Living the Romantic Comedy

Shades of Grey Perplexity

A former romance novelist (actually a man who wrote under a woman’s name), a studio story analyst, and a middle-aged married man went to see 50 Shades of Grey together, and that’s not the set up for a joke: all three of them are me.

Afterwards I imagined my three disparate personas having a discussion of the movie, and it went something like this…

Former romance novelist (RN): Did they really begin Anastasia and Christian's widescreen romance with a “meet cute” where the heroine takes a ditzy pratfall? Really?!

Studio story analyst (SA): I’m just amazed that a movie that’s entirely Act One – the whole two-hour running time is all setup – had a nearly $90 million dollar domestic opening weekend.

Middle-aged married man (MM): The guy wants to call all the shots and have sex without romance (no big date nights, no sleepovers), and she’s almost okay with that for most of the movie. So this is a male wish-fulfillment fantasy.

RN: I’m confused by critics who saw this as some modern, contemporary take on a romantic drama. The hero tells the heroine she’s “the only one” he wants to do all this with… and the heroine believes she’s the only one who can get the guy to change - she's going to open up his heart and “save him.” This is the basic gist of nearly every Harlequin novel I wrote, and of most romantic fiction since Wuthering Heights.

SA: I’m bewildered by the repetitions. Half of the movie happens in and around elevators. The two “guy impresses girl” scenes both involved Anastasia and Christian flying (one at night where he’s the helicopter pilot and the other by day where they’re in a glider). The same and only conflict in a dozen scenes has to do with whether or not she’ll sign his contract.

MM: He buys her clothes… buys her a car… offers to keep her in high style… and all she has to do is endure his somewhat weird sexual preferences. This is different from most traditional marriages I’m familiar with, how?

RN: They did such a good job of white-washing the down-and-dirty perversity out of the story that the sex seems… clean. You don't even see a red chafe or welt-mark on Dakota’s skin. Other than the fact that I never wrote a romance novel scene where the heroine specified “no anal fisting,” there’s little here that deviates from the conventional form. Except that the story has no middle and no ending.

SA: Even for a romantic drama, the lack of any actual… action is confounding. Lots of walk-and-talks in Vogue or GQ spread-like settings, couple of conversations in bars and restaurants… handful of mildly erotic sex scenes. The basic dramatic motor boils down to him saying, “Come on!” And her going, “Maybe,” until the cliffhanger non-ending. In another elevator.

MM: But I so want my wife to see this. She’ll feel much better about our relationship, in that we have TV-watching dates whenever we want, every night’s a sleepover, and the only “safe words” we need to remember are “I’m really tired.”

All three of us agreed on three things: that Dakota Johnson is a good actress (her good humor the movie's saving grace), that we don’t “get” Jamie Dornan, and that the real star of this show is Universal studio head Donna Langley – because we guys paid to see a movie based on a “mommy porn” women’s book that started out as fan fiction for the Twilight franchise and never felt ashamed of ourselves for a moment.

Now that is Hollywood genius.

The Hidden Heroine

It's that time of the year again. Everyone who's got a beating heart knows that as soon as February rolls around, there's a major holiday to be reckoned with, one that's come to symbolize the meaning of love and romance for America, if not the world.

I'm speaking, of course, about Groundhog Day.

Granted, there was a time, long ago (i.e. before 1993), when this holiday lacked the romantic associations since bestowed on it, due to the efforts of Danny Rubin, the late Harold Ramis and Bill Murray. But ever since the writer, director and star, respectively of Groundhog Day created what's now generally acknowledged as one of the great American movies of all time, February 2nd has become synonymous with romance and comedy.  In fact, when people ask me to name a couple of my favorite romantic comedies, this one invariably comes to mind.

What, you've never thought of this cinematic classic as a romantic comedy?  For shame.  I have it on unassailable authority that the film qualifies. For starters, it says so right on the DVD box's cover ("A romantic comedy fantasy that is Bill Murray's best screen performance" --  Gene Shalit). But look up the definition of romantic comedy in the definitive text on same, and you'll find (p.12) that "a romantic comedy is a comedy whose central plot is embodied in a romantic relationship" and that (p.13) "the central question posed by a romantic comedy is: 'Will these two individuals become a couple?'"

As you well know, when TV weatherman Phil Connors (Murray) gets inexplicably trapped in the same repeating February 2nd, his sole recourse to getting out of it becomes the object of his affections, producer Rita (Andie MacDowell); his salvation lies in the answer to their coupling question. (Screenwriting theorist sticklers may point out that the story's central question is really, Will Phil ever get out of February 2nd? To this I say, also true, because the movie is a rom-com hybrid --ibid, pp.21-28 -- a romantic comedy/high concept fantasy, and thus the couple/escape conflicts are intertwined. But let's stop boring our civilian readers, shall we? Thanks.)

Strange but true, there still exist deprived people who have not seen the movie Groundhog Day. If you are one of those poor souls, what better opportunity to improve the quality of your life, than to view it on the official Day itself? And even if you're one of the many enriched individuals who's seen it, Groundhog Day is a movie that you can watch over and over, and over, and over...

If you're a major Groundhog Day fan, you might even consider journeying to the scene of the crime: the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is having its annual celebration, and it promises to be quite a hoot. Such a trip was actually enjoyed byDay's writer and star before the movie was made, and therein lies a tale that speaks, I believe, to the true spirit of romance, or as we might say, what love's got to do with it.

Danny Rubin recounts the following in his illuminating interview accompanying an early draft of the screenplay in Scenario(Spring '95 issue, regrettably out of print). He talks of having been hired, fired and re-hired to work on the script, and when he, his wife Louise and kids were preparing to move from Los Angeles to New Mexico, getting a call from Bill Murray:

He says, "Do you realize that the day after tomorrow is Groundhog Day?"--"Yep."--"And do you realize that between the director, the producer, the star and the writer of this film, nobody has been to the festival at Punxsutawney?  Doesn't that seem wrong to you?"  And I said, "Absolutely.  And I think you should go, I think that will be a great thing."  And he said, "I think we should go."  And I said, "Bill, that's a really nice offer, sounds like fun, but I'm moving, I'm moving my family, we're up to our necks in boxes, I can't just abandon them and go off to Punxsutawney."  And he said, "Well, think about it and call me back.  Here's my number."  When I got off the phone, Louise asked who it was.  "Bill Murray," I said.  "He wants me to go to Punxsutawney tomorrow."  And she said, "Cool."  And I said I'd told him I couldn't do it.  She said, "Are you nuts?"  So I talked to [the studio] and they said, "We'll pay for the move, we'll get someone to help pack, we'll fly out a friend of your wife's to help her move in so you don't have to be there."

This level of support was very nice, and I embarked on the most surreal adventure of my professional life.  All of a sudden I'm flying in a private plane from the middle of nowhere to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night with Bill Murray and we're talking about the script.  We landed somewhere near Punxsutawney at 2:00 in the morning.  And there were fans out there waiting for him--it was supposed to be a secret...

Rubin goes on to say that he used a lot of what he saw there in the script. He'd originally spoken to the town's Chamber of Commerce and looked at their literature, but:

After we actually saw it, there was a whole different feel to it than we had imagined.  It was delightful, really delightful--a wonderful civic event.  We incorporated a lot of that into the movie...  Everyone there knew it was a goofy ritual--it was almost sophisticated in its hickyness.  What was so much fun about the festival is, it's the middle of the night, zero degrees, they've got bonfires going--and they're playing Beach Boys music.

Sometimes I read this excerpt to a screenwriting class when I'm talking about the inestimable value of research, to illustrate how really being there can make all the difference in writing a given project. But I quote it now in this pre-Valentine's Day context to highlight my favorite moment in Rubin's story, which is when Louise says, "Are you nuts?"

I just love that! Gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling every time, because it seems to me that Danny Rubin's wife is the hidden heroine of the Groundhog Day saga. Love doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry.  It means having someone be able to say "Are you nuts?!" to you at a crucial moment. Love is sometimes about selflessness and saving loved ones from themselves -- which come to think of it, is kind of at the core of what the movie ended up being about, don't you think? 

Go watch it again, again, and see if you agree.

Spending my days believing in impossible things and chasing them towards an inner truth, now that's a pretty good gig.

--Danny Rubin

(photograph at post's top by sabine)