Living the Romantic Comedy

Romantic Comedy or What?

Though it seems an odd question for writers taking a course entitled Writing the Romantic Comedy to ask, a query that invariably comes up in the classroom - also debated on various blogs and in the mainstream media, on occasion - is: What is a romantic comedy?

Confusion arises around defining this beast on two fronts: one, many comedies feature strong romantic story lines, so it's sometimes hard to say which conflict is ultimately dominant, and two, many comedies are based in genres that are clearly not "romance," first and foremost, so it may seem strange to define them as "romantic comedies."

For example, some might argue that Bringing Down the House is a romantic comedy, whereas Romancing the Stone is not.

Some would be wrong.  On both counts.

Here's why.  Genre movies define themselves by the central story question they pose.  Horror movies ask: Will the heroine or hero defeat the monster?  The monster may be supernatural (Poltergeist), an alien (Aliens) or a malevolent human (Halloween), but beyond such specifics, all a horror movie has to provide in order to be deemed one, is a "horrible" antagonist (i.e. arousing dread, extremely unpleasant), and plenty of scares.  The Fright Factor is an important index of the movie's success as a horror genre entry.  But finally, any "horror movie" that doesn't make Will the monster be defeated? its primary climactic focus is not truly a horror movie.

When I studied romantic comedies as prep for writing my how-to book, I found that the question such movies asked was: Will these two individuals become a couple?  This is either the most important issue in a given comedy, or it isn't.  The "two become one?" question reflects the fact that in a romantic comedy, the movie's central conflict is embodied in a romantic relationship.  You see this represented in the age-old paradigm for rom-coms: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. 

Applying this central question litmus test reveals that Bringing Down the House is a buddy movie with a rom-com subplot.  Remove the love story involving Steve Martin's character and his ex-wife (Jean Smart), and the story will still function, answering the question: Will Steve's friendship with Charlene (Queen Latifah) change his life for the better? 

Re: Romancing the Stone, let me ask you - How did they get the stone back?  Do you even remember where the stone came from and what getting it was all about?  Oh, right, there was a kidnapping... something to do with Danny DeVito...  No, such a line of questioning is absurd.  What you remember about this movie is the romance between Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.  Setting aside the fact that the protagonist played by Turner is a romance novelist, that the entire movie is a knowing satire of romances, and that laughs are its raison d'etre - the most important question answered by the end of Stone is: Does she end up with the guy? 

Nonetheless, while Romancing the Stone is a romantic comedy, it's clearly an adventure movie.  So why can't it be both?

Well, it can and it is, just as Groundhog Day is both a high concept fantasy and a rom-com (as is What Women Want), while Knocked Up is a slacker/coming-of-age raunch-com and a rom-com (as is Wedding Crashers).

In Writing the Romantic Comedy, I identified a dozen cross-genre hybrids (crime, parental, teen rom-coms, etc.).  Hybrids have been with us from the dawn of the romantic comedy era, and for good reason. 

While in the heyday of screwball comedy (from 1934's It Happened One Night through 1941's The Lady Eve), the boy meets/loses/gets paradigm was enough to fully equip and power a comedy, the form's familiarity and predictable outcome soon forced imaginative writers to start poaching on other genre turf: The Thin Man (1934) crossed rom-com with detective story, while I Married a Witch (1942) integrated the supernatural.  After the ethos-downer of WWII, romantic comedy really had to cross-breed to survive (e.g. the gender-bender I Was a Male War Bride and the sports/rom-com Pat and Mike, et al).

What we see on screens today is a reflection of these two approaches.  Your classic chick flick rom-com harkens back to the pure strain of girl-meets-boy screwballs (27 Dresses, Two Weeks Notice), while contemporary mixed-genre rom-coms (Enchanted, Ghost Town) are a breath mint and a candy mint.  

It's for this reason that Shaun of the Dead remains one of my favorite romantic comedies of the past decade.  Yes, you heard me right.  The movie starts with a classic rom-com conflict: Shaun (Simon Pegg) gets dumped by Liz (Kate Ashfield) because he's stuck in a passive rut and he drags his best buddy with him everywhere.  Can he get her back?  Well, due to a local health crisis, Shaun has to fetch Kate (along with friends and family) and find her a safe haven.  He thus proves he can be an active, heroic bloke who's worthy of her trust and love, even leaving the buddy behind to ensure a happy ending with Liz.

How romantic comedy is that!  Oh, wait, did I leave something out?  Right: there were zombies.

One of the great gags in Shaun arises from this very disjunction: Shaun's so caught up in his romantic drama that he's slow on the uptake, not realizing that while he's hung-up on getting Liz back, all of London is under attack (zombies are feasting on humans and multiplying).  Which speaks to my point: the movie's "Will he get the girl?" conflict is primary.

Zombies are the obstacle, and "how the monsters are defeated" is of course important... but remove the romantic relationship from the equation, and - well, you can't: it's the motor that drives the movie.  The zombies could be aliens, malevolent tornadoes, whatever, and the story would still function.  Take away Liz, however, and you've got a different story: just another zombie horror pic, with buddy protagonists, and you'd have to come up with a new central story line to make it play.

The cross-breed hybrid notion as a way of looking at rom-coms (i.e. they can be "two movies in one") does breed controversy.  Is About a Boy a romantic comedy?  Tough call, since the cad-and-lad conflict is so central and predominant.  I'd have to go with "hybrid" (coming-of-age/rom-com); a similar ambiguity affects genre definition of Juno.  And what happens when something that undeniably seems to be a romantic comedy actually sort of... isn't? 

This is my bone to pick with My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which I plan to expose as a rom-com poseur next week, as we take on the issue: "What is a great romantic comedy?"

I offer you this cinematic tempest in a teapot, as oil poisons the Gulf: sometimes such a diversion really is a quantum of solace.

Script Coverage: A Few Awful Truths

Screenwriters have funny ideas about readers.  Some view us as malevolent fire-breathing trolls who get out the long knives before turning a page.  The funniest misconception is the equivalent of an urban myth, still circulating among pre-pros, that readers "don't even bother to read the whole thing." 

If only!  Story analysts have to read each script from first page to last, even when it's obvious from Page One that it's a godawful travesty, because - and this is often the dirtiest part of the Dirty Job That Someone Has to Do - we have to write a synopsis.

Reader mean-spiritedness, when it really exists, is largely a reaction to this grunt-work.  There are few things more aggravating to a reader/writer than having to speedily synopsize a poorly plotted piece of work (sci-fi/fantasy specs are the most horrific of these, since trying to understand, let alone explain story developments in an incoherent interplanetary saga can really crash your hard-drive).

Then comes the more involving task of writing comments that annotate the pros and cons of the material, but here's the awful truth that a pre-pro screenwriter ought to know about coverage.  The problem isn't that the reader doesn't read your entire script - he's often the only person who does.  No, the problem is that the executives we work for rarely read the entire coverage.  They may not even read a word of it, before pronouncing your 2-3 years of work to be D.O.A.  Their interest is often entirely predicated on a visual.

Allow me to introduce to you (cue drum roll) the grid.

The grid (aka The Box) is the alpha and omega of script coverage.  Specifics vary, vis-a-vis the terms used on the left-hand side, but this one is typical.  And the arrangement of "X" marks across those lines is sometimes all a buyer needs to look at before dismissing a submission.

To be fair, the 1-2 sentence log-line (summary of the concept and basic story thrust) that appears on the cover sheet with the grid is usually just as important.  Of secondary importance is the Comments Summary (1-2 sentences) that follows the log-line.

I usually cover 8-9 scripts a week (the average is two a day).  How often do marks enter the "Excellent" column?  Maybe once or twice a year.  How often am I X-ing into "Poor?"  At least 2-3 times a week.  About half the spec scripts one reads earn a box score like this:

Now here comes the truly abhorrent truth: the most important line is the first one.  High marks for characterization and dialogue can serve a writer well (i.e. even if the script doesn't sell, the reader may recommend that writer for a studio assignment).  Poor Story/Structure marks can give a buyer pause, and high ones will definitely help; same goes for Setting/Production Values.  But solid "Good" for Premise (aka Story Concept)?  If the log-line appeals, the exec may read the coverage.  She may even read the script. 

This one is a no-brainer, right?  The studio will buy it for a cool million.  Oh, right, I forgot to mention the elements attached: Will Smith and Michael Bay.

Here we enter the adjacent realm of Awful Truths.  I'm stretching a bit to make my point, but even an only-fair Premise can get a movie set up if the team that's attached is hot enough, and the politics and money of it make sense to the studio.  

Generally speaking, though, Story Concept reigns supreme.  In fact - hold onto your 3D glasses - there is an answer to that oft-articulated question known to disgruntled moviegoers exiting theaters in a state of dazed bewilderment: "Who the hell thought that was a movie worth making?"

You see the marks for Story/Structure blasting past the Poor bar?  And all the straight-up Fairs?  Now look at that trail of enthusiastic X's filling up Good and edging toward Excellent... and check out the category under Pass and Consider. 

The studio bought the idea.  The endemic logic, in the studio system, is that everything else can be fixed; throw enough writers and other creative elements at it, and a sow's ear really can become a silk purse.  And that, Grasshopper, is how we ended up with Land of the Lost.

I put this before you by way of advice.  Given that what the buyers want is "the same, only different," you must look at your spec script with the harsh, cold glare of the The Grid's little boxes, and ask: What makes the idea of my movie competitive (i.e. distinct from all the others in its genre)?  And if the story concept itself is not genuinely distinctive, what in the execution - the telling of it - makes it seem unique, and will provide a hook? 

In comedy, concept is vital.  Almost every spec we see each week that's touted as "the next Hangover" (translation: it's a comedy with a bunch of guys in it) misses the point; all of us readers routinely pass on "boys' night out in Vegas" specs.  Hangover was a hit because it had a mystery as its driving motor: What in God's name did we do with the groom? 

In romantic comedy, the execution hook can be what makes the difference between "Bridget Jones" (Who cares?) and Bridget Jones's Diary (i.e. the storytelling device is the thing that provides the extra level of interest).  A good premise, by Grid definition, may also represent an inspired way of telling a familiar story, e.g. the in-development musical Wicked (it's The Wizard of Oz all over again - but from the witch's POV).

Either way, the awful truth about scripts and coverage is that Concept/Premise is often all that matters.  So what's the hook in your movie?  What inventive idea will move those top line marks to the left?  What unique angle on a same-old subject will get your script read by anyone other than, well... me?

Sleeper

Single people in search of a mate: Wouldn't it be great if there was some guaranteed, scientific way of finding your "one," so you could take the angst and guesswork out of waiting for true love to come along (or not)?  Or would that be awful, actually, since such a method would pretty much knock the notion of free will out of your romantic equation, and make you a love-puppet of fate?

Writer-director Jac Schaeffer's intriguing little indie pic Timer (trailer viewable here) takes this query and runs with it, and for a good portion of its running time manages to do what so few contemporary rom-coms achieve: it provokes thought.

That the movie doesn't entirely deliver the goods in the end is a drawback, but I applaud the effort.  Given the genre's stultifying reign of zom-coms (i.e. cookie-cutter, zombie-like rom-coms that mindlessly plod through their predictable paces), any romantic comedy that's sincerely invested in doing something a little different deserves its props.

In Schaeffer's alternate universe, for $79.99 and a small monthly fee, you can have a device implanted on your wrist that begins counting down to the moment when you're fated to meet your true love; an alarm goes off on your due date, and will also chime when you encounter him or her -- the one catch being that said soul-mate will have to have been fitted with a "TiMER" as well.  Otherwise...

It's in that realm of "otherwise" that Timer finds its plot twists and its philosophical conundrums.  Heroine Oona (played by Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Emma Caulfield), approaching 30 and still un-matched, gamely marches her suitors to the nearest TiMER clinic -- which in a droll satire of Apple stores and their ilk is too-slickly customer-friendly -- to have these potential mates implanted and thus cut to, or rather, cut out the chase.

But wearing the TiMER device (a neat metaphor for Those Interested in Commitment) isn't actually a stress-ender: What do you do when you fall for someone whose wrist is TiMER-free?  Or someone whose device's countdown indicates you're not their ultimate match?  And -- as is the case with Oona's half-sister Steph (Michelle Borth) -- What are you supposed to do with yourself when your own TiMER tells you that you're not due to meet your mate for another 15 years?  

I'm on the fence re: Timer, which is a bit too bland and sit-commy for its provocative premise, and can't quite come up with the big laughs it ought to provide, along with a satisfying resolution.  But the high concept core of the thing is admirable, and it features an older woman/younger man romance that's got unusually convincing chemistry.

I'm a fan of hybrids.  While the basically realistic Timer isn't a full-blown sci-fi/rom-com like Sleeper, it's a worthy entry on a fertile playing field.  I'm always championing rom-com spec scripts that think outside the genre's too-tight box, and this female-helmed film proves my point: the movie got made.  So catch it while you can (Timer's currently playing in limited release) if you're interested in more-than-just-a-chick-flick fare that's not afraid to take a few risks.

Mom's a Monster and We're Okay

I don't know what they were thinking over at the Film Geek Channel (TCM) this past Sunday when they screened Gypsy for Mother's Day.  Given that it's essentially a familial horror movie (Mothers: Kill or Be Killed?), if they really wanted to go for broke with this perverse gag, they ought to have paired Gypsy -- in an Attack of the Moms/ Revenge of the Kids double bill -- with Psycho.

I caught the first half hour because we were at my mom's in NYC, celebrating her 85th birthday.  Mom (who looks 65 and is hipper than many 35 year-olds) is a Broadway buff; my sister-in-law had never seen the movie, my wife played Rose in her high school's production, and I'm a Sondheim freak, so there we were, absently watching TV while we took turns playing with Mom's gift, an iPad.  I know the original show well, which is why my ears pricked up, Screenwriting Bullshit Detector bristling, when I heard a mass of dialogue spewing from the screen that I knew did not come from the musical's book-as-written.

Rose, you may remember, is the definitive stage mother, a force of nature whose outsized controlling personality tends toward the Greek: the point of her dark saga is that Mama Rose virtually eats her young.  Rose thinks she's doing it all for the kids, and clearly, she's only in it for Rose.  Thus it was with a measure of disbelief and outrage that I heard a scene unfolding between Rose and her own father that delved into Rose's back story.  It explained, in chunks of on-the-nose expository dialogue, why Rose was the way she was.

In the original show, a mere frisson of implication covers that beat, economically managed in a few deft exchanges that form the setup for Rose's big I-want song, "Some People."  But some people obviously looking out for star Rosalind Russell -- agent, manager, or the studio -- had gotten screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass to bulk up this scene, thinking to make the monstrous Mama sympathetic (What if they don't like her?!) by filling in blanks that are best left to the audience's imagination.

How wrong is that?  Like, in every way.

Protagonists, be they villainous or heroic, don't need to be sympathetic.  They need to be fascinating.  Establishing empathy (i.e. we can see something of ourselves in them, however disagreeable) is certainly vital, but wasting precious screen time on her daddy never loved her or kids used to beat him up during recess, etc. -- nuh-uh.  In movie entertainment terms, this is Too Much Information. 

I'd go, "Oh, those old-fashioned Old School studio execs," except that this heinous practice (Tell the People Why He/She is the Way He/She Is) is still with us today.  I read spec scripts and studio projects all the time that include the same kind of fear-based clunky, chunky material, and it betrays a mentality that fundamentally misunderstands the screenwriter's job. 

Audiences are smart.  They need next-to-nothing to get with a well-written character's program.  Yes, you the writer do need to know your protagonist's back story, but the audience doesn't.  They just need to see the baggage a character carries evidenced in the character's behavior.  If you've done your job well, a character's psychology should be so self-evident that the barest minimum of back story inference should suffice.

The corollary to the TMI principal is one we could call IHS, for "I hate snakes."

The one thing we all know about Indiana Jones's back story is delivered in a solitary line of dialogue in the inaugural episode of the franchise: he hates snakes.  In three words intimating an entire personal history, we learn that even Indy has a weakness.  The specifics concerning that vulnerability are left to our imagination (thank you, Lawrence Kasdan).  It helps that vulnerability is part of star Harrison Ford's inherent persona (he approaches every act of heroism with an expression that reads, "This is gonna cost me").  But really, what more do we need (or want) to know, than that somewhere, somehow, Indy once met his match in a now-loathed reptilian adversary?

The common sense behind using IHS instead of TMI was borne out this past weekend in a number of reviewer's responses to Iron Man 2.  Here's Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, talking about being entertained by the movie's characters:

All these folk are so plainly enjoying the ride that to watch it slow and stall, under the weight of dead plot, is a cause for regret.  Favreau... takes the built-in hyperbole of the genre and treats it as food for laughs... it’s a pity that Favreau didn’t go the whole way and toss out the creaky narrative junk.

"Creaky narrative junk," in characterization work terms, is What Made Rose a Monster.  Alfred Hitchcock famously applied his version of IHS in his use of a MacGuffin, Hitch's nickname for "the thing the spies are after."  A good MacGuffin (e.g. the microfilm in North by Northwest that contains "government secrets") requires no involved explanation.  Why?

Because the audience doesn't give a shit.

If you've seen Psycho, you may not even remember the awful tacked-on Norman's psychiatrist explains it all for you scene (studio-mandated, no doubt) that follows the climax featuring Mom's mummified corpse.  It's a superfluous bore that offends our intelligence; we don't need to know the Psych 101 mumbo-jumbo behind Norman's insanity.  We get the gist.

Screenwriters, think of the IHS principle as the character equivalent of a MacGuffin.  Good characterization embodies back story like lines on a face: smile wrinkles mean one thing, while big permanent forehead creases mean another.  You don't need to give each wrinkle a name and a bio, do you?

So don't do what Gypsy's hack-adapter did, ignoring the edict of one of the musical's most famous songs: "Let Me Entertain You."  Let Mom be a monster.  We're okay with that.  Really, we just want to enjoy her roar.

The Real Crisis

A confession: Though I generally subscribe to the "write no matter what" principle, I must admit that this past week, putting any words on the page was just about impossible, when my feelings of sadness and anger were overwhelming.

The origin of the sadness is pretty obvious:

As is the origin of the anger:

 

And what did my beloved genre have to offer, to counter such emotional turmoil?

For once, contemplating J-Lo's butt is just not going to cut it.

I have no desire to turn this blog into a political forum.  I'll just observe that the most depressing and exasperating aspect of the mess our country is in is the polarization that greets every issue.  Whichever side we may be on, we seem incapable of holding more than one point of view at a time, so the possibility of compromise has virtually disappeared.

With emotions running so strong on each side, meeting in the middle begins to seem like a solution of the past.  Which brings me to the question that's been messing with my mind of late:

When the country is so polarized by every issue, what are we talking about when we talk about the mainstream audience?

Time was, at the studio where I work my day gig as a story analyst, that "what the audience wants" seemed fairly clear.  Yes, different demographics respond to disparate genres, there's all that stuff about quadrants, but still -- there had been a general sense of mainstream as a recognizable beast.  I was able to cover a given spec script or studio project with a reasonable amount of security that there was such a thing as a baseline common interest, taste, and shared values in the American public.

Well, when the country is divided into drill-mad and spill-mad, and individual righters and your-papers-please fighters, what the hell is a writer of mainstream movies supposed to do?  And for that matter, what about us readers?

Can we stop screaming and blaming and try to work together, before it's too late?  I mean, really: Let's do it for the sake of the environment and the economy, for the sake of immigrants and liberty, for the sake of the poor, the rich, the old, the children (of course), but above all -- let's do it for the sake of studio readers.

What are you trying to do, people?  Polarize me out of my job?