Living the Romantic Comedy

The Women's Picture

Back in the day, the studios had a name for the kind of movie they knew would appeal to a female audience.   They called it "a women's picture."  Today, the studios have a different name for a movie they know will appeal to a female audience.  They call it... "huh?"  Or "You tell me."

The industry's lack of a better response is somewhat puzzling.  Indie producer Lindsay Doran, quoted in this recent NY Times article by Sharon Waxman entitled Hollywood's Shortage of Female Power, notes:

You don’t see companies saying, ‘More than half of this population is women, we should design a slate to come up with movies like ‘The Break-Up,’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada.’ ”

Part of the problem, the article theorizes, is chick flick fare having been in a dull lull:

Despite the success of “The Break-Up,” for example, romantic comedies have been in decline for a number of years, since their heyday a decade ago with stars like Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock. (This past winter, “Catch and Release,” “Because I Said So” and “Holiday” struggled, while “Music and Lyrics,” with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, did only decent business.)

Waxman goes on to cite a certain gap in the female star firmament...

Not only have few women emerged to replace those A-list stars, but studios are also reluctant to pay the price tags of $20 million or so that those women once commanded.

...and she explores in some depth an issue that may or may not be a factor in creating what producer Lynda Obst (Sleepless in Seattle) calls "a boys' era" in contemporary Hollywood, namely a recent changing in the gender guard re: the seats of studio power.  Nina Jacobson no longer runs Disney, Gail Berman's out of Paramount, and Stacey Snider ankled Universal to head Dreamworks, a Paramount subsidiary.  But Waxman is (wisely) quick to note:

It is debatable whether the diminished number of women running major studios has had any effect on the kinds of movies being made. Studio executives, both men and women, have shown themselves to be pragmatists above all, choosing movies that they believe will make the most money for their corporate parents.

One of the more interesting aspects of this puzzle, at least to me, is the notion that today's female audience is actually enjoying a different kind of movie, one that was traditionally thought of as the under-25 male's province. 

While “Hostel 2” would seem to be classic male-oriented shriekfest, the reality is that women are avid fans of horror films.  Fifty percent of the “Hostel” audience was female, [Lionsgate president Tom Ortenberg] said.

Ortenberg is also one of the most articulate insiders interviewed regarding the core problem:

“Female markets have been underserved, and the over-25 female audience is one that’s dramatically underserved in the marketplace,” he said. “I don’t know why that is."

The article is provocative reading, albeit inconclusive.  I myself have no catch-all Reason Why there's a female audience hungry for movies that say "hello" to them -- and nothing on the studio menus to satisfy their desires.  But I'll hazard a couple of additional educated guesses.

It's the scripts, stupid.   As a studio story analyst, I read bad romantic comedies on a weekly basis.  By "bad" I'm referring to a multitude of sins, from poor craft in execution to story concepts that are derivative, formulaic shlock.  Lately there've been a plethora of idea-challenged entries in the rom-com sub-genre, the Wedding Romantic Comedy, and let me just say this about that: if I have to read one more spec titled Always a Bridesmaid, you'll be hearing my scream even if you hail from Alaska.

The thing about Prada was, in addition to having some pre-sale buzz due to the popularity of the source material, and some very good casting, someone wroted it good.  It was capital-s Smart; it offered up savvy star parts via canny characterization work and had the kind of witty, snappy dialogue one doesn't hear in a lookout, it's gonna blow!!! movie.  Any wonder that women (and a sizable number of intelligent men) responded?

Prada is not a romantic comedy but it's female protagonist-driven and consciously aimed at a thinking female audience.  Which leads me to posit that to be hailed as "reborn" right now, all the rom-com genre needs is one movie smart enough in concept and execution to strike a box office chord with womanhood, and I persist that the route to this is originality.  This most excellent inventory of some recent imaginative romantic comedies shows that it can be done, and I only wish that instead of trotting out SOS (Same Old Shit) specs, today's aspiring rom-com and "women's picture" writers would go WOW (Write Outside What's-Been-Done).  And while we're on the subject of using one's head...

If 40 is the new 30...  Why not start making movies for grown-ups?  The real giant-sized audience that's currently being squandered through ignore-ance by Hollywood isn't just women, it's adults over 25, and beyond them, the Boomers.  Lively Greyheads.  Geezers-who-Geeze-Not.

We're all still here, and as Prada (and say, The Queen and a few other successful anomalies) have demonstrated, thinking over-40 year-olds will brave the multiplexes, given something of substance to chew on. 

The current studio formula for such "adult" fare is actually fairly shrewd: put a young 'un with an elder.  It didn't work for Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLaine's In Her Shoes (inexplicably, I thought, since it was a pretty good picture), but Universal's upcoming Georgia Rule, pairing Lindsay Lohan with Jane Fonda, has a shot. 

I'll have more on this one when the movie's out, having briefly done one quick round of notes on the project, early on.  But I'll say this much: the movie deals with substantive subject matter and has some intelligently realized characters and emotionally affecting moments -- again, the winning combo is a savvy screenwriter (Mark Andrus, As Good As It Gets) and top-drawer casting (Felicity Huffman fans will be pleased as well).

And as Something's Gotta Give has proven, the oldster's romantic comedy is ripe for further exploration.  Pair Jane Fonda with the right guy for one of those, and hell, I'd go.

In the meantime, I'm intrigued to hear from my female readership.  What are you looking for in a movie nowadays?  Where do you (or do you ever) find it?  What kind of movie do you think the studios should put out, to bring you and your gender into the theaters?  Living RomCom wants to know.

The Five Stages

Chances are, you're familiar with psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief, a pattern of phases most people go through when faced with their impending death, or the death of a loved one.   This universal process can be applied to less serious personal traumas, such as injury, break-up, bankruptcy, etc.

I'm thinking now, after emerging from a 3-week nightmare workathon, that it may be also true for rewrites -- specifically when one is handing in a so-called final draft on deadline.  Herewith:

THE 5 STAGES OF FINAL DRAFT WRITING

1. Denial

It's really in very good shape.  Sure, I've got a ton of notes, but it's nothing I can't handle...

2. Anger

Who is the cretinous asshole who wrote this crap?

3. Bargaining

If I can just have [enough methamphetamine, a roomful of writers a helluva lot smarter than I am, a time machine, etc.], I promise I'll have this in good enough rough shape for the draft after the final draft!

4. Depression

I am SO fucked.

5. Acceptance

As awful as this one is, the next one can only be better.  And I still (sort of) have my health. 

How cavalier was I, when my editor suggested a date three weeks away for handing in the manuscript of my novel!  Hadn't we just had a dream date of a lunch meeting, going over her five pages of notes and arriving at (theoretical) solutions for all the problems cited?  It was all so clear, everything -- only a few bits of heavy lifting amidst lots of little stuff -- that needed to be done.

What I forgot, in Denial, and then confronted (in Anger) was the principle of It Can Always Be Better, and the presence of The Me That Came Before.

Here's how it goes.  Beyond the Domino Syndrome  (the idea that when you change one plot beat, the next is affected, and so on) lies a more insidious morass of what we might call a Fortunately/Unfortunately rewrite principle: Fortunately, you can drain a boggy paragraph here, prune an unruly sentence there -- any draft can be improved.  Unfortunately, no sooner has one section of a piece been polished to a fresh sheen, than an adjacent swath of prose looks pathetically shoddy.

It Can Always Be Better is the awful truth that often leads to a torturous game of literary Whack-a-mole.  You're in the home stretch on a scene (you think), merely correcting light line edits, and you're suddenly brought up short by the sight of what an illustrious critic acquaintance calls "a lump."  Some heretofore unnoticed patch of coal is nestled amidst your diamonds, a first draft-like clumsiness that's not up to last-draft snuff.  So back down to the mines you go.

And how did this happen?  Why didn't you see it before?  This is where The Me That Came Before comes in.  Billy 2003 thought the thing up.  Billy 2004 reshaped it.  Billy 2005 rethought it yet again... By the time I got to my present draft there had been a history, a multitude of me's involved, each of them improving on the work of the one before. 

The positive way to look at this, as my stalwart, sweet Tater suggested, is "my standards are getting higher."  The negative way is to fear I'll never get high enough.   

But meanwhile, who is the nefarious Billy who wrote yesterday's draft and pronounced it viable? That freakin' guy -- I'm always reading over what he wrote last night, thinking: what was he thinking?!   Thus the Me That Came Before makes it better, until the Me That Comes After needs to make it better than the Me Before again... ad infinitum.

Next, in my Bargaining phase, the present-day Billy -- while addressing the multitudes of Billys with a desperate plaint: can't we all just get along? -- promised to build a temple in the lord's honor, among other things, if he could just for a second get the story straight.

During Depression, my general hopelessness over the story's ever being a story (let alone being great) alternated with visions of lifelong friends crossing the street to avoid seeing me after the book is published.

Finally came the understanding that the only way to truly bring the book up to the present moment (i.e. where I am now as a writer, via learning from all the mistakes the past me's have made) would be to throw this draft out and start writing the book again from the beginning. 

This sounds to me like I'm approaching Acceptance -- the point where you can at least live with the idea that you'll only get the damn thing as good as it can get for where you are now.

Because it's due tomorrow morning, my brain is mush, and if it really sucks... my editor will tell me how to fix it and get us an extension.  Won't she? 

So why does it feel like I've somehow wheeled my way back to Denial again...

But I Was There First!

The Loneliness of the Early Adopter

What if I told you I was stricken with a disease that's painful and incurable?  You'd be sympathetic, right?  But wait -- one of the most grievous symptoms of this sickening syndrome is that telling people you're stricken with it actually pisses them off.  And all you hear, as you're abandoned in your misery, is the sound of the cosmos going Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!!

Here's how it attacks.  You stumble upon something, usually in some haphazard, seemingly random fashion -- a small item in the paper, an accidental radio dial landing, a half-conscious following from link to link to link during an internet troll -- but suddenly you're riveted.  It's a voice you've never heard before that nonetheless touches you to the core.  And all the fibers in your soul and consciousnesss scream discovery!  Because your hurried, excited research quickly certifies the fact that whoever made this beautiful thing -- a singer-songwriter, an author, a filmmaker -- is somebody nobody else seems to have heard of, either.  They have a following, sure, but it's an obscure one; said artist is currently a well-kept secret.

Meanwhile, the Thing They Made (an import album, a small-press edition of a novel, an indie feature that hasn't gotten national release yet, etc.) has changed your life.  You're addicted to it.  It's become one of your favorite things, and you're given to proselytizing about it to friends who are initially indifferent (note the primary, insidious nature of the disease already at work: isolation of  victim/apathy of peers).  Those friends who become intrigued (or exasperated) enough to experience The Thing -- and invariably, your contagion does claim fellow victims -- are regaled by the precious bits of information you've gathered about the Unknown Artist; he or she is perhaps Canadian, and/or formerly played with/worked for/slept with so-and-so Somewhat Famous Person.

In this nascent phase of the disease you are happy, and it's a happiness peculiar to the human ego: part of the joy you derive from enjoying your Favorite Obscure Thing by an Unknown Artist is the knowledge that you are in the know.  You are ahead of the cultural curve, camped out on your own desert island of art-adoration, and thus tacitly privileged; this artist is going to be big -- so you've been telling everyone you know -- but as of now, they're... yours.  You have them to yourself, and it's a strangely self-satisfying form of intimacy.  Once in a blue moon, if you encounter someone else who knows of Them, the two of you share a rare complicity; you exchange details of the Wonder of Them like Masons doing the secret handshake.

Then one day, inevitably, the hammer falls.  You overhear a total stranger swooning over Them.  Them's photo is suddenly on the front cover of a national magazine.  You hear Them's latest work playing over the speakers in a clothing store like so much Muzak.  And the most debilitating blow of all -- someone you detest, someone whose taste you deplore, someone who belongs to clubs you would never want to have you as a member, this vile being accosts you to ask (their excitement laced with a horrifying scent of lordly I-know-something-you-don't-know-ness): have you heard of... Them?

We've all been victims of what I'll call the I Was First syndrome (IWF), and we've all encountered victims of the sickness.  It's that guy who insists on belligerently recounting how he saw Springsteen in a small club in Jersey when nobody was in the place; it's the woman who read Isabelle Allende's House of Spirits in Spanish, before it was published here; it's anyone who claims to have seen Reservoir Dogs on the festival circuit.  Ironically, whether they're telling the truth or not is entirely moot, because their "But I got there first!" story is almost always greeted with the same condescending, indulgent tolerance one might give a child who insists she had breakfast with Bigfoot.

The only natural response to an IWF victim's claim is: Good for you!  And hence the pain.  Because you know you were the smart one, the hip one, the one who got it when no else had it.  But now -- now that your Them is everybody else's Them -- who gives a rat's ass?  In fact, the more you insist on the primacy of your personal "ownership" of the art under discussion, the more you sound like exactly what you are: a sniveling, whiny elistist.  Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!!

Inside the world of technology, this is is already a well-established syndrome with its own set of terms and principles.  An Early Adopter is a person who embraces new technology before most other people do.  The term comes from a "diffusion" theory formalized by Everett Rogers in a 1962 book called Diffusion of Innovations.  The adopters of any new innovation are characterized as innovators, early adopters (i.e. the IWF-stricken), early majority, late majority, and laggards. 

Computer geeks of course thrive on elitism and are thus shamelessly arrogant about being early adopters.  Only one of them could have coined the acronym RTFM -- Read The Fucking Manual -- as the preferred uber-term to torment newbies.  But out here in the rest of the culture, there's really no gain in being rabidly IWF.  You're more likely to gain enemies and alienate people by insisting you're hipper than thou... and thus the typical victim of I Was First syndrome can't do much more than suffer in silence.

Or blog about it.  This whole screed was triggered by an extreme attack of IWF yours truly suffered when I opened up this morning's NY Sunday Times, and if you're not a laggard (to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume you're an early majority member) you'll have recognized the photos accompanying this post and know just who I'm kvetching about.  Front page of the Book Review?  A review (by James Wood, no less) of a book by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño.  And front page of the Arts & Leisure section?  An article citing Canadian singer-songwriter Feist as the next big thing.

But I was reading Roberto Bolaño a year and a half ago!  And I was listening to Feist when she was still in Broken Social Scene!!  I was reading Bolaño's first book of short stories translated into English while listening to Feist's Mushaboom -- the imported UK version -- and making pancakes for Bigfoot, in 2005!!!

Yeah-yeah-yeah.  Good for me, right?  In the lonely world of the IWF-diseased, no one wants to hear you scream.

 

So It Goes

"Hello, babies.  Welcome to Earth.  It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It's round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here.  There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

-- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

This past Wednesday, the world lost one of its great voices -- at least, in its flesh-and-blood form.  Those of us who have long loved the sound (and humanity and wit) of Mr. Vonnegut can take solace in the idea that he can always be found on one's bookshelf, in all his literary glory.

Others have done a fine job of eulogizing this writer.  I sort of feel that if you know him, you know him, and if you don't... you'll find out or you won't.  He'd probably be the first to question how much it really matters.  But in tribute, I humbly offer a replay of a piece I wrote about my one brief encounter with the great man, originally published on this site back in October of 2005.

Clouds in My Coffee #2: Kurt Vonnegut's Dry Cleaning

[A second installment in the ongoing true life adventures of Periphery Man, who has had myriad peculiar encounters with celebrities, while not being a celebrity himself.]

According to Kurt Vonnegut, in his new book of essays (essays, BTW, are what people used as blather-platforms before there were blogs), the first rule in creative writing is, Do not use semi-colons.  I'm abashed to admit I'm secretly fond of them, though I do go back and get rid of two out of every three ones I put in; now I suppose I'll have to go over my entire oeuvre with a fine-toothed colon comb and flush each last one of them out.  I'd do that for Kurt, because I love the man.

How can you not love a writer who says he's suing the manufacturers of his cigarettes for a billion bucks because they've promised to kill him (see the small print on a package of Pall Malls) and he's still very much alive?

To me Vonnegut seems one of the last contemporary writer guys to fulfill the romantic figure of what a writer is supposed to be -- original, audacious, inspiring.  That he is on the bestseller lists, at 82 (after having semi-officially retired from writing books some years ago, no less),  is a cause for celebration and a renewal of hope: if he's selling that many books at this moment in America, maybe we're not as stupid as we've seemed to be.

One of the neat things about reading a Kurt Vonnegut book is that he tends to use a lot of very short paragraphs.

Look at all this white space!  Isn't it nice?

He writes fiction that looks as sparse as good screenwriting (though the screen has not been as good to his works as it should).  In his work, he seems particularly attuned to how what seems to be junk can actually be significant, and vice versa, and to how the most seemingly mundane, momentary interactions can turn human beings into the playthings of enormous forces.

I can relate to that.

Despite all of my run-ins with celebrities, I would never have dreamed of going up to a famous person in a public place (i.e. a non-performance environment) and asking for an autograph.  The concept has no appeal.  But when my dear friend Darcy Hawes (wife of esteemed painter-bassist Jimi Hawes and mother of Dexter Hawes -- recipient of one of the best names ever given to a non-fiction character) found out that Kurt Vonnegut lived across the street from my parents and got all excited, saying that he was her favorite writer, and if she could have his autograph she'd be ecstatic, I told her I would see what I could do.

It was one of those things one says that's just an expression of good intentions, because although Vonnegut's townhouse is indeed located diagonally across from my parent's apartment building in Manhattan, I'd never encountered the man in person, not in all the years they'd lived there, and didn't expect to, anytime soon.

A month or so later I flew back to New York on business and stayed with my folks for a few days, and get this: one morning as my dad and I left his block and turned north on Second Avenue, here came Kurt Vonnegut, headed home.

Kurt looked more like a writer than any other writer I've ever seen.  He was wearing a worn cardigan and corduroys, his hair was disheveled and mustache droopy, his eyes behind silver-framed spectacles seemed fixed on something miles away, and there was a cigarette hanging from his lower lip that looked glued there, defying gravity.  If one can imagine New York City as a kind of giant industrial farm, then he looked like one over-worked farm animal.  Slightly stooped, with his hands shoved deep in his cardigan pockets, he didn't so much walk as galumph, with a distracted and slightly pained expression, as if he'd recently been smacked in the face with a large wet salmon but expected as much: "so it goes."

I was so startled to see him that he'd already passed by us before I stopped my dad, saying "Wait a second, I have to do something," and ran after the unsuspecting author.  My "Excuse me, Mr. Vonnegut" slowed and turned him round.  "I'm sorry to interrupt your day," I said, seeing the baleful look in his watery eyes, and hurriedly asked him if I could get his autograph for a friend of mine.  Even as I said it I realized this was the quintessential stock cliche for autograph- seekers -- it's always for someone else -- so  I quickly explained that Darcy was a writer who lived in L.A. and that he was her favorite author.  This sounded odd to me, too, as if the subtext was "me, I couldn't care less," so although I wasn't about to add, "I love you, too, though my favorite writer is Julio Cortazar," I did blurt something about my being a huge fan of his work as well.

Vonnegut had a deadpan that would've done Buster Keaton proud.  He considered the request with some gravity for a moment and then nodded.  "Got a pen?"

Of course.  I always carry a pen (you can see by my pen that I am a writer) and I immediately produced it.  But it was soon apparent that what neither of us had was anything to write on.  I was journal-free, as was he, book and magazine-bare.  A quick perusal of my pockets produced nothing but a lone dollar bill.  I held it up for consideration, but both of us shook our heads (in a later re-read of Breakfast of Champions, I found his sardonic dismissal of this American currency, with its flying eye-topped pyramid and pretentious Latin he interpreted to mean "In nonsense is strength").

"Hold on," said Kurt, reaching into his wallet, and came out with a dry cleaning slip.  He studied it briefly, murmured, "They won't need it," and took my pen.  Using a nearby concrete railing for backing, he inscribed 'For Dear Darcy' at the top, and autographed it with a literal flourish -- a sort of sparkling star-like figure adorning the signature.  I thanked him profusely, and we parted ways.

An ecstatic Darcy Hawes framed the document.  And now it can be told:  on September 5th, 1995, Kurt Vonnegut had 1 jacket, green ($5.50) and 1 pants, tan ($4.00) at the Turtle Bay Cleaners.

They will be ready on Wednesday after 5 P.M.

In a Vonnegut novel, the lack of that slip, at the cleaner's on Wednesday, might instigate a chain of events that would end in some darkly funny catastrophe.  Or such a slip might serve as the last recorded information about a man subsequently kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.

No such luck! in my rom-com story.  But life's possibilities -- and bless you, Mr. Vonnegut, for demonstrating this -- remain endless. 

Top 10 Romantic Comedies

Like a dog with a bone (or like a blogger with a bug up his butt) I'm been gnawing over the "Top 10 Romantic Comedy Screenplays" list ever since I last posted re: this oh-so vital (stop the presses!) topic.

For one thing, I realized after the fact that I'd hobbled myself right off the track with my Top 10 Rom Coms In Print notion; it's a bit like saying, here's the Top 10 Rock Albums On CD, Not Vinyl or some such nonsense.  True, I was trying to serve two purposes, simultaneously presenting a "best" list and a "here's great screenplays you can read!" menu, but in the end, any Top 10 Rom-Com list that leaves off both Groundhog Day and Tootsie is merely absurd.  You might as well tout a list of the "Top 10 Rock Bands Not Counting the Beatles and the Stones."

Then there's the issue of script v. movie.  What, precisely, makes something a Great Screenplay versus a Great Film?  We could get all academic on this point, but -- I'm sorry, is my talking interfering with your snoring?  Exactly.

Thus, in the interest of saving my own sanity (and giving into the List sickness I decried here some time ago), I decided to take the bull by the horns and go for it, assembling a pure and simple list of Top 10 Romantic Comedies, period.  And that's when I really found myself knee-deep in manure.

Here's the thing: when I put together my initial list, I was careful to keep it largely Modern Age; I reasoned that an arguable Best of the Screwball Era title would serve for the whole of it, and thus Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) made the cut.  But sure enough, as my post commenters made abundantly clear, this just wouldn't do.  How can you have a Top 10 that ignores Bringing Up Baby?  Or for that matter, a classic of the genre like The Philadelphia Story, which won a Best Screenplay Oscar, no less (for Donald Ogden Stewart in 1940)?

Problem is, if you start filling your Top Ten with Screwballs, there's no room for a contemporary masterpiece like Moonstruck, let alone the brilliant left-field one-of-a-kinder Eternal Sunshine.  The Top 10 Challenge starts to be a headache, for a genre that's actually fairly small in its roster of agreed-upon greats (assemble a Top 25 and you can feel fairly secure about your choices).

My simple if unorthodox solution?  Not one Top 10, but two.

It's undeniable that the romantic comedy genre (along with so much else) was never the same after World War II.  The romantic comedies of the Thirties, when you set them side by side with their descendants say, 50 years later, are about as alike as a Smith Corona manual typewriter and your Apple iBook: essentially, they're using the same materials to do the same job, but dude!  What a world of difference.  So herewith, with some help from Living RomCom's readership, my suggested Top Ten Romantic Comedies, from before and after the A-bomb scorched a line in the genre's sand.

TOP TEN ROMANTIC COMEDIES, PRE-WAR:

Trouble in Paradise

It Happened One Night

My Man Godfrey

The Awful Truth

Bringing Up Baby

Ninotchka

His Girl Friday

The Philadelphia Story

The Shop Around the Corner

The Lady Eve

TOP TEN ROMANTIC COMEDIES, MODERN ERA:

The Apartment

The Graduate

Annie Hall (alternate: Manhattan)

Tootsie

Moonstruck

Say Anything (alt: Jerry Maguire)

When Harry Met Sally

Groundhog Day

Four Weddings and a Funeral (alt: Notting Hill)

A Fish Called Wanda (alt: There's Something About Mary)

Runners-up Department: Afficionados of the Pre-Wars may quibble with the exclusion of the third great Howard Hawks screwball (Twentieth Century), argue for Holiday over Philly Story, or bemoan the lack of a Tracy-Hepburn (sorry, but 1942's Woman of the Year is clearly inferior to 1949's Adam's Rib).  But that's nothing compared to the heat I'm bound to get for List #2.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is MIA because I've drawn the line at the year 2000, arguing that from our vantage point in the Oughts, it's too soon to definitively say "Top."  But where are Sabrina, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Shampoo, Romancing the Stone, Roxanne, Broadcast News, Bull Durham, Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle and so on?  And that's not even opening the whole Woody Allen canon can o' worms (pick Annie Hall but not Hannah? Broadway Danny? etc.). 

So to forestall outrage and assuage my own pain, I added in the "alternates" above.  Due to a massive Tom Cruise backlash, Cameron Crowe is repped by the iconic Say (which has given us Lloyd Dobler to contend with, forever) rather than Jerry Maguire -- even though Jerry's the one that added three catch-phrases to our culture (Show me the money, You had me at hello, You complete me). 

But generally, the deciding factor was: did this romantic comedy in some way define a cultural moment and/or become a part of our collective cultural vocabulary?  Thus, Arthur, though a classic and a personal fave, seems fatally dated in certain respects and hasn't enjoyed the kind of lasting resonance that Moonstruck has, with its "Snap out of it!" slap.  While Four Weddings may not be your favorite Richard Curtis, it was in a very evident sense the progenitor of the entire Wedding Rom-Com sub-genre. 

Most hybrids, alas, had to be cleaved from the upper crust. True Romance is really a satire of rom-coms and more legitimately a black crime comedy; Princess Bride is less a real romantic comedy than it is one of the greatest comedies ever.

At any rate, I'm ready to debate, carp and defend, so have at it.  Now that I've expanded and revised, what do you think I got right or wrong?