Living the Romantic Comedy

Us

Now and then people ask me, "What is the biggest mistake writers make when they're writing a romantic comedy?"

My answer is: They put too much emphasis on the obstacles—the things that keep their protagonists apart.  Because actually what's more important, and in my view, the primary job of a rom-com writer, is to convince the audience that these two people must become a couple.  What's going to make us root for the leads in a romantic comedy, what's going to make us care about whether or not they hook up in the end, is a keen sense that they really do belong together.

Which brings us to an age-old query:  Why do two people fall for each other?  What makes a relationship work?  What is this thing we call love?

Curiosity about this subject has impelled John Bowe (editor, journalist, and co-screenwriter of Basquiat) to publish Us: Americans Talk About Love.  This treasure trove of a book, a follow up to Bowe's Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, offers up a myriad of takes on the  What We Talk About When We Talk About Love issue.  Relevant auteur Judd Apatow has graced its jacket with a That's what I was thinking! quote:  "Every story is a small movie I wish someone would make."

Right.  Because another mistake that aspiring rom-com writers make is that they try to write Movie Love, as opposed to love as it's found in real life.  The real-life stories told here easily trump half the cinematic love hooey I've seen in recent years.

The key to Bowe's success is diversity.  In his preface to this collection of "oral reports from across the United States," Bowe acknowledges the effort he and his collaborators made to find a representative sampling of this country's panoply of people - young, old, black, white, et al (a Salon interview with Bowe elaborates on their methodology).  One of the big kicks in reading it comes from the jaw-dropping contrast between one person's experience of love and another's.

For example, here's a moment from the tale of Colorado's Jeremy Vanhaitsma, age 30, who staged an elaborate proposal for his beloved that included bringing her into a small rural church, where he'd prepared a basin of water and a towel:

I asked her if I could wash her feet.  It's just a symbol, an example of the love the Lord gave to show the full extent of His love.  This was completely new.  She had never had anybody wash her feet.  I shared my heart about why I wanted to do it: so that our relationship would be sealed, so we could serve one another, and so that we could go out and do that to others.

Jeremy's story is directly followed by that of Dominic Sclafani, age 30, from Arizona, which begins:

I like people who play.  People who are fun and who punch me at random moments and who do weird shit.  The first time I met Chyna, we were at a rave.  She bit me.  I was totally into it.  I'm like, "Fucking bite me harder!"  And she got all excited and I got all excited, because I like being bitten and scratched up.  That was orgasmic.

Diversity, dude.  It's typical of this shrewdly organized collection, which moves from stories told by people who've been in love a relatively short time to people who've loved for a lifetime.  And some of this stuff is harrowing - brutal, scary, painful material, smarting with truths that are worlds apart from your typical rose-colored gift card homilies.

There's something about people telling their stories out loud - people who aren't writers - that pierces the fabric between storyteller and audient in a uniquely compelling way.  Like Celia Menendez, 17, of San Antonio, who starts with: "This is the first time I've ever been in love and I'm still feeling miserable."  Later on, she unloads an observation topped with a casual throwaway line that would turn any novelist or screenwriter I know green with envy:

I would never have stayed up on the phone until one in the morning, just talking about nothing, with anyone else - even my best, best friends.  But him, even if I couldn't physically be with him, I could sit on the phone with him for hours.  I think it's part of the reason I failed calculus.

These oral reports are like short stories, like movies, only more incredible, in that they really happened.  Ultimately, that's a big part of what you're left with: the wonder.  There are reasons upon reasons here for "why I fell in love" and "what love means to me" - if you're writing a romantic comedy, dramedy, or tragedy, I can't think of a better contemporary source book for such thoughts - yet in the end, the fundamental mystery remains.  As one Shawn Whitworth of New York, New York concludes:

I would like to choose to believe that I have loved or that I can and am capable of love.  I'm almost sure that it exists.  But if it slapped me in the face, I couldn't tell you what it was.

Us can be as bracing as a kick in the head, and it tells us a lot about what love is.

[Photos from: lovescape.org, 101lovetips.com, timpaphotography.files.wordpress.com, piratesandfireflies.wordpress.com]

Catching Up is Great to Do

Early on in our relationship, Tater and I had one of those "Really?!" moments.  I was pontificating to her about cinematic storytelling, talking about how character could be revealed without using a word of dialogue, and I said, "You know, like that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone's guarding his dad with only one other guy, outside the hospital?  And the other guy's terrified and trembling, 'cause any minute hit men could be coming to kill them, but when Michael lights the guy's cigarette with a lighter, his hand isn't shaking?"

Tater nodded slowly, with an odd expression on her face.  Clearly she was wrestling with something, and with a little prodding, she finally came out with it: "I don't tell too many people this, but..." She took a deep breath.  "I've never seen The Godfather."

I managed to subdue my incredulity (probably one reason we're still together today), and not long after her confession, I had the unique pleasure of popping my future wife's Godfather cherry.  And the thing is, Tater - a journalist, an editor, an appreciator of all things story - totally got it; she understood why she'd been hearing so much about this movie for so many years, and she became an instant, rabid fan who can now quote and reference Coppola's classic with the best of them.

We've all got at least one of these - a gap in our cultural canon, a missed Something Big that would cause most of our peers to wonder what rock we were hiding under when that incredible movie/album/show came out and rocked everybody else on the planet's world.  Given that I like to think of myself as generally with it, when it comes to arts and entertainment, I get a deep uh-oh feeling in the pit of my stomach when I encounter evidence that One of Those has somehow passed me by. 

Such had been the case for a few years now, when it came to a certain TV series.  References to it kept cropping up, often in unlikely places; I kept seeing people I respected speak of it with a knowing and/or  worshipful air.  Finally, when the media was glutted this past Fall with "Best of the Decade" articles, and this title consistently topped everyone's television lists, I had to throw down and buy Season One to find out: What was the deal with The Wire?!

Brothers, sisters - members of The Wire choir who've long understood what Tater and I came to, so, so late - please forgive me for having to state the obvious: it's all true.  For once, the hyperbole is fully deserved, for The Wire may well be the best dramatic TV series ever made.

Better than The Sopranos?  Than Mad Men?  Than [Insert Your Holiest-of-TV-Holies Here]?!  Well, taste is taste, comparisons are tedious, and the last thing I want to do is over-sell the series to the uninitiated; the road to viewing hell is paved with high expectations.  But there's a reason why "Dickensian" and "Shakespearian" keep showing up as critic's adjectives for the series' five season stint - it really does have the depth and breadth of a great, great novel - and if a guy whose mainstay is romantic comedy wants to testify to the brilliance of a show about detectives and drug-runners in a Baltimore ghetto?  There may be something to it.

In fact, since we started with Tater's confession, I can now own up to why, if you've happened to notice, my "Movies Seen Recently" sidebar has been oddly inactive for the past month or two, and for that matter, why neither of us has been seen recently, out and about.  I am a Wire addict, as is my wife (it's a kind of Days of Wine and Roses situation, minus the alcohol): we've been devouring this 63 hours of genius since the past holiday season, and sadly, we've recently begun the home stretch - we're a couple of episodes into Season Five.

"When do we Wire?" is our standard evening query, voiced the way "What's for dinner?" is usually asked in other households (occasionally, at the end of a particularly gripping episode, the phrase is, "Double-Wire?").  The irony of a show that's tacitly about crack being our crack isn't lost on us, and we shudder to think what will become of us when the viewing binge is over.

For writers, The Wire is simply required viewing.  Cops aren't good, crooks bad; characters you fall in love with invariably do things that horrify you.  Everyone has their favorites, and one of ours is Omar, a professional thief with a string of dead bodies in his wake, yet he's about as close to a hero as you get in this devastatingly dark saga of insidious, city-wide corruption.  As Omar famously puts it, after a high-horsed lawyer has been ripping into him: "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase... we all in the game, though."

"The game" is the core concept of The Wire, which moves from Baltimore's street corners, to its port, to inside the precincts, the schoolrooms, the corridors of political power and ultimately, the media, to show how everyone - all of us - are in it.  The writing is exquisite, as is the ensemble, the direction, the music...

But enough.  If you take my bait, I have only one caveat: The Wire thrusts you right into the middle of its world in the first episode, which took Tater and I three attempts to get through.  There's little exposition, and you may wish for subtitles; there's an entire vocabulary that has to be learned and a large cast to get to know.  One of the great things about creator David Simon's method is its canny sense of storytelling:  a seemingly thrown-away conversational exchange often contains a whopper of a major plot point, and the most startling moments of drama can unfold in a weirdly matter-of-fact, low-key way.  You know - kind of like it is in real life.

My larger point, whether you choose to Wire now or never, is that great art doesn't always answer to a given time and place.  I'm glad I finally caught up with The Wire, just as Tater thoroughly appreciated The Godfather, decades after its release.  What matters, in arts and entertainment, isn't necessarily what just won the weekend.  So if you've been wondering what the big fuss is about a certain show you chose to ignore, back in the day, I heartily recommend taking the time to seek it out and unlock its secrets.  Catching up can be a great thing to do.

Speaking of which, I suppose this is the one silver lining that awaits my wife and I, when we enter our tragic Wire withdrawals.  The Oscars are looming, and man, do we have a passel of current movies to catch up on.

Who Asked For It?

It sure wasn't me.  Did you?

Nonetheless, here's the movie that somebody thought we wanted to see.  And evidently they weren't wrong.

By now you've probably heard about the obscene amount of money this weekend's romantic comedy has made (an estimated $50 million and counting), and you may have read some of its almost uniformly horrific reviews.  You may have succumbed - sorry I didn't warn you in time - and even seen the damn thing.  But like a force of nature (actually, a force of commerce) Valentine's Day just... is.

Which puts Living the RomCom in an odd position: Not obliged to defend this picture, mind you, but once again asked to defend the genre - precisely because so many terrible rom-coms continue to get churned out by the studio system.  When a bad one hits it big, well, what is one to say?

 

Stick a whole bunch of stars in something and They Will Come seems to be the instant takeaway.  So is that all there is?

In this case, it's worthwhile to investigate the project's origins.  Back in January of 2008, New Line was rumored to be putting Katherine Fugate's script for Valentine's Day in turnaround, evidently having reconsidered its commercial potential.  Then an unexpected thing happened.  New Line's ensemble romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You, released shortly before Valentine's day weekend, made a fortune (ultimately grossing around $94 million).

Rom-coms had done well in this spot in the past, but the date + gorgeous ensemble formula seemed genius.  I don't know when and how that movie's screenwriters (Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein) came into the mix, but quickly, New Line planted a flag on Valentine's Day 2010 for Fugate's suddenly hot-looking movie.  A passel of female stars were sought and signed (and some boys, too) and Valentine's Day (now credited to Fugate/Kohn/Silverstein), with veteran Garry Marshall at the helm, became a deeply green light.

In other words, this is a movie calculated from the get.  Its very premise was a capitalization on a commercial holiday (i.e. its plot revolves around how some dozen and a half people deal with the actual 24 hours of February 14th), and the producing of it was aimed at one specific end: to make a bloody fortune on President's Day weekend, 2010.

A sequel of sorts was announced before the movie even opened - we now have New Year's Eve: The Movie to dread, from the same stalwart team.  I look forward to the eventual release of Arbor's Day, don't you?

Anyway, if you've ever wondered what the cinematic equivalent of Diet Cherry Coke might be, have a sip.  In the words of NY Times critic Manohla Dargis, "it’s a disaster: cynically made, barely directed, terribly written."  EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum notes, "Every skit is lame, every line of dialogue is stale, every joke falls flat, and every performance has been phoned in between text messages to agents blinking, ''SOS!'' 

So much vitriol has been unleashed on the movie that it seems indulgent to add my two cents, beyond noting that the relatively lightweight Love, Actually is now looking like Citizen Kane.

Does the fault lie in our stars?  Of course not.  Take a decent salary for some ten minutes of screen time, with so many colleagues' participation for cover, should it tank...?  Hell yeah.  I can imagine Marshall's call to Julia Roberts: "I know, the last time I cast you as a whore, but sweetheart: this time you're a soldier from the Iraq War flying home to see your valentine - and we can shoot your pages in a day!"

The thing that galls me is how such a successful opening weekend becomes a familiar industry trope: the reward for bad behavior.  If a cynically manufactured, properly packaged and programmed product that bears little relation to love and life as we actually experience it can do this well, why should Hollywood invest in riskier, more substantive romantic comedy fare?  We have met the enemy and it is us: The Gullibles.

Meanwhile, if you want to save your money but need a quick V-day fix, I found more emotional involvement in the free 53 seconds of a Super Bowl commercial than in the entire running time of Valentine's Day: check out Parisian Love - (thank you, Carrie, for the link) - it's genuinely romantic.  And at least it's not pretending to be anything other than a sell.

Revenge of the Romantic

I had a theory.  Things tend to be cyclical in our culture of arts and entertainment, and having just seen the romantic comedy genre dominated for a decade by male point-of-view raunch-coms (the Apatow era, from 40 Year-Old Virgin to last year's bromantic I Love You, Man), I figured it's about time for the meter to swing the other way.

Now that all things scatological and even gynecological (see Knocked Up) have been mined for comedy, I reasoned we're due for the return of romance - meaning softer, less sexually-centric stories that mine what's left of the genuinely romantic in our increasingly anti-sentimental culture.  Seems to me that there's only so many gags about gagging a genre can take, and soon enough we'll start seeing movies that put a more classical sense of romanticism back in rom-com.

My Uh-Oh Moment came roughly at the midpoint of my 4-day "Writing the Romantic Comedy" course at UCLA Extension. We were talking -  a dozen students and myself - about the vagaries of dating.  This was in relation to one writer's project, and where in the trajectory of her imaginary couple's relationship things might get physical.  The youngest member of the group, a 22 year-old writer named Sarah, raised her hand.

"But nobody dates," she said.  The room - predominately 30- and 40- somethings - quieted.  "I mean, if you're interested in someone, you hook up," she explained.  "And then, if that, like, works out... maybe then you might end up going out for dinner or something.  But nobody's like... dating."

The room filled with the silent sound of many older people feeling older, as they tried to wrap their minds around this information.

The discussion resumed and the course went on, but I couldn't help feeling as though the collective romantic psyche of the group had just been dealt a body-blow.  So much for my theory.  How could a new  generation of moviegoers have any interest in traditional rom-com romance, if their own romantic lives begin with casual sexual hook-ups and flare or fade from there?

Au contraire.  The tip-off, had we been alert enough to take it in, came at the end of that day's class when young Sarah mentioned the penance her boyfriend was performing that evening.  "We had this fight that was his fault?" she told us. "And so he has to take me to see Dear John tonight.  He'd love to get out of it, but like, no way."

Apparently she and her boyfriend were not alone.  Dear John raked in a hefty $32.4 mil in its opening weekend, knocking the billion-dollar titan Avatar off its seven week-long perch as America's number one movie.  Yes, all the guys were home watching the Bowl, so there was a natural bump for the movie's target demographic, but despite bemused-to-dismal reviews, this latest four-hankie entry in the Nicholas Sparks canon is like, a monster.

Meanwhile, the industry is a thick-headed beast which, even after the phenomenal success of pictures like Sex and the City, still appears shocked and stunned to discover that women actually do go to movie theaters.  It's past time for the biz to get the message.  

Here's the rewrite of my theory re: romance's return.  Why are the nation's tweens, teens and young 20-somethings flocking to the Twilight franchise, and giving the Nicholas Sparks brand a major hit in John?  Because romance is what's lacking in their love lives. 

Maybe when hooking up is the norm, and the slow, deliciously torturous build-up toward physical consummation has been relegated to the passe past, what's passionately romantic - as opposed to raunchily sexual - is the new wish fulfillment fantasy: The crude, lewd Aughts are giving way to the chastely passionate Teens.  After all, the Twilight series is all about sublimation, while Dear John - if it's anything like other Sparks pics such as The Notebook - is more about what's unrequited - it's retro-romantic angst.

But add some tart laughs to counter all the syrup, and you could have the Old School Romantic, Nouveau Romantic Comedy I've been theorizing about as the genre's next direction.  At least, that's Living the Rom-Com's take.  What say you?