It's that time of the year, so Billy and Tess, absurdly overdue for another podcast, gift each other with some favorite rom-com moments, make romantic comedy resolutions, and wax poetic about where we are and where we'd like to be.
Here is the link to Episode 9 (A Fine Romance). Warning: contains movie quotes, meet cutes, and swearing.
Though Bertolucci is most famous for Last Tango, it was The Conformist that changed my cinematic life when I saw its American premiere at the NY Film Festival in 1970. When the lights came up, one faction in the audience was booing, because the leftist Italian filmmaker had supposedly sold out to "Nixon-Paramount," while on my side of the aisle we were on our feet cheering.
If you've never seen The Conformist or want to revisit it, here's a montage of some of the most memorable moments from this masterpiece, created by Bertolucci in collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro; music by George Delerue, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Domonique Sanda, and Stefania Sandrelli.
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.
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)
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.
[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.
For Mature Audiences Only (NSFW)
I was getting ready to go to work the other morning when I glanced out my home office window and beheld two raccoons having sex on the roof next door.
Though I've never been an advocate for animal pornography, after a few minutes of slack-jawed observation, I went for my camera - not because I wanted to get a better look, but because I wanted my absent wife to see this - not because she has any interest in raccoon sex, per say, but because a simple description wouldn't really do justice to such a scene.
It's not a common occurrence on our block in Venice Beach at 7 in the morning. And that's the thing, I guess: Nothing could be more common in the world at large, but the context, the public exhibitionism of it all, gave the experience an extra level of interest. There was also an aspect of character-driven intrigue: the male raccoon was being a brute about it (this not exactly a shocking development, either), and the female apparently had other things she'd rather be doing, such as getting off the roof.
They were still going at it when I left, now a few minutes late for work. And the images stayed with me as I read a spec screenplay at the studio. Which occasioned my establishing a new standard for such reads.
I'd often been at a loss when asked what compels me to give a "Consider" to a screenplay. Now I can answer this, by posing a crucial question in response: Is the script more interesting than the sight of two raccoons humping?
You've started to read a screenplay. Someone comes to the door of the room and tells you, "Hey - there's two raccoons humping outside my window." Do you immediately put down the draft and go to the window? Or do you say, "Wow, I'll be right there," and keep reading to the end of the scene you're reading, first?
It's really that simple. I will call this the TRH (Two Raccoons Humping) Factor, and I plan to lobby for having the studio add a box for this on coverage cover sheets, in addition to "Consider," "Consider Concept Only," and "Pass." In the box next to "TRH Factor," readers will rate the script with a number from 1 to 10, i.e. a low number indicating that the raccoons would win out fairly easily, and a high number indicating that the script will be more likely to sustain an audience's interest.
I share this with you as the preamble to a blog post of more substantive interest, re: the current Oscar contender Amour, and the issue of story stakes. I'll be posting that within the next 48 hours, but in the meantime, feel free to contemplate this:
Well, there's science and there's science. There's the science that's way beyond what your average bear can wrap his mind around (Higgs-Boson what now?), and then there's the "what goes up must come down" kind of stuff, where science affirms something that common sense already knows.
In the latter category comes this recent article in the Huffington Post, addressing a question that we all thought was capably handled by Nora Ephron some years ago: "Platonic Friendships: Men & Women Can't Be Just Friends, Research Suggests." Some of the scientific conclusions sounded to me a bit like something out of the Onion, but hey, not laughing, because: science.
Here's my favorite part of what the scientific researchers reported, after having done their study:
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends.
To which, when you stop giggling, you might only say: No! Really? And all I can really say in my gender's defence is, we were made this way. But the folks at HuffPost Live, in their infinite wisdom, asked me to say more. A few days ago I participated in a panel discussion on this topic of opposite-sex friendships, prompted by the article. And because I'm a sharing sort of guy, I'm providing you with the link of the live-streamed show we did, a near half an hour of scintillating conversation.
It's the second time I've done one of these HuffPost things, and they're pretty neat; you meet interesting people, and host Alicia Menendez is a smart, savvy cookie. Here's the link to a show I did with a different group about the ominous effects of romantic comedy movies and TV on relationships in real life, in case you missed it. A less science-based discussion, but no less lively.
Please enjoy it all at your leisure, while I go outside to enjoy the unseasonable Californian weather, having heard - scientists theorize, at least - that the sky out there is blue.
Just want to give a brief shout-out to the Charles Randolph and Zwick-Herskovitz scripted Love and Other Drugs, an endearing mess of a movie - actually three different movies trying to be one - that sucks on some levels but is kind of brilliant on a few.
Mainly what's impressive to me as a rom-com maven is its handling of the protagonist's erotic and romantic relationship. Finally, a movie where the heroine doesn't keep a sheet glued to her clavicle after (or during) a bout of hot sex - kudos to a brave Anne Hathaway - where the heroine decidedly does not have marriage (or even a sustained relationship) as her tacit goal, where the hero actually doesn't turn down that meaningless sexual menage while still pining for his errant beloved.
In other words, a relationship in a romantic comedy that bears some relationship to life as we actually live it.
Love's less stellar aspects aside (the disease-of-the-month mawkishness, the fat-horny-roommate farcical shtick), it also takes on the pharmaceutical industry in a manner that's startling for a mainstream Hollywood product. The movie is a room-splitter; you'll either applaud or groan at its sending up and tweaking that hoariest of rom-com bedroom clichês - the shot of the heroine's hand clenching a bedsheet in the height of passion - by actually making it character-driven (Hathaway's hand trembles because she's got Parkinson's).
Nonetheless, for its attempt to push a tired and frayed envelope open, Love and Other Drugs will definitely earn a Special Achievement Award in the upcoming 2010 Astas. If you're a fan of the genre, you may want to catch it before it disappears in the end-of-the-year Big Serious Oscar Movie Contenders glut.
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