Living the Romantic Comedy

Henry's Questions

Really, I just wanted to post the picture. Henry Bromell died nearly a week ago, and this is what he was like, as a writer and a guy: you can kind of get it, in the photo. I was friendly with him for many years, though I wouldn't presume to say we were close, but he made you feel close to him - it was part of his charm. He didn't have a barrier, was the way a mutual friend of ours put it.

He did, of course, have barriers. There was a palpable darkness at the core of his writing, and this wasn't a side of Henry that surfaced in social encounters. No, and what you saw - in the outpourings of love and appreciation that came on Facebook, in tweets, and in the press after his death - was a mirror of the generosity, the kindness, the good-humored openness of spirit in Henry. He was the quintessence of mensch.

He's most well known these days for his work on Homeland, but before that, there was Homicide, and further back, Northern Exposure, a unique show that was very Henry in its bemused and loving take on the peculiarities of human interaction. His darker side was evidenced in the novel he wrote, Little America, and his quite good, unjustly overlooked feature, Panic.

My favorite work of Henry's has yet to be produced: Fellini Black & White, a marvelous evocation of the great Italian director's 1957 visit to America with his lovelorn wife. There are images and poignant, funny moments in that screenplay that have stayed with me for years: an inopportune attempt to put the top down on a speeding vintage convertible, and the wind ripping the top loose, the canvas flapping and tumbling backwards into the night; Fellini watching the bobbing dark shapes of California surfers in the rising sun. Thank you, Henry, for putting these moments in my head and my heart.

When I talked about Henry with my friend the editor Cindy Mollo, she characterized her months working on Panic as a kind of private film school graduate course. Henry was a natural teacher. I brought him to one of my classes as a guest speaker, and he regaled the students with stories and insights that kept them rapt for an hour and a half. When his alloted time was up, I couldn't resist one more query: Hey, Henry - What makes a good scene? 

Henry seemed briefly stymied, as if no one had put this question to him before. Then on the spot, he came up with what he called his "Big Five" questions regarding a scene. I scrawled them on the back of a postcard (Union City Drive-In, 1993, Photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto), and I've been using them in classes ever since. This is not due to their unique profundity - this is 101 stuff, for sure - but because they're so simple and useful. And really, over time, I haven't come up with a sixth. 

Henry Bromell's "Big 5" Questions to Ask of a Scene:

Have we seen this scene before?

Is there a conflict?

Is there a subtext?

Does it go from A to B (have a shape)?

Is the language and tone interesting?

I've found that asking these questions of any scene one writes is a tonic, especially when something isn't working, or when one senses that the scene could be stronger. There's clear thinking in the Big Five, and they've proven to be an effective gateway to other explorations and discoveries. The first, for example, instantly causes the writer to step back from the page and think wider, deeper, for implied in the question is a provocative subtext, i.e. If we have seen this scene, what are you doing to make your version of it memorable?

I pass Henry's questions along to you as another tool for your toolbox, and in homage to a man whose job it was to create good and great scenes, and who did it so, so well, over a rich and vibrant career. I'm happy that I got to know the guy, and I'm happy to think that those of you who didn't, can get to know him though his work. It's already living on.

Adam's Rom-Com Run

No, Living the RomCom hasn't become a 24/7 Girls zone, but I can't help taking note of Sunday night's finale, a typically controversial Lena Dunham special, in that it once again reversed expectations... in perhaps one of the last conceivably shocking ways.

After all the dark and disturbing character turns, the archly meta cultural commentary, and the perversely reality-based tweaking of romantic comedy fantasies, in the end [spoilers!] Dunham and her crew chose to honor that mother of all rom-com clichés by having anti-hero-turned-white-knight Adam run, literally run to the rescue of damsel-in-distress Hannah, kicking down her door and sweeping her up in his manly arms.

I suspect that Dunham, Apatow and staff may have availed themselves of Pixar's Rules of Storytelling #9 ("...Make a list of what wouldn't happen next...") to arrive at this unexpected conclusion to their scary roller-coaster of a Season 2, but it was true to the determinedly irony-laden spirit of the show.

Adam you may remember as the ugly sexual abuser of his current girlfriend, so not so much attired in shining armor (he was buff-ly shirtless), and Hannah wasn't so much about to get on a plane to Paris as she was about to disappear down her bedcovers rabbit-hole prior, perhaps, to a stint at Bellevue. But the effect and the execution was about the same: there was even pounding emo-rock on the soundtrack (hey, nice synch between the drums and Adam's footfalls on the stairs, sound editor person!), courtesy of the writer/director's paramour.

Did your heart swell, nonetheless? Mine did, though I was simultaneously laughing, both at the bald absurd logic of the conceit, and its incidental execution: the detail of Adam barking at Hannah on his iPhone as he ran was about as perfect a 2013 rom-com update as one could wish for. And it is heartening, I gotta admit, to see a trope as old as... well, romance still delivering the goods, at this late date. Be as po-mo proto-feminist as you like, Dunham's resolution suggests, but you'll still swoon for an archetypal clinch.

Proof that we do live in a time that's a little different from medieval can be found in this excellent link, wherein some savvy Brooklynites have managed to specifically locate and time Adam's rom-com run down to the second, suggesting that while we may still fall for the same old shtick, we've gotten a lot more efficient at annotating it.

What Does Your Sex Mean?

[This post contains substantive Girls spoilers, but if you’re into Girls, you’ve probably already seen this past weekend’s devastating episode, and if you’re not, you don’t care.]

Sex scenes are always a challenge to write, for screenwriters and fictionists alike. I’ve found that within the romantic comedy genre – a genre that you'd think might more willingly explore the vagaries of sexual experience than most – sex scenes tend to fall into two equally superficial categories: romantic and hot.

Romantic rom-com scenes seem to exist primarily to say “they really love each other,” and hot rom-com scenes express “they’re really horny for each other.” The former tend to be replete with corniness, and feature clichéd images (e.g. the old “waves crashing on the shore” riff) and the latter often features characters throwing each other up against walls. At their clumsiest, you get a hot’n’romantic combo platter that leads to memorably cheesy scenes like this:

Sex scenes that actually move the plot forward, reveal character, and/or speak to theme tend to be fewer and farther between – as are sex scenes that actually have something to say about the nature and meaning of specific sexual encounters.

For this reason, one of my favorite rom-com sex scenes from the past decade appeared in Knocked Up (aka, at this date, The Last Good Apatow Movie): the scene where Seth Rogen’s character Ben had to stop having “doggy-style” sex with Katherine Heigl’s Alison (“It’s just the style, we don’t have to go outside or anything!”) because he was afraid of traumatizing the baby in her belly (“My dick must be like an inch away from its face!”).

Both Ben and Alison are wonderfully themselves in this moment: she’s fraught with self-loathing about her pregnant body, and he’s becoming a dad (i.e. beginning to have feelings of responsibility for his child-to-be), and their increasing estrangement in the midst of intimacy makes for a great conflict that also yields some LOL gags. That’s a great sex scene.

“Great sex scenes” as in great scenes about sex have become Lena Dunham’s mini-metier in the two seasons of Girls. Season 2’s penultimate episode (9: On All Fours) had one good (i.e. meaningful) and one truly great (i.e. meaningful and meta-meaningful) sex scene which was genuinely awful – that is, in a wonderfully disturbing way.

The episode as a whole was so dark as to prompt one viewer to wonder if director Dunham had been channeling Lars Von Trier, and the sex scenes were suffused with said darkness. Charlie’s brief sex scene with Marnie was essentially “I’m fucking you because I finally have all the power in this relationship, and much as it pisses me off that I’m still attracted to you, I'm giving you what you seem to need and I still want, damn it!”

Adam’s horrible sex scene with Natalia, like a car accident one could not draw one’s eyes away from, was about Adam (Adam Sackler) – clearly conflicted about being in a potentially healthy romance and doubly tweaked by having fallen off his AA wagon and having run into his bête noir, ex-lover Hannah (Dunham) – debasing and degrading Natalia (Shiri Appleby) in order to push her away from him, thus self-destructively affirming that he was incapable and undeserving of a “normal” relationship.

After compulsively coming across Natalia’s breasts and then wiping her off, and hearing Natalia’s “I really didn’t like that” response, Adam asks, with pained hope, “This is it, are you done with me?” (Self-hate much, Girls?) And that “cum shot” – which set the internet a-twittering – had the additional resonance of skewering a standard trope of pornography, revealing the true ugliness that’s often at its core.

My simple point is not that your happy, healthy romantic comedy ought to turn into a nihilistic treatise on the sadness of sex. But given the boundaries that are being broken by shows like Girls on a weekly basis, if the characters in your rom-com are going to have sex, how about having it mean something?

Yes, sex is sometimes just sex (and that can be great sex, indeed), but in a screenplay, if you’re going to go there… you ought to do something with it. What makes this sexual act specific to your story? Is it getting to know you sex, getting closer sex, breakup sex, makeup sex? Is it sex about gender roles, morality, philosophy? What do your rom-com's acts of intimacy reveal about who your characters are, where they’re going (in story terms), and what your point of view is?

In screenwriting terms, sex should mean never having to settle for superficial. Today’s romantic comedy audience wants – and is clearly ready for – more.

I Have Seen the Future of Romantic Comedy and It's Been Going On For Years

This past week various friends and acquaintances sent me a link: The Atlantic's Christopher Orr on Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad? Guys, are you sending me this because you think it's news to me somehow, or because you recognize that Orr is saying what I've been saying on this blog for like, nearly eight years now?

The idea that "romantic comedy is dead" is so 2003, and for that matter, so 1973, and 1953. The genre's death and subsequent resurrection has been celebrated (or reviled) many times since its screwball heyday - and hey, given that Howard Hawks' divine Bringing Up Baby was dissed by critics and a box office dud in 1938, there were probably people going "this romantic comedy thing is over" back then.

So to Christopher Orr, with whom I couldn't agree more, I say, Welcome to my world, and I'm glad you're putting in establishment print what I said in the blogosphere over two months ago: Silver Linings Playbook and Moonrise Kingdom were indeed the best romantic comedies of 2012. Therein lies the theme that I've been going on about, oh, ever since my Writing the Romantic Comedy was published in the year 2000.

Because if romantic comedy is dead, how come a romantic comedy starring an actual dead person as its male lead (Warm Bodies) has just become one of 2013's great successes?

For about a decade or more, there's been a common misperception at the core of this issue. When most people think "romantic comedy," they're thinking either of acknowledged classics, and/or of the kind of standard chick flick movie that had its peak popularity in the '90s and waned in the 2000s: studio-designed programmers starring the usual suspects (e.g. Reese, J-Lo, Cameron, Heigl, et al).

Such formulaic cookie-cutter pictures generally conformed to what I call the Career Girl Gets Alpha Guy (CGGAG) model. Their female protagonists tended to be underdogs, seeking success in a chosen field, who ended up winning the man who either came with, or trumped, their livelihood victories. When these movies were good, you got Bridget Jones's Diary, and when they were bad or merely mediocre, you got... practically everything else.

It is these kinds of movies, their plots rooted almost solely in their straight-up girl meets, gets, loses boy conflicts, that eventually oversaturated the market. In this decade, as New York magazine's Vulture has aptly pointed out, they've begun to tank so regularly that yes, this particular kind of romantic comedy really can be declared "over" as a viable box office proposition.

What continues to be summarily ignored, meanwhile, is that the larger rom-com genre has been doing pretty well, thanks, meaning: movies that feature "Will these two people become (or remain) a couple?" as their central narrative question.

Yes, Silver Linings Playbook is a romantic comedy, as is Moonrise Kingdom. So is 2011's Midnight in Paris (rom-com fantasy), 2010's Tangled (animated rom-com), 2009's Up in the Air (rom-com-dramedy), 2008's Mama Mia (musical rom-com) and 2007's Knocked Up (raunchy male POV rom-com). While many of these are more accurately termed "hybrids" (i.e. they merge other genres with romantic comedy, like Ted's high concept rom-com gambit), many a "pure" rom-com has been a hit within the past few years, e.g. Crazy Stupid Love.

The romantic comedy will never die, because audiences will always want to see movies about the absurdities of human mating games. It's one of the most inexhaustable plots there is. The key here (I'm talking to you, screenwriters) is that it's harder to get it right and to strike a cultural chord, than ever before.

In this regard, Atlantic's Orr is spot on (e.g. true obstacles to both sex and commitment are tougher to construct, in 2013) and Vulture's Brodessor-Akner is astute (e.g. the studio system has tapped out its formula, and for the moment, its conventional rom-com stars). But as Warm Bodies, Playbook and others have recently demonstrated, the romantic comedy as a larger genre is alive and kicking. What's required, on the part of its writers and producers, is some imagination and risk-taking.

That's what's been going on for a while now on the smaller screen (witness Girls and Louie), and it's what's going on in the best genre minds we've got: Richard Curtis's forthcoming About Time is a time-travel rom-com (and I predict, based on its I-laughed-I-cried screenplay, the sleeper hit of his career).

What, in this messed-up, who knows what a relationship is? cultural moment, is the kind of rom-com story that says hello to a new generation of lovers who no longer have a traditional path to follow? What appeals to a present and older generation that's aware of the awesome complexities that actually follow "boy gets girl?" What's unique about your personal take on love and romance, that can be delivered in a story that doesn't comform to the dated CGAG rom-com box?

Warm Bodies isn't half as funny as Shaun of the Dead (2004), but it's got heart, humor, and a neat, timely irreverence that's evidently speaking to today's audience. And it achieves this by not following the tried and true, but by tweaking what's been tried, with a skewed sort of truth.

Getting outside the box is what's required, and thinking hard about how our current collision between a reality-based culture and the wish fulfillment fantasies of the movies can be mined. Classic rom-coms like Tootsie, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have transcended genre and hit such zeitgeist sweet spots in the past. So why don't you stop worrying about the romantic comedy being over, and write something, well, fresh, as we lurch uncertainly into the future?