Living the Romantic Comedy

Movie Book Heaven

While half the blogs in the known universe are posting reactions to the 2008 Oscars telecast (Javier Bardem actually won for No Country?!  OhmyGod!!!  But seriously, best speech: Tilda Swinton), Living RomCom would like to talk about the Oscars show from 1968 -- as relived in one absolutely scrumptious book. 

By this time in 2009, you'll prob'ly have a hard time even remembering who won what this year (this oft-experienced Oscar amnesia is a clear indicator of how fundamentally trivial our modern era's Academy Awards can be), but I'll wager that the movie book-reading public won't forget Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.  It's the best book written about the movies and what they mean to us to come down the pike in a long while, and its subject matter is particularly intriguing in terms of its contrast to the times we live in.

Harris's basic story concept is brilliant.  Pictures uses the Best Picture nominations of 1967 to explore that seminal moment in film history when the old guard of Hollywood was pushed, wheezing and whelping, into confrontation with the New.  On the left was Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate; on the right was Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Dr. Doolittle (yes, really); occupying the conflicted middle-ground was In the Heat of the Night.

Night won the night, but the ultimate champion was a new breed of filmmakers that was to nearly destroy the old studio system, dragging it under protest across a just-solidified generational dividing line, and therein lies the fascinating core of Harris's tale.  The book is at its shrewdest and most revealing when it explicates the particulars of a rather Oedipal story, showing how a motley crew of European-inspired sons (among them, Warren Beatty and Mike Nichols) slew the already staggering Hollywood dragon-dads (e.g. Jack Warner), creating a passel of more modern myths even as they enacted an ancient one.

Harris's cinematic narrative strategy is to cross-cut the creation stories of all five future Best Pic noms; we follow each movie from conception, through production, to release, spanning a four year period.  It's an involving and suspenseful gambit, due to the cliff-hanging nature of its subplots (a crash course in how miraculous a feat it is to actually get a movie made), and the colorfully diverse cast of characters involved.  Being a fly on the wall in a legend-filled room is one of the great pleasures in movie-book reading, and Pictures puts you in many such stellar suites.

I loved, for example, discovering that screenwriting team David Newman and Robert Benton, while trying to sell Francois Truffaut on helming Bonnie and Clyde, sat through a screening of Gun Crazy he'd set up for them along with Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.  Godard briefly considered directing Bonnie himself -- and as Picture reports, after it later lost Best Picture, sent a telegram to Newman saying "Now, let's make it all over again!"

The book cuts from Gene Hackman agonizing over having been fired from Bonnie, to Stanley Kramer wondering if Spencer Tracy will live long enough to finish Dinner.  You get first-timer Dustin Hoffman's totally traumatic experience of working on The Graduate while everyone else in show biz considers him miscast, juxtaposed with Sidney Poitier's refusal to film in the deep South for Night because there was no guarantee he'd get out of there alive.

The era's portrait snapshots are priceless.  Here's Sidney Lumet remembering vulgarian producer Joseph E. Levine "sitting in the Polo Lounge, so happy, a hooker on each arm, each hand on a different tit."  There's young Peter Fonda (with then-unknown chums Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper) cheering on the Byrds while they play his mom and Roger Vadim's Malibu beach party -- with "Daryl Zanuck and George Cukor both staring dumbstruck as a barefoot young hippie began to nurse her baby in front of them." 

Next to the passionately innovative serious-ities of Arthur Penn and Nichols, the disastrous saga of Dr. Doolittle serves as black comedic counterpoint.  That it was clearly a movie that didn't want to have been made is borne out by a telegram sent, after typhoons and animal seizures jeopardized its bloated, ill-advised production, from a crew member on location in St. Lucia to Anthony Newley and wife Joan Collins: "Insect terrible from very wet summer STOP everyone covered in welts and sores two people bad infections from bites STOP six people ill last week from dysentery."

Meanwhile, it's the life-and-death issues of that era -- when the Civil Rights movement was peaking and the Vietnam War was beginning to divide the country -- that give this movie race its gravitas.  The book explores how The Graduate came to embody youth culture before the term existed, how Bonnie seemed to react to the war and the violence in the heart of America, how Night's success (and Dinner's datedness) were informed by events that culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- a tragedy that caused the Academy to postpone its show for the first time in nearly 40 years.

Harris's well-written and prodigiously researched work (even the footnotes are intriguing) has an aptly-timed resonance.  As I devoured the book, I couldn't help occasionally humming Dylan's Things Have Changed.  This year's picture race?  There Will Be Blood does speak to the tyranny of oil-lust that underlies our current administration's downfall, No Country can be seen as an indictment of the nihilistic violence we live with now, and Juno certainly has its finger on the pulse of kids-these-days.  But no one could sanely make a claim that this crop of pictures signifies a revolution of any kind -- or that they've even connected with America with anything like the force that 1967's wildly popular bunch did (many critics have pointed out that prior to the Awards, Juno has been the only major moneymaking hit among this year's nominees).

In its tacitly elegiac way, Pictures takes a picture of a now long-gone moment when movies were still at the uncontested epicenter of popular culture, and a clear embodiment of what "we" were all thinking and feeling.  Micro-trended into a vast collection of disparate cultural tribes, we (or, all the many "we"s) simply don't live in that world anymore.  But Harris's book delivers its bygone era to us in an indelibly vivid way.   All I can say is: hie thee with this tome to a comfy chair, 'cause boy, is it ever a damn good read.

Definitely Adam

When I was but a film school pup, I traveled with a pack of future illustrious moviemakers that included editor Sally Menke (Pulp Fiction), Oscar-winning sound man Lee Orloff (Terminator 2), cinematographer Joey Forsyte (Naked in New York), producer Paula Mazur (Corrina, Corrina) and director Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest).  Another member of this clan -- which spent inordinate hours figuring out which restaurant to go to and once ensconced in one, drank and ate film, film and more film until dawn -- was Adam Brooks.

Readers of this blog probably best know Mr. Brooks as the screenwriter of Lawrence Kasdan's French Kiss, beloved by many rom-commers for Kevin Kline's indelible performance as a quintessentially Gallic con-man.   In addition to co-writing Bridget Jones 2, Wimbledon, and Beloved, Adam wrote and directed an adaptation of Jennifer Egan's novel The Invisible Circus in 2001, and has now auteur-ed arguably his most personal movie to date.  A passel of critics led by the NY Times' A.O. Scott, who only weeks ago was decrying the dearth of good romantic comedies, have declared his Definitely, Maybe to be "nimble and winning" and a "sparkling comic enchantment" -- while noting a strain of almost elegiac melancholy in its subtext.

I'd wager that the film's attempt to do something a little different with the romantic comedy genre is key to the reception it's received.  Meanwhile, its undertone of cineaste seriosity entwined with a mischievous playfulness seems to me to be very Adam Brooks -- who answered Living RomCom's questions about Definitely, Maybe this week via e-mail.

Your movie has an unusual structure and a fresh point of view in terms of what's considered the standard rom-com "formula." Did you consciously set out to tweak the traditional form?

Yes, in that I had just done a number of big rewrites on rom-coms and felt exhausted/bored/depressed with the ‘formula’. I wanted to surprise myself, keep myself interested, and have no idea what would happen. No, in that once I started writing I no longer thought very much about other films or the rules of the genre, I really tried to write within myself, if that makes any sense. When I teach screenwriting classes, I notice how quick students are to look for solutions outside themselves. They want hard and fast rules about when they should end the first act, how to structure the ‘b’ story, etc. etc. Okay, it’s a natural tendency, and writing is a scary, murky, stomach-churning process; but obsessing about rules is a distraction from the real work at hand. It also ignores a basic truth - that storytelling is practically genetic - conflict, heroes and villains, cliffhangers, the three act structure, I really think they’re all embedded in our sub-conscious. I don’t need to give Robert McKee a lot of my money to find out something I already know, if I just make the effort. Ask any parent who has told a bedtime story to their child.

How did the idea for your story develop? What is it about the character of Will that comes out of your own experience, passions and predilections?

I started with a couple of very broad notions. The first was ‘young man comes to the big city’. It’s an old story, especially in novels. The young man comes with all his ideals, dreams and immense ambition [In the movie, hero Will Hayes arrives in New York to work on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992.] -- to pursue his career and find true love. Which is what a lot of us do in that period after college until we're in our early thirties, when we have to come to terms with what has (or hasn’t) worked out professionally, and is also when we often settle down and start a family. It’s something I related to on a personal level. I came to New York to attend NYU film school and pursue my dream of being the next Truffaut. Meet cool wonderful exotic young women. Conquer the world. It didn’t work out badly, but it definitely didn’t work out the way I had planned.

The second notion I had was to write a love story that took place over many years - with ellipsis, unexpected twists and turns. Story lines in movies have become incredibly compact. Even when a story takes place over months, it often feels like it’s happening in a single breath. I miss films that feel more elongated, novelistic, that allow you to watch the characters evolve and then feel more invested in what happens to them.

The last ‘big’ story idea I had, a couple of months into writing, was what became the framework for the movie. Will, in the middle of a divorce, tells the tale of his youth to his ten year old daughter, as a kind of mystery love story [She has to guess which of three different women he got involved with became her mom.] By telling her his story, he comes to terms with something very important about himself, and his daughter comes to terms with what's happening to her family. Often romantic comedies are too focused on the basic boy meets girl of it all, and ignore the chance to create a real, complicated world around the particulars of the characters.

Let's talk about your writing process. How much is predetermined (i.e. outlined) and how much discovered in the writing? Did you always know, for example, which woman Will would ultimately end up with? Or did this change and surprise you over the course of a number of drafts?

I decided to completely change my writing process for this script. I didn’t outline the story, a first for me, and I had no idea which of the three women Will would end up with. When I started I didn’t even have the idea of the flashback structure. It was a bit scary, like not having a safety net, and it took a lot longer to write a first draft. But it was a very satisfying process and ultimately I think it paid off. Usually I write about 150 pages to get to a 120 page draft. With Definitely, Maybe I wrote well over 200 pages. I wrote sections in prose and then adapted them. I wrote in diary form. And for the first time ever I allowed myself to write badly. By which I mean I didn’t put the pressure on myself to write a good scene, just to write the scene - long, rough, and bad as it might be. It’s what I always tell my students, I decided to follow my own advice.

About halfway through the first draft (three months in) I stopped, totally confused and lost. I showed what I had to my wife and a few trusted friends. They gave me the encouragement to go on at a moment when I desperately needed perspective. When I started back in, confidence renewed, a mental outline for the rest of the story quickly and easily evolved, and I pretty much knew what would happen.

The movie features a stunning ensemble cast. What was it like to work with relative newcomers like Isla, and vets like Kevin Kline?

I got lucky with the cast - not just because there are a lot of wonderful actors in the film, but because they worked so well together, they complimented each other. I try to create a relaxed and safe environment for the actors so they can try anything, so that they can fall on their face in one take without having a nervous breakdown, and then find what they’re looking for two takes later. My other main rule was that I never wanted to hear the script. I didn’t want the writing to sound clever, or the humor to sound like jokes. I encouraged the actors to play with the words, to overlap, to mess it up. I think they were surprised and relieved that as a writer/director I wasn’t precious about what I had written. I told them not to worry, I would be happy to take credit for any fantastic or funny line they came up with. And they always would surprise me. Ryan and Isla especially. And Kevin Kline of course. Give him 5 takes, and sometimes he will give you five different readings. Tell him you like one in particular, he’ll never do it again.

How close is the finished movie to the one you originally envisioned? How did it change?

More than any other movie I have written, Definitely, Maybe turned out closest to what I had imagined, especially in the general feeling, pace, look and emotional palette. We were meticulous in preparing the design and choosing the locations, and about how we would portray New York visually over the 16 years the story takes place. That said, I decided early on not to have too narrow an idea about how the the scenes would play out. And because of that, the shoot was a very enjoyable process of both realization and discovery.

Thank you, Adam, for sharing all this with us re: Definitely, Maybe -- certainly not your same old cookie-cutter rom-com.

Our Love is Here to Stay

The dispiriting, uninspired sameness of romantic comedy strikes me as something of a scandal.

--A.O. Scott

Well, yuh, we might say -- those of us who haven't come as late to the party of Ragging on Rom-Coms as the esteemed New York Times critic A.O. did in his "A Fine Romance" piece a week or so ago.  Scott's had it with the same stuff we've been reviling for awhile now, and it only seems appropriate on Valentine's Day 2008, that Living the Rom-Com should address the ostensible living death of our beloved genre.

As Scott accurately points out, the paradigm for what's generally known as "romantic comedy" today follows a painfully predictable course:

A single woman, courted by two eligible men, will be drawn toward the man who is superficially right but ontologically wrong for her before choosing, in the final 20 minutes, the man with the opposite qualities. Or, more rarely, a single man will face the analogous predicament. Or an incurable skirt chaser will be cured, usually by a lady who at first had seemed to be repelled by his irresistible manly charms. Or a couple on the verge of splitting — or already split — will discover that they were meant to be together after all... If the protagonist is male, his best friend will be either a geek or a boor; if female, her sidekick will be either a prude or a slut.

Scott cites a common answer to "how did this genre fall so far?" i.e. from contemporary relevance and into lackluster movie boredom: the idea that "the rituals of heterosexual courtship no longer provide as flexible or adaptable a framework as they once did" (i.e. post-Sexual Revolution, the rom-com is essentially forced to play tennis without a net).  But this, as Scott points out, can't really be the problem, since the "naughty R-rated sibling" of the romantic comedy (e.g. the Judd Apatow ouevre) doesn't fear to tread, however coarsely, a more explicit -- i.e. modern -- path. 

Noting another obvious issue -- that many of today's romantic comedy stars lack the substance and sophistication of their forebears -- Scott quickly glosses over the huge success of last year's Knocked Up and Juno as "hardly the norm"; conversely, Scott cites 27 Dresses as being typical of run-of-the-mill rom-com "movies whose notion of love is insipid, shallow and frequently ludicrous."

I'm with you there, A.O., but let me say this about that.  Knocked Up is a romantic comedy (while also being a high concept coming-of-age farce) and Juno (coming-of-age dramedy) is a romantic comedy.  That these two "exceptions" are the genre's biggest recent successes (along with a more traditional hybrid, Enchanted) speaks to a development that takes some of the air out of Scott's screed: the genre is already transforming.

Yes, there's a lot of rom-com crap out there, as has always been the case -- just as there have always been tons of godawful sci-fi movies to one The Matrix (Part 1), thousands of terrible character-driven ensemble films next to Little Miss Sunshine, et cetera ad infinitum.  There are always memorable movies that transcend their genre alongside a stream of biz-as-usual pics that don't even try.  The list of truly "great" romantic comedies is an unusually slim one -- a testament to how truly challenging this deceptively simple-looking genre has always been (do try this at home: see how many Inarguably Great Rom-Coms you can add to this list; I'll bet you can't come up with more than another dozen).

Studios keep grinding out the Dated Traditional Date Movie because it's cheap to make, it fills a demographic slot, and once every blue moon or so, they catch lightning in a bottle (see Hitch, for one notable example -- the biggest trad rom-com opening weekend to date).  But if the audience stops showing up for negligible shite like Good Luck Chuck (which deservedly tanked), the studios won't make so many of them as a matter of genre course.

What will they be inclined to make instead?  More Knocked Ups and Junos, of course, but also more high concept romantic comedies like 50 First Dates and What Women Want; more character-driven rom-coms like Jerry Maguire and As Good as it Gets; more hybrids like Enchanted and Mr. and Mrs. Smith; more Take-a-Chancers like Something's Gotta Give; more indie-bent benders like Eternal Sunshine...

If there is any one through-line or commonality I've found in good, memorable romantic comedies that get made, it's that they don't arrive at the party with "I'm just an old-fashioned rom-com" tattoed across their foreheads.  They don't start out with "she's looking for Mr. Right" as their premise; they put their distinctive protagonists in the midst of an extraordinary story where love is a surprise, not an inevitability.  Even the Trad Rom-Coms that have been successful in the past decade have come jerry-rigged with some kind of high concept hook; witness Wedding Crashers and How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days. 

This is why I keep telling students, clients, execs and anyone who'll listen (that would be you out there) that romantic comedies that don't even look like romantic comedies (e.g. Groundhog Day, Zelig, Juno) are the smartest way to go -- funny love stories that don't slavishly follow That Formula, and wisely wrap their romances up in a larger movie idea.  Thinking outside the romantic comedy Same-Old box is the surest screenwriting path I know to Different. 

Originality and passion -- as opposed to dutiful fill-in-the-numbers hackwork -- is the hallmark of great work in every movie genre.  So if you're a screenwriter with something to say about love or people and/or both, don't dump your potential rom-com gold into that dusty overused mold Scott described.  Surely you can find a way into that material without relying on the hoary, threadbare genre model that's scandalized A.O. and bored rom-com lovers like me to tears.   

One such a movie is opening this Valentine's Day.  I have to recuse myself from saying too much about Definitely, Maybe because its writer-director Adam Brooks (French Kiss, Wimbledon) is an old friend of mine, but it's a romantic comedy that consciously tweaks the established conventions.  And I'll be posting an interview with Mr. Brooks this weekend, to investigate how his genuinely heartfelt attempt to do something different came about. 

Vive le difference, y'know?  It is, after all, what makes the world go round.

Triumph of the Unconscious?

Nick Kazan was the guest speaker at my Cinematic Storytelling class this weekend.  The Oscar-nominated screenwriter (for Reversal of Fortune, in 1991) is also on the Board of the Writers Guild, so it was especially generous of him to spend some time with a small group of fledgling screenwriters -- given that the momentous meeting in the Shrine auditorium that would help decide the fate of the writers' strike Saturday night was merely hours away. 

Perseverance was a theme in our discourse: working sometimes for years on a story to get it right, with the particular kind of stubborn will-power that's central to the modern storyteller's craft and career survival.  Simultaneously what struck me as a through-line in our conversation, surfacing in different contexts as we discussed how a story takes shape and develops on the page, was how much of the screenwriter's method is intuitive. 

When he starts to write a scene, Nick favors literally closing his eyes and letting the images flow.  "Just watch what happens in the scene, don't try to force it," he said, "then write down what you see.  Then close your eyes again.  You're tickling the unconscious...  If you let the movie happen, let the characters speak, then what you get is more visual and cinematic."  And we talked about how film operates like a dream.

So now I'm sitting... picturing... having to retype this sentence three times in a row since I can't actually spell well with my eyes closed and I'm dreaming --

Fried.  Basted.  Knackered, flattened...  Words fail me at the end of Day 3 of  a four-day screenwriting intensive at the Writers Program.  It's kind of like teaching on acid.

Also it resembles group therapy, of some benign locked-in-a-room EST-ian variety.  Trying to get a handle on her script's theme, one student spoke of the pain of being split in half by religion, politics and parentage (adopted, she thought of herself as living betwixt and between her current and birth-mother families).  Another confessed that her seemingly lark-like female buddy comedy was actually based in her not long ago having been left by her husband of 10 years (with three kids' lives in the balance); it was about having to face sharing her children with a second "mom."

We bathyscape into the depths here.  It's a cinematic psyches sea world.  And it was so odd to emerge into this night of all nights, where a writer-director friend, back from the Shrine meeting, couldn't quite get with the cheerlead-ish brio at the strike's imminent ending.  "You always want to make yourself feel good about the decision you've made," he noted wryly, as in: regardless of what realities might be implicit in a lowered-expectations deal.

What did we win? is bound to be the question that'll occupy a lot of scribe minds this week, as they pick their way past the debris of whatever's been lost in three months of picketing.  Me, I'm momentarily incapable of inhabiting the win-lose world.  Here in the training grounds, where storytellers go after their truths with terrier-like tenacity, digging them out in draft after draft, trying to tickle their unconsciousnesses into letting those images flow, it's so not about percentages and residuals.  For the writers (poor beautiful suckers) it's always about making dreams come true.

How's this dream going? I wonder, and I guess we're about to find out. 

After I've visited my own dreamland and taken a few days out of pocket to revive and refuel, I'll be back -- on Valentine's Day, to discuss Why Romantic Comedy is Deader Than Ever... Yet ALIVE, I tell you, it's ALIVE!!! 

   

The Hidden Heroine

Yes, it's that time of the year again.  Romantic comedy lovers, romantics, lovers comedic or serious -- pretty much all humans with beating hearts know that as soon as February rolls around, there's a major holiday to be reckoned with, one that's come to symbolize the meaning of love and romance for America, if not the world.

I'm speaking, of course, about Groundhog Day.

Granted, there was a time, long, long ago (i.e. before 1993), when this holiday lacked the romantic associations since bestowed on it, due to the efforts of Danny Rubin, Harold Ramis and Bill Murray.  But ever since the writer, director and star, respectively of Groundhog Day created what's now generally acknowledged as one of the great American movies of all time, February 2nd has become synonymous with romance and comedy.  In fact, when people ask me to name a couple of my favorite romantic comedies, this one invariably comes to mind.

What's that?  You've never thought of this cinematic classic as a romantic comedy?  For shame.  I have it on good, nay, unassailable authority that the film more than qualifies.  For starters, it says so right on the friggin' DVD box's front cover ("A romantic comedy fantasy that is Bill Murray's best screen performance" -- thank you, Gene Shalit).  But you can also look up the definition of romantic comedy in the um, definitive text on same, and find (p.12) that "a romantic comedy is a comedy whose central plot is embodied in a romantic relationship" and that (p.13) "the central question posed by a romantic comedy is: 'Will these two individuals become a couple?'"

As you well know, when TV weatherman Phil Connors (Murray) gets inexplicably trapped in the same repeating February 2nd, his sole recourse to getting out of it becomes the object of his affections, producer Rita (Andie MacDowell); his salvation lies in the answer to their coupling question.  (Screenwriting theorist sticklers may point out that the story's central question is really, Will Phil ever get out of February 2nd?  To this I say, also true, because the movie is a rom-com hybrid -- ibid, pp.21-28 -- a romantic comedy/high concept fantasy, and thus the couple/escape conflicts are intertwined.  But let's stop boring our civilian readers, shall we?  Thanks.)

Strange but true, there still exist deprived, disadvantaged people who have not seen the movie Groundhog Day.  If you are one of those poor souls, what better opportunity to improve the quality of your life, than to view it today, on the official Day itself?  And even if you're one of the many enriched individuals who's seen it, Groundhog Day is of course a movie that you can watch over and over, and over, and over and over and over...

...And if you're a major Groundhog Day fan, you might even consider journeying to the scene of the crime: the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is having its annual celebration, and it promises to be quite a hoot.  Such a trip was actually enjoyed by Day's writer and star before the movie was made, and therein lies a little tale that speaks, I believe, to the true spirit of romance, or as we might say, what love's got to do with it.

Danny Rubin recounts the following in his illuminating interview accompanying an early draft of the screenplay in Scenario (Spring '95 issue, regrettably out of print).  He talks of having been hired, fired and re-hired to work on the script, and when he, his wife Louise and kids were preparing to move from Los Angeles to New Mexico, getting a call from Bill Murray:

He says, "Do you realize that the day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day?"--"Yep."--"And do you realize that between the director, the producer, the star and the writer of this film, nobody has been to the festival at Punxsutawney?  Doesn't that seem wrong to you?"  And I said, "Absolutely.  And I think you should go, I think that will be a great thing."  And he said, "I think we should go."  And I said, "Bill, that's a really nice offer, sounds like fun, but I'm moving, I'm moving my family, we're up to our necks in boxes, I can't just abandon them and go off to Punxsutawney."  And he said, "Well, think about it and call me back.  Here's my number."  When I got off the phone, Louise asked who it was.  "Bill Murray," I said.  "He wants me to go to Punxsutawney tomorrow."  And she said, "Cool."  And I said I'd told him I couldn't do it.  She said, "Are you nuts?"  So I talked to [the studio] and they said, "We'll pay for the move, we'll get someone to help pack, we'll fly out a friend of your wife's to help her move in so you don't have to be there."

This level of support was very nice, and I embarked on the most surreal adventure of my professional life.  All of a sudden I'm flying in a private plane from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with Bill Murray and we're talking about the script.  We landed somewhere near Punxsutawney at 2:00 in the morning.  And there were fans out there waiting for him--it was supposed to be a secret...

Rubin goes on to say that he used a lot of what he saw on that trip in the script.  He'd originally only spoken to the town's Chamber of Commerce and looked at their literature, but:

After we actually saw it, there was a whole different feel to it than we had imagined.  It was delightful, really delightful--a wonderful civic event.  We incorporated a lot of that into the movie...  Everyone there knew it was a goofy ritual--it was almost sophisticated in its hickyness.  What was so much fun about the festival is, it's the middle of the night, zero degrees, they've got bonfires going--and they're playing Beach Boys music.

Sometimes I read this excerpt to a screenwriting class when I'm talking about the inestimable value of research, to illustrate how really being there can make all the difference in writing a given project.  But I quote it now in this pre-Valentine's Day context to highlight my favorite moment in Rubin's story, which is when Louise says, "Are you nuts?"

I just love that!  Gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling every time, because it seems to me that Danny Rubin's wife is the hidden heroine of the Groundhog Day saga.  Love doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry.  It means having someone be able to say "Are you nuts?!" to you at a crucial moment.  Love is sometimes about saving loved ones from themselves -- which come to think of it, is kind of at the core of what the movie ended up being about, don't you think? 

Go watch it again, again, and see if you agree.

Spending my days believing in impossible things and chasing them towards an inner truth, now that's a pretty good gig.

--Danny Rubin

(photograph at post's top by sabine)