Living the Romantic Comedy

ExactlyLikeMe.com

When I come upon the latest reports from the frontlines of what's euphemistically called "the dating scene" (Thurber called it The War Between Men and Women) I'm reminded of a moment from When Harry Met Sally: Harry's best friend Jess and Sally's best friend Marie (i.e. Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher), a happily committed couple, get off the phone with their respective traumatized buddies, friends who've just slept together, the idiots, and ruined everything -- and Marie turns to Bruce, saying: "Tell me I'll never have to be out there again."  Bruce puts an arm around her and tells her soberly, "You'll never have to be out there again."

Oh, Lord, yes: the dreaded Out There.  I haven't done the math, but I've probably spent more of my adult life Out There than I have In Here (i.e. in the midst of a relationship), and thus I have nothing but sympathy for those who are in that lonely place.  So I was heartened to read in the NY Times this morning that those looking to hook up and stay hooked are getting more seriously pragmatic about making it happen.  An article entitled Let's Say You Want to Date a Hog Farmer explores a relatively new online dating phenomenon: niche sites.

A growing number of people have found love on dating sites that pair members based on a specific shared interest or background — sites like HorseandCountrySingles.com, Nerdsatheart.com, DateMyPet.com, STDmatch.net (for singles with sexually transmitted diseases), MatureSinglesOnly.com (for people over 50) and Veggielove.com.

“Singles are increasingly eager to narrow the audience and really target their needs,” said Mark Brooks, a dating consultant who keeps his own blog, OnlinePersonalsWatch.com. “It’s the same reason why Procter & Gamble makes so many detergents. We are all drawn to things that cater to our very specific desires.”

According to Times journalist J. Courtney Sullivan, such sites are booming.  FarmersOnly.com, for example (their trademarked slogan is "City folks just don't get it!") has gained 50,000 members in the past year alone.  One satisfied customer who grew up on an Ohio horse farm, the successfully hitched Sarah Edwards, recently told a friend to give up on Match.com:  “I said to him: ‘You’re wasting your time. You’re not going to find girls on there who like hunting and fishing and four-wheeling,’ ” she recalled.

The article concludes with a quote from a Jewish man who found his fiancee on Jdate: "When you’re looking for a lifelong partner, you probably want some winnowing down. You probably want someone who’s a lot like you.”

Sure, I say, and more power to ya.  I'm reminded that my own honey Tater claims she conjured me out of the ether weeks before we met, by compiling a very specific list of what she wanted in a mate.  Instead of generalities, she filled her list with such attributes as "he must be a good driver" and "he must love books and be as well-read or more well-read than I am."  She landed a guy who handles his Mini pretty well, thanks, and reads and writes for a living. 

Her foresight was definitely a factor in our courtship being suffused with moments of delighted "you like that, too?!" discoveries.  Specificity works.  But as a diehard romantic comedy fan, I can't help but ask: Whatever happened to opposites attract?  There must be a rom-com waiting to be written about the boy from DemsForClinton.com who meets the girl who's an Obamacan.

I've argued on occasion that the subtext of "opposites attract" is usually: one sees in the other a quality that one, being deficient in same, might benefit from acquiring (call it the Darwinian theory of evolutionary dating).  But this alternative theory of hook-ups aside, here's what I've come to conclude about romantic affinity: the best relationships are often just a kluge.

Kluge (again, from the Sunday Times, in a review of a book called Kluge), as defined by author Gary Marcus, means “a clumsy or inelegant — yet surprisingly effective — solution to a problem.” 

Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University and director of the N.Y.U. Infant Language Learning Center, borrowed the word from the field of engineering, where it has long been the term of art for a useful but ungainly improvisation.

An engineering example of a useful but ungainly improv is the kluge the astronauts on Apollo 13cobbled together to save their mission.  A romantic kluge is likely to be whatever patch job contraption might keep, say, James Carville and Mary Matalin a functional couple.

The awful truth of most enduring romances, comedic or tragic, is that no matter how much the other person seems to be like you (it's uncanny!  magical!) there inevitably comes a moment when you find yourself gaping at your beloved in deep incomprehension (it's inconceivable!): how is it possible that they could be like... that?!

We're snowflakes, remember? The difference is always going to be there, no matter how alike you look or how close you're able to fine-tune your affinities.  Ultimately, what successful romantic partnerships create is a Rube Goldberg-like assemblage of inspired workarounds.  I've learned to love Vegan food and Tater's learned to tolerate, if not always enjoy, the occasionally aggressive motoring skills that come with the Mini-mastery her list requested.   

The ancients believed that one lover finding another was really one half of a soul finding its other half.  I'm down with that, too, but there'll always be the issue of cole slaw.  Just tonight my sweetheart exclaimed at me in disbelief, "What kind of a person doesn't like cole slaw?!"

Meanwhile, yet another Times article proves that some really do live the romantic comedy: it's about a real life Harry and Sally who shifted from being friends to getting physical (the ensuing high jinks led them to the altar). 

I guess they were already exactly like each other enough to survive the awkwardness of their first kluge.

If You Like Pina Coladas

Frothy and fruity (and raunchy and loopy), Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a sweet vacation chill drink that goes down easy.  It would take a few of these to really give you a knockout movie high, but the buzz is nice -- it's a cheery way to forget your cares for a couple of hours, and America's clearly in the mood.

These Judd Apatow productions are getting to be a dependable trademark, for better and for worse.  The down side?  After the seminal 40 Year-Old Virgin and 2007's Year of Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad), there is a franchise now, which means some of the thrill is gone.  We have seen many an Apatow boy-man do his thing, and such Macho-Chick Flicks (David Denby says "Slacker Striver," Creative Screenwriting calls them raunch-coms) are beginning to feel predictable.

True to its genre, Sarah has no cinematic vision to speak of (every Apatow movie looks like widescreen TV).  It features a guy doing the girl's part (the big joke for the movie's first half is that leading man Jason Segel enacts every rom-com heroine's heartbreak, short of devouring some Hagen Daz from the container).  And the girls are more plot device than fully-developed, credible females (this time Kristen Bell gets to play the malleable blonde).

On the plus side, with an Apatow product you know you'll be getting a fairly consistent stream of good or decent jokes, both verbal and physical, with occasional sustained set pieces and running gags.  And these are not your mother's romantic comedies.  Not just because a typical throway line is cleverly dirty (I liked the bride-fatigued honeymooning groom who left a scene muttering, "I'm off to find the mythical clitoris"). 

No, what keeps these rom-coms fresh is that they're meta. Sarah never spends too much time hitting an obvious beat; it tosses off obligatory exposition and credibility markers with a "we've all seen this scene, so let's cut to the chase" panache.  Segel's writing here is easygoing yet alert, with occasional quirky zingers; the script even includes a droll parody of TV's sexy homicide genre (apparently some affectionate revenge; Segel did a stint on CSI).

In Apatow country, you can also expect to be revisiting ever-hardy members of the Apatow Players stock company -- in this case, male MVP Paul Rudd (of Knocked Up, et al) and Superbad's Jonas Hill.  Star and scribe Segel is of course a charter member of this crew, dating back to Apatow's Freaks and Geeks days.  He acquits himself reasonably enough, though his is a less endearing shlub than the one played by Rogen in Knocked Up and, let's face it, more small than big screen in charisma wattage. 

The genuine big movie star thrill of Sarah Marshall comes with the debut of new talent Russell Brand, instantly beloved by the camera, who nearly walks away with the movie as the benignly assholic British rock star Aldous Snow.  Snow's smartly written and Brand has a field day with the role; I know I'll be re-viewing this on DVD just to re-enjoy his delicious self-absorption.   

Good girl Mila Kunis's appeal is actually a key aspect of the Apatow Aesthetic.  She's beautiful, but not movie star otherwoldly/unapproachable gorgeous -- you'd believe that such a creature really might be found behind the reception desk of a world-class resort hotel.  In this, she embodies what's sneakily most compelling about Apatow's sensibility.  The guy and his colleagues are making movies about them that could be us.

The witty dialogue in an Apatow company pic is irreverent in a welcome way.  It has that certain snarky, casually cruel sound we make when we're making fun of our friends, or in pain and being unintentionally funny at our own expense.  After years of enduring too-stylized theatrical rom-com conversation, we're starved for the sound of us, talking truth the way we talk it -- which is rude and often crudely scatalogical -- and this, I think, is part of the baseline appeal of Apatow's comedy.

The same holds true for the physical comedy.  Director Nicholas Stoller has colluded with Segel in milking maximum embarrassment out of male nudity, where the tacit subtext is: yeah, guys really look like that.  And most of the set piece humor in Sarah is grounded in humiliations that are all too familiar to many of us -- those moments when unlike say, old school heroes in movies, Segel does exactly the thing he shouldn't do, and suffers the ridiculous/mundane consequences.

Meanwhile, tropical drink Sarah, with its bright colors, scenic vistas, hula-dancers and surfing sequences, seems emblematic of USA entertainment here and now: this is getaway fare, pure and simple.  It's not for nothing that in a time when the economy's tanking and a war drags on, we'd like to lose ourselves in sex farce giggles (the studio slates are so bloated with laugh-fests that one of this summer's opening weekend competitions is between blockbuster comedies Love Guru and Get Smart).

Aptly titled, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is largely about both denial and moving on.  Indeed, what the picture's accompanying trailers (and the Sarah audience) told me was: Pineapple Express -- this summer's Apatow franchise stoner movie with Seth Rogen as an uber-pothead -- is going to be HUGE, as is, most probably, Tropic Thunder: the only war movie that could actually make money in America this year, because it's a parody of war movies and it looks and sounds capital-F Funny. 

Escapism, dude, it's what we're all about.  We're willing to laugh at ourselves, sure, but we want to be on vacation with like, one of those drinks that has a little umbrella in it.  And given the state of the world and the mess we've all made of it, can you blame us?

Imagine Me and You: A Novel

Should you happen to be reading or have recently read this just-released book (available wherever books are sold), you might enjoy an illuminating interview with its author at Writer Unboxed.  And you can meet the Mernitman at Small World Books onVenice Beach this Thursday (6:00 pm).

Chick Flicks: Nix or Fix?

Pundits say has got to be one of my least favorite phrases these days, and that's as true for the world of arts and entertainment as it is for politics.  For awhile now, pundits in the show biz press have been pronouncing the "chick flick" dead or at least on life support, and the amount of disinformation they toss around is enough to make a romantic comedy lover (i.e. defender) get a little... testy.

New York Times writer Michael Cieply evidently needed a hook for his puff piece about two female-driven movies currently in production: P.J. Hogan's Confessions of a Shopaholic, starring Isla Fisher, and Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, so he titled his screed, "Wary Hollywood Plans More Chick Flicks (Hoping to Lure the Guys)." 

The thesis Mr. Cieply puts forth here can be summed up as: Hollywood hasn't done well with chick flicks recently, but it's giving them a shot again with these two pics, hoping they'll somehow constitute a "next generation chick flick."

How wrong are the basic assumptions here?  Let us count the ways.  Firstly there is "Hollywood" -- spoken of as if it were a single entity, as opposed to an unwieldy, ever-morphing mass of contradictory impulses whose disparate constituents are often barely on speaking terms with one another.  Hollywood is not wary; Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the producers of Shopaholic, is wary, and who can blame him?  This movie doesn't have big car chases and things blowing up good in it, so he could lose a chunk of change.

Secondly, there's the idea that "chick flicks haven't been doing well."  Here's the short list of under-performers Cieply refers to, after noting that The Nanny Diaries didn't do as well as Bridget Jones' Diary or The Devil Wears Prada:

A run of recent female-oriented romantic films — “The Holiday” with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet; “Catch and Release” with Jennifer Garner; “27 Dresses” with Katherine Heigl; “Music & Lyrics” with Drew Barrymore; “P.S., I Love You” with Hilary Swank; and “The Jane Austen Book Club,” with an ensemble cast — has stopped far short of the peaks established years before by films like “Sleepless,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Runaway Bride” and “Notting Hill.”

A chick flick is a movie that women respond to, and a hit movie is a thing that people respond to, and the thing is: Nanny Diaries SUCKED.  The half dozen movies cited are uniformly mediocre at best.  Female audiences avoided them not because they were "chick flicks" but because they weren't very good.  And their weaknesses stemmed largely from their sharing a relentlessly old-fashioned sensibility about what "a woman's picture" is supposed to be.

When I read a spec script that follows the hoary chick flick formula, i.e. a movie that's relentlessly focused on its heroine's quest for a Mr. Right, complete with say, a stereotypical female buddy, a scene that has the heroine use a hairbrush as a microphone and a tub of ice cream as consolation for romantic distress, plus a climax that features a race to the airport... do I run into a studio executive's office yelling "I've got a winner!!!"?

Like, not if I want to keep my job.  But if I read a script that has a great part for a female star, that's emotionally involving, that's about something (i.e. some issue that feels contemporary and universal), that keeps me in suspense (dramatic or comedic) and surprises me...  I'm far more likely to give it a Consider. 

A script that hops onto my desk singing, "I'm a chick flick!" -- meaning, a story that subscribes to the most traditional, conservative and fundamentally unimaginative use of, and portrayal of, a female lead and concerns -- is exactly what the studio doesn't need.  Ironically, studios are being somewhat cautious about green-lighting female-driven movies because they're finding out the hard way that the old formulas aren't working.  It's not that they don't want to make movies for women, it's that (calling Dr. Freud) they really don't know what women want.

Meanwhile, recent studies of demographics have shown that a huge young female audience has flocked to such splatter fare as Hostel 2 (counter-intuitive but true: 50% of the audience for that gore-fest was apparently women under-25, see this post).  65% of the audience for video game The Sims is reportedly female.  And what, pray tell, was the biggest hit among female audiences in 2007?  A quirky, edgy, indie-sensibility-ed left-fielder about teenage pregnancy called Juno.

Cieply and co's pronouncement that "the next generation hasn't announced itself" has already been patently disproved.  Diablo Cody's little movie is the next generation's chick flick -- because it speaks to the contemporary young female audience where it lives, in a language that this demographic understands.  That's what makes a chick flick click.

Women -- and humans, period -- went to see Prada because it was a smart, entertaining movie; I didn't go because it was a "chick flick," but in spite of it having been marketed as such.  Shopaholic and Julie will hit or tank based on their either being well-written, well-made movies that speak to a contemporary audience's concerns, or not (Shopaholic, for example, with its "addicted to shopping" humor, had better hope it's not released smack dab in the middle of major recession). 

What do "chicks" like?  Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggested one kind of paradigm; Juno points to another.  When the studios (and screenwriters and directors and talent, et al) finally abandon aging preconception of what a chick flick is and think outside the pink-hearted box, they're liable to hit a responsive chord.  Maybe if instead of making your mother's (or grandmother's) chick flick, you make a smart, edgy movie featuring a female protagonist that isn't merely about landing Mr. Right... more than just chicks will show up to see it. 

Fix it, don't nix it.

Imagine Me and You: A Novel

What is it about?

A writer's imagination gets the better of him when the lover he invents becomes real... and refuses to disappear.

What are people saying?

"Both utterly charming and vaguely psychotic, Billy Mernit's ode to the buoyancy of the human heart is a thoroughly entertaining ride."

--Theresa Rebeck, author of Three Girls and Their Brother

When does it come out?

Tomorrow.

Doesn't it seem like only yesterday that readers of Living the RomCom were treated to the sound of me freaking out -- in a good way -- over the news that Random House/Shaye Areheart Books had bought my first novel?

Remember when my editor requested that I change its title (then called Making Up) and I held a contest here to rename it, and sharp cookie Anna Hailey from Alaska picked the winner?  (As promised, she gets a thanks in the acknowledgements, with an autographed first edition on its way to her this week.)

And maybe you recall my various pukings and mewlings over the difficulties of revising what I'd foolishly thought was a finished work, and rants re: the writing process that birthed the book and all that.  Well, we've finally moved from the realm of hopes and dreams into the province of real time and space... which is where you come in.

It's pretty simple, obviously -- if you've enjoyed my disparate ruminations and ramblings here over the last nearly-three years (free! and free of advertising! every week!), here is your golden opportunity to say thanks with a show of support: this Tuesday April 8th and after, go to your bookstore, be it real or virtual, and buy my book!!!

Over the next six weeks, I'll be posting dates and details for My Littlest Book Tour at the top of the right-hand column.  You can meet me and my imaginary friend in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore and New York City, reading and signing and occasionally showing film clips (the S.F. appearance will be a full-blown romantic comedy seminar), so by all means come by and say hi if I'm in your vicinity.

Reviews are not yet in, but for a snarky not-so-good-one from industry rag Publishers Weekly that currently sits atop my Amazon.com page, thanks, betraying what from my wholly subjective POV seems to be an age-old East Coast literary bias (i.e. who's this screenwriting guy who thinks he can write a novel?!).  I'm glad it's followed by the accolades from Ms. Rebeck, Elizabeth Crane and Danny Rubin (the guy who wrote Groundhog Day).  And if you enjoy your read of the book, please feel free to write your own online review.  Every bit of goodwill helps.

Meanwhile, the experience of finally seeing this little sucker in print totally trumps all such issues, and the perks are killer.  Every writer friend I spoke to, prior to publication, told me I would hate my cover, but nuh-uh: not only do I like it fine, the generous and inventive folks at Shaye Areheart saw fit to add gold embossing to the background pattern, and man, I gotta say the j-peg doesn't even vaguely do it justice.  I lurve my beautiful cover.

And the beauty part is, no matter what may or may not come of this book joining the legions of books that are presently piling into bookstores all over the world... there it is: a done deal, manifest and real.  They can't take that away from me.

Imagine Me and You: a testament to the idea that dreams can come true.