Living the Romantic Comedy

Begin Again

That's me in my home office with Tabitha, one of our family of dogs. If you were here, she'd be tail-wagging and wiggling a welcome.

I've been off this blog for about a year, and was neglecting it for a few before that - largely because Facebook and Twitter took over my social media attention, and because the romantic comedy genre itself was in the doldrums. But as of this week, I may be leaving Facebook, for reasons that should be clear to anyone paying attention, while the romantic comedy - in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians and 80 million Netflix subscribers embracing a new crop of funny love stories like To All the Boys I've Loved Before - is back in force.

I like being where I can share interesting stuff and just sound off about whatever, while engaging friends and strangers in conversation about it. It does say "other topics apropos" above, under Living the Romantic Comedy, so I'll be here appreciating the world and analyzing the likes of anything from The Kissing Booth to Karl Ove Knausgaard and beyond.

Happy to have you aboard, first time visitors and returning readers alike. I'm currently working on the revised and expanded 20th Anniversary edition of Writing the Romantic Comedy, which Harper/Collins will publish in early 2020, so as I wrestle with putting the genre's last 20 years in perspective, all input welcomed! Please do comment, and I promise to reply. 

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) 

Kurt Vonnegut's Rules of Writing... for Screenwriters

[Today is Kurt's birthday and Veteran's Day, so this photo of Vonnegut in the Army seems apropos. Also seems a good time to reprint this earlier post.]

Tucked into the grab-bag collection of loose ends that is Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, you will find eight rules for writing a short story. Shortly after Vonnegut's passing, I passed these out to a classroom full of screenwriters, because it seemed to me that the rules applied to the crafting of screenplays as well. Herewith, Mr. V's rules, and a little commentary to make clear their connections to movie work, using quotes from movie folk to show that Great Minds Think Alike (GMTA).

1.  Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

Oh, but that more writers observed this golden rule! We-the-readers always know when we are bored. Just take note of how the lead sentence of a given screenplay can instantly stop you from reading further, unless it somehow grabs your attention with a "you need to know this!" subtext. What does not waste a stranger's time is something that can take writers years of learning on the job to master, but the point is that simply thinking about this issue -- i.e. will this hold someone else's attention? -- is a worthy pursuit, indeed. GMTA: I'm reminded of screenwriter Callie Khouri's immortal quote, "If you have information on the screen that doesn't move the story forward, you are taking moments away from people's lives."

2.  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

Save the cat or pet the dog: screenwriters have a protagonist perform a simple act that embodies a positive value, so that the audience can identify with him or her. They also apply the principle of "unearned suffering": If a little girl loves her dolly, and a bully snatches it, don't you want to see the little girl get her dolly back? This holds especially true for characters who are seemingly unsympathetic. As (GMTA) screenwriter Richard LaGravenese said: "All destructive people have an inner side to them, and the more three-dimentional your characters are on screen the more compassion you can open up in an audience... To me, that involves the audience more, it stimulates them and asks more of them."

3.  Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Time and time again, I've addressed the rewrite of a given scene, my own or a client's, with this same simple question: What does each character want? Failing to define this is nine times out of ten what leads to fuzzy and unfocused writing. Put two characters in a scene with unclear actions to achieve and you risk losing your audience. If the characters don't care about getting something while they're in it, why should we? Billy Wilder's maxim (GMTA) "Develop a clean line of action for your leading character" speaks to this; "I want to get a glass of water" suggests one clean and powerful line of action.

4.  Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

Because what else is it doing there, describing scenery? Fine, if the scenery is speaking to character ("His furniture was as cheap as he was") or moving the story along ("The woods are quiet tonight -- too quiet!").  Otherwise? Zzzzzzz... A good story, lyrical though it may be, functions like a shark: it must keep swimming forward to keep breathing. GMTA: Here's producer Lindsay Doran on the subject -- "Scheherezade was a woman who had to make her stories so interesting she didn't get killed that night.  That's exactly how I feel.  We all have to keep our stories so interesting that... if the reel suddenly broke, everybody would rather die than leave that theater and not be able to find out what happened next."

5.  Start as close to the end as possible.

Screenwriter's credo: Come in late and leave early. The awful truth about most screenwriters' exposition is that it's for them -- for them to know. The audience doesn't need all that. In the opening scene of The Godfather, the Godfather is the Godfather. Period. And the movie's story begins when his successor-to-be enters the story: Michael Corleone comes home. Everything we need to know about everyone in the story gets dealt out to us, economically, as events irrevocably move towards the crisis that will cause the passing of the torch from father to son. GMTA: Two rules from Mr. Wilder again -- "Grab 'em by the throat and never let 'em go" and "Know where you're going."

6.  Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

I love this rule. It's so cruel-but-true. "What's the worst thing that could happen?" is such a time-honored screenwriters' maxim that it even became the title of a bad movie. We don't want to see characters have a sort-of blah day, we want to see the most horrible day of their lives. As Vonnegut shrewdly points out, calamity and crisis is the fastest, most powerful route to revealing character. GMTA: Screenwriter Audrey Wells told my romantic comedy class, "Steep your characters in pain--make them miserable.  Then after they've really suffered, make them happy."

7.  Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Re: the movies, this is obvious, yet many a screenplay has fallen on this sword: trying to please "them." There is no Them. Half the time They -- e.g. the studios, who sometimes can't see a hit when it smacks them in the face (see: everyone who turned down Star Wars) -- don't even know what Them (i.e. that ever-elusive fickle "mainstream audience") wants to see. Vonnegut told NPR that he wrote to please his late sister Allie. You may write to please yourself or any other one person, but it's this choice -- your own personal "ideal audience" -- that will focus your work and cohere its voice, not trying to be all things to all people. GMTA: As Paramount's Kathie Fong Yoneda noted in an on-line interview, "Frequently, the writer who tries to add 'something for everyone' ends up pleasing no one."

8.  Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This last one is tricky to translate, in that often suspense is exactly what a screenwriter is (and should be) after. I think what Mr. Vonnegut is speaking to is the issue of clarity. Many pre-pro screenwriters waste a reader's time by being coy and cagey with the simple and necessary facts of who, where, when, what and why. There's a difference between withholding -- which too often promotes confusion -- and dealing it out slowly. The audience needs to be oriented in time and space, and quickly involved in a character's issues to stay with a story. GMTA: He wasn't a screenwriter, but he was an idol of Kurt's who surely had the definitive take on this. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." -- Mark Twain

(All typewriter photos from Laineys Repertoire)

Talk to Me

Due to confusion at the front desk, when they’re supposed to be connecting me to the management to clear up the problem with the restaurant bill, they connect me instead with my own hotel room, and inexplicably, a woman answers. I’m so confused by this that in the moment, I ask for myself by name. “Just a second,” she says. Then she puts me on the phone.

“Hello?”

And so there I am. Immediately I don’t trust myself. It’s not that I suspect this me is an imposter. On the contrary, it’s irrefutably myself on the other end of the line. But while I’d have expected to feel relief, anticipating welcome acceptance from the one person who truly understands me, what I’m feeling is the opposite. I’m fully prepared to disbelieve anything that comes out of my mouth.

So, okay: interesting. My first impression of myself is that I’m a liar. Except that’s not it – it’s that I’m fully aware in a way I’ve never been before that the me who’s answering a phone, who’s prepared to engage with an unknown human being, is not going to be the authentic me. There’s a cloud of consciousness made up of bits and pieces of my myriad selves hovering there.

The true me cannot possibly emerge from this matrix of half-me’s, pretend me’s, me’s that used to be, me’s that want to be other me’s, the me’s my mother has implanted in me, the me’s I’ve artfully constructed to disguise my childhood me’s, the various me’s that are always assembled, like an endless row of shirts upon the hangers in an infinite closet, prepared for interaction with the world.

The realization that there are so many choices for me to make is so mortifying that my next impulse is to get off the phone right quick. But as if paralyzed (all of this transpiring in the smallest portion of a second), I hang there in the interstitial crevice of the yet unanswered greeting: “Hello?”

I can sense that the other me is calculating, is wary, on the defense. That me is incapable of simply meeting this moment with the many masks discarded. I know that no matter who I might be – wife, brother, best friend, idol, my grandfather’s ghost – the me who’s wondering who’s calling won’t be capable of expressing the truth of who I am.

There’s something so sad about this, more absurd than tragic but nonetheless painful, that if only I could reach through the virtual telephone line and grasp myself by the shoulder, I would give me a shake as if to say give it up, let it go – I’d like to think that if I did know it was me I was talking to, I could be honest.

But the specter of the days, months, years of energy already expended in this useless occupation, the creation of an acceptable social self is so overwhelming just now that I, the me who’s yet to answer, can’t bring myself to even invite the conversation.

If truth be told, I can’t be entirely sure that I’m not still on that phone, listening with a curiosity that transcends terror to the silence on the line.