Living the Romantic Comedy

Love in 24 Hours (or Less)

Bearing down on it now, this business of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and the ethos and eros of romantic comedy, with the logical query: If Getting to Know You movies believe that true love is only achieved over the course of some serious time (in When Harry Met Sally, it takes more than a decade, and in Groundhog Day, a near-eternity), what are we to make of a rom-com that claims you can have it overnight?

Love Overnight movies, a small but hardy cadre of romantic comedies in which the main action takes place within one extremely compressed and compacted time period - usually a linear span of around a day and a night or so - are founded on the belief that love, whether at first sight or a later second's consideration, has no need of racking up considerable psychic or physical mileage.  In these movies, The Real Thing can be sighted, experienced, and validated in record time. 

The uber-Love Overnight pic, obviously, is Richard Linklater (and co-screenwriter Kim Krizan)'s Before Sunrise (1995),

in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do their meet-lose-get scenario in roughly 18 hours.  That they blow their scheduled post-movie reunion, and don't hook up until about 16 years later in the sequel Before Sunset (filmed 9 years later, 2004)

is moot: that they do get together for good, Ethan impulsively abandoning a wife and child in the bargain, is proof that What Happened One Night was indeed a happening thing.

It Happened One Night (1934), by the way, covers a longer time span than its title promises, but it's an LO movie in spirit.  These stories posit that what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas, but lives on - or, to cite the grandaddy of such "single at lunch, married by breakfast" tales, what happens in the forest near Athens changes you forever, even if you were only literally turned into a donkey for a few hours.  Shakespeare's magical romp of an ensemble rom-com makes the case that one Midsummer Night's Dream (a couple of nights, actually) can hitch a few pairs of lovers, and better them, for good.

In this essential regard, Love Overnight (LO) romantic comedies are the diametric opposite of Getting to Know You (GTKY) movies, yet kissing cousins to the Only One paradigm - rom-coms that believe if you can find your fated soul mate, you'll be good to go.  In the LO universe, if an attraction develops, is tested and endures over the course of one fated night, that's all its faith-and-hope-prone protagonists need in order to make a solid commitment.

2008's unjustly overlooked all-in-one-night rom-com Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist - the answer to your future "What was Kat Dennings in before 2 Broke Girls?" trivial pursuit question - delivered the full, passionate goods in this neck of the woods: as in Sunrise, the meet-lose-get between Kat and Michael Cera goes down in one linear fell swoop, and it seems to be for keeps.  It's a credit to screenwriter Lorene Scafaria that we buy into this idea... which may be why there aren't dozens of these LO rom-coms extant.  Your average romantic comedy, even if it spans weeks, can be credibility-challenging enough.

The short list of hybrid Love Overnight classics over the years is topped by the horror/rom-com Shaun of the Dead (2004).  Here the protagonists have met and broken up before the 24-hour story proper gets launched, but one night of bludgeoning, axing, and shooting flesh-hungry zombies together is all it takes to make its two lovers like one, again.  2007's teen/bromantic rom-com hybrid Superbad similarly has a prologue to zip through before its neverending party night brings both boy-and-girl, and boy-buddies together before dawn.

Another seminal LO movie is John Hughes' teen rom-com Sixteen Candles (1984), coupling Molly Ringwald and Justin Henry over the course of a pivotal birthday's non-celebration.  Like the Shakespearian original, Woody Allen's minor Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982) is a nocturnal roundelay of hook-ups.  As every genre must have its nadir, we'll dutifully note that the execrable Valentine's Day (2010) follows form, its soul-killing superficial scenarios taking place in 24-hour holiday time.

A memorable variant is 1954's Roman Holiday, in which Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn spend a day and night together, a reporter and a princess on a platonic (but tacitly romantic) spree in Rome: no happily ever after for these two, but it's a time they'll remember all their lives.  One knowing anti-LO classic, Scorsese's black comedy/rom-com After Hours, is like an urban nightmare version of Bringing Up Baby with no Katherine Hepburn in sight (the series of "madcap" women hapless Griffin Dunne meets are crazy in a chillingly unscrewball way).  The movie suggests you not only can't get laid in a New York night, you're liable to get killed and/or turned into a plaster statue for trying to.

Living Rom-Com commenter Judith Duncan astutely noted that the GTKY movie lacks the high-gear energy of shorter-fused rom-coms.  LO pics, by their very "zero to 60 in no time" nature, have well-tuned motors (commenter Cantara Christopher's suggestion - Vincent Minnelli's The Clock, a rom-com/dramedy - is a quintessential example).  And if you ever needed evidence that rom-com lovers are optimists, the Love Overnight sub-genre, with its embrace of Be Here Now encounters and Instant Love Everlasting, clearly provides it.

So what other LO classics am I leaving out? 

A Third Way to Love

Romantic comedy believes in the transformative power of love, but its sub-genres reveal more specific belief systems.  Not long ago, my post Is There Only One? questioned movies that say, "Every soul has only one mate, chosen by fate" (Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, Only You).  Conversely, Second Chances looked at rom-coms that tell us, "Everyone is capable of finding more than one great love in one's lifetime" (Truly Madly Deeply, Love Actually, Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

The Only One movies, all about the chase, sometimes barely acquaint their protagonists with each other, banking on a this-was-meant-to-be philosophy to justify the match-up.  "The One After The One" movies are less about the One After's identity or compatibility then they are about the new mate's message: Get over it and move on.

Being predominately about courtship, romantic comedies don't usually go into the mundane nuts and bolts of how a longlasting union is formed.  The main event here is "how they met and how they got hitched," and it tends to play out in a short span of time.  Meanwhile there exists a small canon of romantic comedies that do focus on the bigger how - not how these two got together, but how their being together gradually blossomed into true love.  These rom-coms, I think, try to get at a more realistic assessment of what actually makes a romantic relationship work.

A Getting to Know You romantic comedy follows two people through a good chunk of their lives, examining the incremental process by which two people become truly intimate.  While most rom-coms enact some version of this in tightly-motored microcosm (e.g. the whirlwind adventure of Romancing the Stone forces its lovers to get closely acquainted, pronto), the Getting to Know You picture takes the longer view, suggesting that a slow-fused romance played out over time may in fact be the best route to a love that can last.

The uber-GTKY rom-com is of course When Harry Met Sally, in which it takes years (more than a decade) for Harry and Sally to get that they've already got what they need and want.  And the ethos of this mini-sub-genre is expressed in its famous climactic declaration by Harry, a detailed list of what he's learned to love in Sally ("I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich..."): True love is found by getting to know, accept, and appreciate the other, over time.

Getting to Know You rom-coms are similar to, but set apart from, the more garden variety "The One Who Was Always There" movies, in which a current romance with a Bellamy (Mr. Wrong) reveals that a best friend, co-worker, or otherwise long-on-the-scene character is actually the protagonist's true love (The Proposal, et al) - or not, as in My Best Friend's Wedding.  GTKY sticks with its two central characters over time to showcase how "the little things" in each add up to what only in the end seems inevitable.  He and she, by genuinely comprehending the beautiful and the bad in each other, make an eyes-wide-open commitment based more on empirical evidence than on ephemeral attraction.

Perhaps the earliest example of a GTKO movie, more romantic dramedy than rom-com, is Penny Serenade (1941, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne), featuring a married couple whose love deepens through the years.  In our modern era, When Harry... is bracketed by two darker hybrids (dramedy/rom-coms): 1967's Two for the Road (Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney) and 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Kate Winslet, Jim Carrey).  Road studies a marriage that seems to be driving toward the rocks, intermingling flashbacks with present-day turmoil, while Eternal, using similar (and wilder) techniques, replays, rethinks, and reboots a long-term relationship.

These two Getting to Know You movies root their stories in the seeming inevitability of a break-up, and work their way, comedically and poignantly, toward a reaffirmation of what was good about this coupling in the first place - tempered by a painful acknowledgement that what's flawed (as well as what's fun) in a mate is here to stay.  While that's not a theme which necessarily suggests the most upbeat date movie experience, such films have more to say to the experienced, real-world romantic than say, Valentine's Day.

An even smaller subset of these films employs a formal device to build up its intimacies: 1978's Same Time Next Year, in which Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn get to know each other via annual hotel trysts, and this year's tanker One Day (we revisit Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, whether they're together or not, on the succeeding anniversaries of their first meeting).  Another, more fantastical variant is found in Groundhog Day (Bill Murray gets to know Andie MacDowell via an eternity of February 2nds), and less profoundly, in 50 First Dates (Adam Sandler goes to school on Drew Barrymore, whose peculiar brand of amnesia makes every date their first one).

Are Getting to Know You rom-coms less ubiquitous because their tacit theme is more pragmatic than  romantic?  It may be why they tend towards drama more than comedy.  And what significant members of this small but resonant roster may I have left out? 

Your Mind on Music

Caffeine.  Alcohol.  A toke, a toot.  Everyone's got their favorite stimulant, but when it comes to working on a draft, the overwhelming drug of choice for most writers I know is music.

Four screenwriters interviewed in Karl Iglesias’s fine and useful book, The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters talk of their dependence on music as muse: Ron Bass likes to write to jazz; Steven DeSouza uses soundtracks from movies similar to the genre he’s writing in; Scott Rosenberg goes for rock’n’roll; Nicholas Kazan prefers Gregorian chant ("I need something constant and neutral.  I find it’s a wonderful aid that sort of massages the right hemisphere of my brain").

References to writer-as-listener abound in the realm of screenwriting interviews.  My own habit coincides with that of Mr. Bass, who notes: "I like to play the same CDs over and over because I like the music to disappear."

True that.  When I find a piece of music that evokes the sensibility of what I’m writing, I put it on Repeat and play it for hours.  (This method’s only drawback is that when you wear out a piece this way, you really do wear it out; certain songs I used to love are dead to me now, sadly.)  Lately, I've been stuck on a song called Diamond Heart by the group Active Child (fans of Roxy Music's Avalon may enjoy, but if Neo-80s synth and romantic langeurs give you the hives, steer clear, plus this is the only song from the album I've gotten so attached to, so the real hook may be something subjectively idiosyncratic, i.e. the sound of a C# alternating against a C with a D# above it just says HELLO to my heart). 

Diamond Heart is an exception that proves the rule, in that it has vocals, something usually to be avoided, but the lead vocal is so aurally tweaked that it took me a dozen listenings to realize that the words "diamond heart" are used in the lyrics.  Generally non-vocal music serves the task best, and my perennial search for instrumental music that’ll work often unearths great stuff that defies categorization (what exactly do you call Four Tet's Smile Around the Face, which sounds like the union of a benignly berserk robot drummer and the Lollipop Kids on helium in a toy factory?). 

My default fall-back is a pair of hardy perennials that never fail to get the fingers moving: the music of Steve Reich and Johann Sebastian Bach.  The perpetual motion and ethereality of Reich (particulary the more minimal early works) eases my right brain into gear, while Glen Gould playing Bach's keyboard music stokes the left side into more active alertness.  There's just enough muted and/or ambiguous emotionality in both composers' work to keep it engaging, and it abounds in that "constant and neutral" quality that Kazan spoke of.

I did a similar post on this writing methodology some five years ago, and got a lot of good suggestions for Music To Write By, but I've since exhausted those sources (played into its grave are The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid's two hours of beautifully spooky, languid otherworldliness, and my first novel thanks you).  Once again, I’m on the lookout for writing-stimulation. 

What music have you found that gets your blood moving and keeps your creative juices flowing, when you're working on a draft?  Living Rom-Com wants to hear.

Rom-Com Truisms #9

The less said, the more felt.

An ongoing issue with the romantic comedy spec scripts I read is that they talk too much. 

By "they" I mean the characters (i.e. the writers), which is surprising.  Given that we're living in the reign of Twitter, seeing as how we all have less time to take in information, why is that screenwriters still seem to think that romantic comedy = two people sitting or standing around talking, for page after page?

It's axiomatic that in comedy, fast is funny.  And brevity being the soul of wit, the alert rom-com writer ought to be able to cut to the gag, pronto.  In this regard, I've often cited the opening of Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral as a model, a paradigm of great romantic comedy dialogue.

The movie begins with a wordless montage of various characters getting ready to go to a wedding.  We find protagonist Charles (Hugh Grant) still in bed, sleepily picking up his alarm clock and reacting, eyes widened, with the movie's first dialogue:

Oh, fuck. Fuck!

Charles runs into housemate Scarlett's room and thrusts her clock at her sleepy face.  Scarlett reacts: Fuck!

Cut to Charles getting dressed in a hurry.  He bends to tie his shoes and his suspenders pop off the back of his trousers.  Charles: Fuck.

Cut to Charles and Scarlett in the front of his Volvo.  The engine won't start.  Charles: Fuck!!!

Now that's great dialogue.  I'm not being facetious here -- it's truly impressive how much the sequence accomplishes, in terms of story set-up, character and tone, using one four-letter word.  But Curtis is also a master of the long speech, which he demonstrates in the closing scene (which also includes one godawful clunker of a line, Andie MacDowell-as-Carrie's "Is it raining?  I hadn't noticed" as she and Charles stand drenched to the skin in a downpour), but at any rate - boy has met, lost, and is getting girl, romantically in the rain, and his pitch is true to Charles' twistedly conflicted anti-marriage persona:

Do you think... after we've dried off, after we've spent lots of time together, you might agree... NOT to marry me?  And do you think... not being married to me... might maybe be something you could consider doing for the rest of your life?  Do you?

Girl uses two irony-laden syllables in reply:

I do.

One of the most moving uses of a commonplace word that I've ever heard, in the closing lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is made up of two syllables repeated by two devastated lovers (He: Okay?  She: Okay) which pack so much emotional resonance - they've been through relationship hell together, but they're still willing to believe they've got a chance to make it work - that the scene tears me up every time.

You may remember how effective the wordless first act of Wall-E was (yes, it's a romantic comedy, as well as being a sci-fi animation), and speaking of sci-fi, one of the best cinematic responses ever given to the phrase "I love you" was provided by Han Solo, who replied, true to character: "I know." (Harrison Ford, reportedly bettering Leigh Brackett's script for The Empire Strikes Back.)

The best romantic comedies don't over-explain or over-sell themselves.  I've noticed that many people who enjoyed Crazy, Stupid, Love got big laughs out of early scenes like this - Cal and his wife Emily trying to decide what to order at a restaurant...

Cal: How about we see what we want on three?  One, two...

Emily: I want a divorce.

Cal (simultaneously): Creme Brulee.

...but cited Cal's big, long, over-sentimental speech at his son's graduation at the picture's end as one of its missteps.  Not to belabor the point (i.e. why go on and on?), but movies are a visual medium, and when the talk is brief, there's room for a scene's emotional subtext to be felt.  If your characters say more with less words, you're giving the audience a chance to feel what lies between the lines.  And isn't that the smarter, funnier, more moving way to go?

'Nuff said.