you credit the opening. Minion wrote the script; Frank wrote some of its first scenes; Scorsese chose them.