Living the Romantic Comedy

Good News

The great work begins: Harper/Collins will release the updated, expanded & revised 20th Anniversary Edition of "Writing the Romantic Comedy" in 2020.

 

In Praise of Women

The latest episode on the podcast I do with good friend and great romantic comedy screenwriter Tess Morris (Man Up) is a positive counterpoint to the truly awful Hollywood news of late: We talk about A Dozen Great Female Characters (in comedy, romantic comedy, and black comedy, 1970s-Present, and A Dozen Great Screenplays Written by Women. Cheer yourself up with this tribute to Film Women Who Rock: You Had Us At Hello.

Yours, Mine, and Eternity's Man

Even as a young man, Leonard Cohen was old. Listen to him on his first album singing the instantly memorable first line of Suzanne, and you hear a world-weariness, the sigh of an elder sage, that would seem unbecoming in a young singer-songwriter were it not for the level of insight evidenced in his lyrics. 

It's not just the deep bass register he adopted as time went by, but the entirety of his persona: the sober, rabbinical pose at the altar of keyboard or guitar, the spare and simple folk-timeless chord patterns, his incantatory phrasing cushioned by the sweet young voices of female background singers. You felt, listening to Cohen even in his middle age, that you were hearing the testimony of a man who had been to the mountain and back, an aged soul whose eyes were focused on the higher truths that transcended the superficial ditherings of what preoccupied contemporary culture. 

You know his music, you may know his poetry. But it was his lesser known novel Beautiful Losers that changed my adolescent mind. At age 16 I was just starting to think I might be a writer, and I was awed by its weird, surreal eroticism. To this day I can't forget the moment when, after a benignly monstrous vibrator has had its way with the lover-protagonists, it makes an exit worthy of a creature from some '50s sci-fi horror pic:

The Danish Vibrator slipped off her face, uncovering a bruised soft smile. "Stay," she whispered. It climbed onto the window sill, purring deeply, revved up to a sharp moan, and launched itself through the glass, which broke and fell over its exit like a fancy stage curtain... When it reached the ground it crossed the parking lot and soon achieved the beach...  How soft the night seemed, like the last verse of a lullaby... We watched the descent of the apparatus into the huge rolling sea, which closed over its luminous cups like the end of a civilization.

Years later I was introduced to Mr. Cohen briefly backstage on the night I attended one of his by now-legendary I'm Your Man tour concerts. Nothing memorable to note there, just a polite head nod - otherwise I stood around eavesdropping as he talked to my more celebrated companions (see Periphery Man photo captioned: Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Unidentified Man, etc.). And then...

About a decade ago I went for lunch at the French cafe on Abbot Kinney with my friend Peter Trias, and shortly after we got settled into our table, I noticed an elderly man come in, accompanied by a beautiful young Asian woman. As they sat down at a table across the little patio, I gave the man a curious glance, because there was something familiar about his face.

A bit further into our lunch, I put it together: the older man with the haunting, luminous eyes, the younger woman so attentive to him. "I think that's Leonard Cohen," I told my friend. I chanced another look at their table.

And here's the odd thing: when I did so, the man was already looking at me. There was an air of expectancy in his gaze, as if he'd known before I did that there was reason for me to look, as if, in fact, he had recognized me. He returned my feigned casual glance with a gaze of open curiosity.

My second look had confirmed, at any rate, my suspicion that there was indeed an icon of my generation having tea in the French cafe.  But the weirdness persisted; a few times during the course of our meal, I had the distinct feeling of being watched, and when I snuck another look Cohen-ward, once again I found his waiting eyes anticipating mine.

It could have been any number of things, but Cohen's behavior strikes me as extremely Zen. If idolized, idolize the idolator. He was acting as a psychic mirror -  either that, or mistaking me for the guy who did his dry cleaning. There's also the possibility that he unabashedly enjoyed being recognized, and/or was having the kind of day where his ego welcomed the attention... which come to think of it, is antithetical to being a Zen monk.  There you go - his familiar dichotomy theme: the struggle between the spiritual and the material.

By the time Cohen and his companion were paying their check, I couldn't contain myself. "I'm sorry if this embarrasses you," I told Peter, "but I've got to talk to the guy." There was something I felt compelled to impart to Mr. Cohen, coincidentally having listened to I'm Your Man in the course of a writing session only a few nights previous, and so when he and the young woman came down our aisle, I stood up and briefly blocked his exit.  Again, he seemed to anticipate and expect this, as if it were an inevitable ritual.

"Excuse me, but are you Leonard Cohen?" I asked.

He smiled. "Yes, I am," he admitted, looking happy about it.

I introduced myself and shook his hand. "I was listening to your Tower of Song the other night," I said, "and it occurred to me that I first read Beautiful Losers as a teenager. I'm a writer, and I just want you to know that you've been in my life, giving me great pleasure and inspiration for quite a long span of time, so thank you for that."

"You're very kind," he said, and we nodded at each other, I stepped aside, and he and the Asian woman (who seemed relieved that I'd been wielding neither an autograph hound's pen or a .45 magnum) went on their way. But I don't think I was wrong in feeling that Mr. Cohen had been genuinely pleased by my little tribute, and I guess this is the point of my anecdote.

Too often the greats don't get their props until they pass away. There are but a handful of songwriter-artists who have continued to produce a sustained body of meaningful work over a damned impressive number of years - Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon come to mind. Let us celebrate them now, I say, while they're still among us.

For it's one thing to make a big splash and then fall by the wayside while times and taste shift, and another thing entirely to transcend the vagaries of fashion and be, in a very real sense, eternally young, eternally old... ever alive to what's eternal. It's a formidable challenge, one addressed in these lines from Leonard's Book of Longing's poem, The Faith:

The sea so deep and blind

The sun, the wild regret

The club, the wheel, the mind

O love, aren't you tired yet?

La Reine

Christine of Christine and the Queens, in a pause between blowing out the rafters of the Ace Hotel last night, got confessional with us. She recalled once seeing people laughing and pointing at a homeless "freak," and admitted, "I'm a coward. I did nothing. But in this odd little job I've got," she said, "I get to make it up to him," thus introducing the song she'd written for him, St. Claude:

Christine (Heloise Letissier) has a physicality that drives her show, a string of tightly choreographed assaults of musical joy. Self-identified as pansexual, voice and moves inseparable, she is an instrument: she seems to play and be played through by her powerfully minimalist band as she dances out each song, whether she's in pounding four-on-the-floor disco mode, or in subtler stuff like this this cover of Beyonce's Sorry:

A galvanizing force in her native country's LGBT club scene, Christine charmed the Ace crowd with her Gallic sense of wryly distancing humor. "I'm coming out to you, Los Angeles," she announced. "I'm French." She seems poised to take over America, and if her next release contains anything as good as Tilted, my personal heavy rotation list-topper and the one that had the entire audience singing along, I bet she will. 

 

Writing the Romantic Comedy Redux

"Don’t think about it as a romantic comedy. Don’t look at the tried and true and what the movie needs to be. Look at these people. Look at what makes them unique and perfect for each other. Think about your views on love and courtship and what you think is funny about falling in love right now, and what do you think really makes a relationship? And go at it with a consciously thematic and socially conscious point of view. “What do I have here that will really speak to my peers about love and romance?”

Creative Screenwriting magazine asked me some questions about the genre that I could not help but try to answer. As a general update on what's up with rom-coms these days, you may find the interview of interest.

Still Girls

Rom-commers (writers especially), a reminder: As you know, the real romantic comedy action is presently on the small screen (see everything from Catastrophe to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and that's just the C's). So if you haven't yet started on Lena Dunham's penultimate season of Girls yet, hie thee to it. With Louie scheduled to start streaming again on 3/5, that's two of our top, most forward-looking comedy/rom-com auteurs available for your perusal at the peak of their powers.

A Million Views

There was a fine white mist at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains as I biked up the path early this morning - my last bike ride on the beach as a resident of Venice: Tater and I are moving to the suburban wilds of North Hollywood tomorrow. It'll be quite a change, as I've lived in Venice for 23 years, but as we're trading a small two bedroom apartment in the over-traversed epicenter of West Side hipsterism for a three-bedroom house with yard and garage, etc. in a charming, quiet neighborhood... Well, I bought a bike rack for the car. I'll happily trek out here once a week.

Seems perfectly synchronistic that Living the Romantic Comedy is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend - end of an era, and all that - though not end, I hasten to clarify: I intend to keep blogging, for as long as it's still fun. But the blogger's landscape has certainly changed since I first moved into this neighborhood, ten years ago.

In June, 2005, Facebook wasn't yet as ubiquitous and Twitter didn't exist, let alone all the other platforms. And though I was late to a party that was still going strong - at the time, you could tell someone you had a blog without getting an eye-roll in response - it was a heady, stimulating community to join, especially in screenwriting site circles. These days, to have an active blog makes you feel a little... quaint. It's a bit like writing in longhand and sending an actual letter.

The most exciting aspect of it, inarguably, was and still is getting a response. These days we're all used to being liked, shared, favorited, and retweeted, but back then it was a more novel experience to blather on about something online, and suddenly get agreement, or disagreement about it from a total stranger. By the time Living RomCom was going strong, it wasn't uncommon for me to get 25-35 comments on a given post. That's astonishing, then and now.

The essential experience - reflected for me in the title of the blog - has been of growing up in public (I like to think I'm still growing), and when I looked back, digging up things to re-post this month, I saw all manner of momentous events annotated here: In my very first post, I was wondering how to write a dating site profile, and over the course of a decade, after seeking romance in all the wrong and nearly-right places, I found true love in my third and final wife; America elected its first president of color; my first novel sold to a major publishing house; and my beloved father passed away.

What I hadn't quite foreseen was a major sea change in my genre of choice. No, the romantic comedy is not dead, as I've exhaustively discussed in these pages, but in the past few years, a certain kind of formulaic chick flick (I call it the Career Girl Gets Alpha Guy movie) has finally lost its audience. I myself had dutifully supported the so-called formula of the traditional romantic comedy, but I lobbied fiercely here for more progressive fare.

One of the things that keeps me blogging about the genre, in fact, is that the rom-com seems to be morphing into something newly relatable, as such hits as Silver Linings Playbook and Her have demonstrated. I'll go out on a very short limb now to declare that when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer's Trainwreck (which I did notes on for Universal) comes out in a few weeks and makes millions, you're suddenly going to hear - from the same people who danced on the rom-com's grave last year - that "romantic comedy is back!"

Such is the ever-cyclical nature of the industry. Meanwhile, what truly makes the blogging practice worthwhile continues to be the people I come in contact with by doing it, from my first-ever commenter Caroline Ferguson to the blog's most stalwart fan E.C. Henry. I'm amazed and gratified to talk with not just friends, but folks from all over the world on a weekly basis.

Probably the most humbling of such encounters occurred when a former consult client living in Eastern Europe informed me that having read a certain Living Rom-Com post had helped her to make a major life decision about when and how to have a baby. Her child is over a year old now, and the idea that something I wrote on this blog could turn me into a sort of cyber-godfather fills me with awe.

That's the thing, I guess: What I've mostly learned here is that when you write something and offer it to the world at large, you can never know what effect it may have, even on people you don't and may never know. And this is the best endorsement for facing one's fears and continuing to write that I can think of.

Thank you all, at any rate, for keeping me company thus far. And please comment to let me know what you'd like to see more (or less of) on this blog. Largely due to the efforts of blog colleague Scott Myers, whose promotion of a recent post currently has my total page view numbers at 999,690 and rising, I'm within 300+ hits of reaching one million by the day's end. You, my friend, may even be my millionth viewer!

May your days be filled with love and laughter.

(Illustrations by Adrian Tomine) 

Love Wins

"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were... 

"As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage.  

"Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.  

"Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. 

"They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. 

"The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered."

We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain, both. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.

-- Rumi

 

(photos from NY Times/Simone White, NY Times, O-lan Jones, Richard Kelly Jang, NY Times, eonline, goosepimplyallover, Sean Rockoff, White House)

The "Best" Romantic Comedies

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: June, 2010

An unhappy truth about living in this world is that not everyone will agree with you. It's why "Best" lists drive me nuts.

Passions run hot when we assess the value of movies. I've seen supposedly rational people battle over the merits of disparate film directors with an intensity that puts any Democratic-Republican conflict to shame. That we take it so personally - the art and entertainment that we love or hate - speaks to the heart of the "Top Ten" conundrum. All such lists are an attempt to objectify what finally must be subjective assessments. Because really, when we talk about best, we're talking about many things, and often what gets confused is the difference between most popular, most artful (i.e. aesthetically impressive, thematically substantive), and... my favorites.

In film criticism, most generally accepted arbiters (e.g. the American Film Institute) go the democratic route, polling a wide group of aficionados. But even here judgment calls shift with the sands of critical time. Up until AFI's anniversary revamp in 2007, D.W. Griffith's racist polemic Birth of a Nation was on the Top 100 list; now the substituted Griffith entry is Intolerance - a movie that, despite its historical significance and awesome production values, is in large part unwatchable (Have you sat through it recently?  Would you, again?).

It's for these reasons that when I had to assemble a "top 100" for the index of my Writing the Romantic Comedy, I took pains to avoid "Best." As Hugh Grant tells Andie MacDowell in Four Weddings, after his hilariously incoherent declaration of love ("... in the words of David Cassidy, in fact, while he was still with the Partridge family..."), I thought it over a lot, you know; I wanted to get it just right. So I ended up with "100 Noteworthy Films of the Romantic Comedy Genre and Beyond." Noteworthy, as in worthy of earning the rom-com screenwriter's familiarity, and "beyond," to acknowledge that whole thorny issue of hybrids (see last week's post).

Meanwhile, some romantic comedy titles that end up on such lists aren't even proper romantic comedies. I believe that a romantic comedy is a comedy motored by the primary question, Will these two individuals become a couple? By this standard, My Big Fat Greek Wedding doesn't cut it.

Romantic comedies are courtship comedies (even when they involve courtship between the formerly married), and we go to them to vicariously enjoy the joys and pains of falling in love; their primary focus is gender relations: a good rom-com has fun with women being women and men being men (or men being women, as in Some Like It Hot) while they're being coupled up.

The question posed by Big Fat, as my commenters E.C. and Christina astutely pointed out, is "Can two people's love survive the bride's family?" or "How can the bride keep both a husband and her family?" While some of the best laughs in Big Fat do involve courtship (e.g. Nia Vardolos's physical slapstick in the office as she spies on John Corbett), it's really a hybrid - a family comedy in rom-com drag. And because there really is no conflict between Nia and John (who's made a career out of being Mr. "I'm Okay With That"), and such conflicts are, to me, the meat and potatoes of the genre, this is not the movie that will ever truly satisfy my rom-com jones.

What My Big Fat Greek Wedding is, undeniably, is one of the most successful or popular (so-called) romantic comedies of all time. That's not necessarily the same as best.

The need for such distinctions was brought home to me by a recent online list. Writer/blogger Jennifer Crusie has compiled a definitive list of American Romantic Comedies, and for anyone interested in the genre, all of her posts on the subject make good reading. Ms. Crusie, an engaging and successful writer with a hearty following, wisely left "Best" out of the title of her list, though it seems the tacit agenda. I agree with most of her selections. But one exclusion and one inclusion helped crystallize my thoughts on this list issue: Crusie and her readers put in Desk Set, while they left out Annie Hall.

You can hate Woody Allen personally; you can wish that as filmmaker he'd packed it in twenty years ago; you may simply not respond to his brand of humor. But a definitive American Romantic Comedies list that leaves out Annie Hall is like a Greatest Rock'n'Roll Albums list that leaves out Sgt. Pepper. 

Setting aside Hall's historical Oscar sweep, it's been the singularly biggest influence on its genre for over 30 years. Without Annie Hall, you wouldn't even have beloved classics like When Harry Met Sally... (since that entire movie, from its opening white-on-black-screen credits with a tinkly jazz soundtrack to its lovers' strolls in artfully filmed Central Park to Harry's "dark" persona is clearly, um, homage); Hall's sensibility created last year's indie darling (500) Days of Summer, and is still apparent in rom-com spec scripts I presently read on a weekly basis. 

The Desk Set inclusion perplexes because while it wouldn't be the last Tracy-Hepburn movie a lover of same would take to a desert island (the abysmal Without Love gets my vote), most fans would go with Adam's Rib or the quirky Pat and Mike. Desk Set isn't generally a rom-com devotees' pick. Crusie justifies the choice as a personal favorite... and ah: there we are.

It's her prerogative, of course (and she's not invoking "Best"), while I'm admittedly as guilty as the next list-er in this regard (see my two Top 10 lists here): I've been as myopic as anyone in my own choices (fans have decried the thoughtless exclusion of any Harold and Maude mention in my rom-com book). What I'm lobbying for now, in the general critical discourse, is something more specific and useful in our list designations. 

How about "Favorite Romantic Comedies" (supply your idiosyncratic selections)? Or "Best Guilty Pleasure Rom-Coms" (I'll never be able to defend watching Pretty Woman or My Super Ex-Girlfriend, but nonetheless...)? Or...

"Most Original Romantic Comedies" (Eternal Sunshine, Groundhog Day, What Women Want, etc.)

"Best Female-Driven Rom-Coms" (Bridget Jones's Diary, While You Were Sleeping, Moonstruck, etc.)

"Best Male POV Rom-Coms" (Tootsie, 50 First Dates, 40 Year-Old Virgin, etc.)

"Best Mixed-Genre Rom-Coms" (Romancing the Stone, Prizzi's Honor, Jerry Maguire, etc.).

As for "Best," who knows? Best by what standard? Harold and Maude (the one I forgot) is on AFI's Top Ten Romantic Comedies list. I suppose that all I'm saying is: the next time you find yourself debating with someone what "the best romantic comedies" are, take a moment to define your terms. One woman's Best (say, The Holiday) may be another man's Woa, That Really Is a Chick Flick. Apparently one of the only things both sexes can agree on is that Clueless rocks. 

And so our daily romantic comedy lives on.

Black Americans in Love

A Tenth Anniversary Re-Post: January, 2009

Practically everybody in print has been finding a way to speak to the great historical occasion of our 44th President's inauguration, and I was particularly taken with Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott's take in the NY Times: How the Movies Made the President. Subtitled "Evolving Cinematic Roles Have Prepared America to Have a Black Man in Charge," their piece insightfully analyzes just how that's been accomplished, shrewdly identifying the movie archetypes that have arguably paved Obama's way, among them the Black Everyman, the Black Father, even the Black Yoda (think Morgan Freeman).

There was only one role missing from the list, through no fault of Ms. Dargis and Mr. Scott: the lover, the romantic -- call him the Black Mr. Right. And you might as well call him the Black Blank Space, for as much screen time as the guy's gotten, so far.

Where is The Great African-American Romantic Comedy? I've found myself wondering, or even the best of the near-greats?  When I went looking for a Top 10 Black Romantic Comedies, I emerged from an afternoon in cyberspace more perplexed and vexed than victorious. Obligatory disclaimer aside (not being black, I'm not the most qualified, etc.) I could only settle on a rough half dozen or so clearly top-notch American movies that feature black men and women in funny love. Which makes a rom-com lover wonder.

Maybe it's the last frontier of this territory. Are we still so not past the culture's racial divide, that the predominant white audience hasn't yet begun to accept a Black Mr. Right, let alone one who wins a Black Dream Ms.? Box office stats are disheartening in this regard, suggesting a self-fulfilling cycle: if such pics aren't pulling in a sizable audience, the studios are less likely to make them.

Ironically, movie biz history's number one best opening weekend for a romantic comedy is Will Smith's Hitch, which surely tops my incomplete Top 10. But even here, Smith's romantic foil wasn't African-American: Cuban-American Eva Mendes is the woman of color who kicks his butt, then claims it in the end. In this sense, how far have we come since the dated-in-its time Sydney Poitier hit, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Meanwhile, some of comedy's best black minds have found the romantic comedy genre challenging. Witness Chris Rock's admirably adventurous but nevertheless box office tank-erous I Think I Love My Wife. Interestingly, half of my thumbnail "top six or seven" rom-coms starring black leads come via Eddie Murphy and co. -- but two out of three (Coming to America and The Nutty Professor) are high concept comedy hybrids that wouldn't immediately register as traditional romantic comedies, leaving only Boomerang as a straight-up genre pic.

What about screen chemistry?  Halle Berry ought to be all over this turf by now (though my money's still on Gabrielle Union as the genre go-t0 girl).  You'd think Denzel's reign as the black Cary Grant would already be upon us, but having largely struck to romantic dramas (and an oddly neutered turn with Whitney Houston in The Preacher's Wife), he's yet to follow Philadelphia with his equivalent of The Philadelphia Story.  

The how-come? of it all is definitely subject for further research.  Meanwhile Denzel did make my short list of The Good Ones, with his stint opposite Indian-English Sarita Choudhury in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala.  Spike Lee's on the list, though he himself has mostly disowned the rough but remarkable She's Gotta Have It. I'd put it alongside his cousin Malcolm Lee's The Best Man (a rom-com dynasty?)

 But after that, we're in a runners-up zone, where only Love Jones and Love and Basketball would make the cut, while such snarky farces as Two Can Play This Game and Deliver Us From Eva may not stand the test of time.

 

Given its untapped possibilities, the Black Romantic Comedy looks to me like prime screenwriting real estate, here at the end of the Oughts.  If there ever was a neat high concept romantic comedy, it's "black first family moving into the White House"  -- a movie that would introduce us to two marvelous, sophisticated and still amusingly romantic newbies knocking around our nation's most famous home.  But mercifully, real life has beaten Hollywood to it first.