Come closer, children, come closer, and sit by your old granny’s knee. I’m a-gonna tell you a tale from times of yore, of what life was like back in the olden days. Oh, it was all very different back then, I can tell you! Back then, we didn’t have things like cell phones—good gracious, no! If you wanted to walk around with a phone that had a photo of you and your friends on the front, you’d have had to cut a handset off the wall and tape a Polaroid onto the back of it. What’s that you ask? “What’s a handset on a wall? What’s a Polaroid?” Oh dear, I’m using old-world language. Let’s try again. So as I was saying, back when your granny was a young child, we didn’t have cell phones, we didn’t have the Internet, and, perhaps most shockingly of all, romcoms weren’t synonymous with mind-numbing retrograde crap that made you think all women were insane and all men horrible human beings. I know! It’s like hearing about a time when people didn’t have indoor plumbing, isn’t it?
Those of us who were born before 1995 know that romcoms didn’t used to be terrible, but we know this in the way that we know we used to love Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby in a manner wholly uncomplicated by their personal lives. We accept that time did exist, even if it does feel impossible today. The low status of the romcom today makes me very sad because it is so wrong. What’s more fun to watch than romance and comedy, for heaven’s sake? The answer is “ANYTHING” if by “romance and comedy” we now mean “misogynistic bullshit starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler,” as apparently we now do, judging by 2009’s The Ugly Truth. And the result is, romcoms have been declared dead.
“RIP Romantic Comedies: Why Harry Couldn’t Meet Sally in 2013,” blared the Hollywood Reporter. “Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?” mused the Atlantic. “Death of the Romcom,” read a graph on Box Office Mojo, showing how the romcom has tanked while movies about superheroes have soared.
Do we really want to live in a world in which Captain America is considered to be more universal than romance and comedy? Nobody, goes the theory, wants to see romcoms anymore, because they are terrible. The end. But the truth is, the only reason romcoms are terrible these days is that Hollywood stopped giving a shit about women. Fin.
Romcoms were once amazing. In fact, the romcom genre encompasses some of the finest—and most feminist—films ever made, from The Philadelphia Story in 1940 to Annie Hall thirty-seven years later. There were so many great romcoms in the 1980s that I feel like there should be a collective noun for them: a delight of romcoms, a swoon of romcoms. And they weren’t just good—they were critically respected: romcoms such as Moonstruck and Working Girl won Golden Globes and Oscars. Sure, the Oscars are stupid and ultimately meaningless, but the only romcom of the past fifteen years that has been comparatively lauded was 2011’s Bridesmaids, which—uniquely for today—was written by and starred women. Which brings me to the next point.
What marks eighties romcoms out is that so many of the best ones starred women. Whereas Woody Allen made himself the protagonist of his great seventies romcoms, such as the wonderful Annie Hall and the now pretty much unwatchable Manhattan, in the eighties he made his then-partner Mia Farrow the focus, and his movies became sweeter, more varied, and more interesting for it. She is very much the star in films such as The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters, and therefore the subject of the film as opposed to just being the object within it, as Diane Keaton is in Annie Hall. Allen gave Farrow a voice in his eighties films, which is more than he’s ever done for any actress since. Cher was forty-one when she starred in Moonstruck and Nicolas Cage, her romantic opposite, was twenty-three, and no one in the film ever comments on this (fairly obvious) disparity.I Working Girl transplanted the romcom to zeitgeisty eighties Wall Street, with a vague (very, very vague) feminist spin, and has three fabulous actresses at its core: Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, and Joan Cusack. Kathleen Turner proved that women can front romantic action films when she costarred with Michael Douglas in the sweetly screwball Romancing the Stone and The Jewel of the Nile.
“I was the first! The first female lead of an action movie. I knocked up a lot of firsts,” hoots Turner. “But I don’t remember that being discussed at the time—certainly no one expressed to me that they had any concerns. You know, I’m a strong woman and I was a terrific athlete so the only thing that they were worried about was they had to stop me from doing my stunts: ‘No, Kathleen, you can’t swing across the gorge on a vine, insurance doesn’t cover that.’ Ah, come on!”II
All these films attracted not just female audiences but (gasp! shock! amazement!) men, too. The Princess Bride proved that romcoms didn’t just have cross-gender appeal; they had a cross-generation one, as well, because only people without souls don’t enjoy romance and comedy and men, women, and children alike all generally have souls.
The wonderful Tootsie showed that you could have a romcom that looked at love from both gender sides through one character. When aspiring actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) dresses up as a woman and redubs himself Dorothy Michaels, in order to get a role on a soap opera, this former selfish asshole finds himself helping to empower the women on the show against the sexist director (9 to 5’s Dabney Coleman, everyone’s favorite sexist in the eighties). So far, so early eighties comedy. But Hoffman plays the part much more tenderly than audiences have come to expect from movies featuring actors cross-dressing. In an emotional interview with the American Film Institute in 2012, a tearful Hoffman described how shocked he was when he first saw himself made up as a woman because he wasn’t beautiful. He then went home and cried and said to his wife that he had to make this movie. When she asked why, he replied: “Because I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself on-screen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character. Because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out. There’s too many interesting women I have . . . not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.”
To the film’s credit, it does show various men in the movie learning to appreciate Dorothy, despite her not being conventionally attractive, including her costar John (played by George Gaynes, better known to eighties movie fans as dippy Commandant Lassard from the Police Academy films), the father of a friend, and even, to a certain extent, Coleman. You can tell that Hoffman truly did respect both the character and the film because he managed to make a whole film about a man cross-dressing without once coming across as even slightly transphobic—a downright marvel, considering the film was made thirty-five years ago, and this is why it feels as timeless as the similarly transphobia-free Some Like It Hot. Nothing dates a film quicker than bigotry (that, and giving a cameo role to Paris Hilton). At most, the movie has a small plotline about his costar Julie thinking that Dorothy’s a lesbian, but even this is done rather sweetly: when Michael-as-Dorothy tries to kiss her, Julie reels away in shock but, instead of being shocked or even horrified, she burbles apologetically, “I’m sure I’ve got the same impulses. Obviously I did. . . .”
But the movie flakes out when it ends with Michael getting together with Julie, played by the astonishingly beautiful Jessica Lange, whereas it would have been much more interesting if Michael himself had learned to see the appeal in women who don’t necessarily look like goddesses—such as, for example, his best friend Sandy, who likes him, played by Teri Garr, but whom he dumps. Still, at least the point of the film is that women shouldn’t date assholes, and if it takes Michael dressing as a woman to become the non-asshole that Julie deserves, fair play to them all. And at least Hoffman himself took something away from the movie (even if what I took away from it was that even five-foot-five-inch schmucks with big Jewish noses only want gorgeous blond shiksas). (Incidentally, I really do love this movie.)
Then, in the final year of that decade, the greatest of all eighties romcoms was released. It looked at love from the men’s and women’s points of view in a far more credible, funny, and moving way than Tootsie: When Harry Met Sally . . .
Along with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally . . . is the most quotable film of the 1980s, the most quotable of all the decades. Nora Ephron wrote so many great lines in it that the self-restraint needed not to type them all out in one giant quote binge is actually giving me finger cramp.
“Thin. Pretty. Big tits. Your basic nightmare”—No! Stop it! “Someone is staring at you in personal growth”—Stop! You promised you wouldn’t do this!
“You know, I’m so glad I never got involved with you. I just would have ended up being some woman you had to get up out of bed and leave at three in the morning and go clean your andirons, and you don’t even have a fireplace—not that I would know this.”
Ah well. It takes a stronger woman than me to resist the pithy power of the Ephron.
But as funny and wise as When Harry Met Sally . . . is—and it is so funny and wise, and we’ll return to this—the funniest thing about it is that it was dismissed by the critics when it was released. The New York Times described it as “the sitcom version of a Woody Allen film” (critics can be real idiots) and it was nominated for only one Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay—and it lost that to Dead Poets Society.III Dead Poets Society! Well, I did tell you the Oscars were stupid.
I get the surface comparisons with Allen—the white-on-black opening credits, the adoring shots of New York City, the privileged uptown world, the hat-wearing women—but When Harry Met Sally . . . is nothing like a Woody Allen movie, even though plenty of critics still beg to differ on that point (writer Mark Harris memorably described it as “not Annie Hall but a movie about people who have seen Annie Hall”).
Like the best of Ephron’s writing—her journalism, Heartburn, her essays—When Harry Met Sally . . . has the precision of a personal story but is actually interested in drawing out universal truths. Allen, by contrast, is only ever interested in his stories and would never dream of suggesting that they somehow say something about anybody but him, and sometimes that’s great and sometimes it’s less so. When people talk today about the message of When Harry Met Sally . . . , they think of Harry’s claim that “men and women can’t be friends,” and how the movie seems to confirm that. But Ephron said she didn’t believe that at all. Instead, she wrote:
What When Harry Met Sally . . . is really about is how different men and women are. The truth is that men don’t want to be friends with women. Men know they don’t understand women, and they don’t much care. They want women as lovers, as wives, as mothers, but they’re not really interested in them as friends. They have friends. Men are their friends. And they talk to their male friends about sport, and I have no idea what else. Women, on the other hand, are dying to be friends with men. Women know they don’t understand men, and it bothers them: they think that if only they could be friends with them, they would understand them and, what’s more (and this is their gravest mistake), it would help.
Gender generalizations are, as a generalization, abhorrent, but it takes a truly po-faced pedant not to delight in this one. Imagine a romcom today being built on this kind of subtle wisdom. And as abhorrent as gender generalizations are, I think only a man could ever claim that When Harry Met Sally . . . feels like an Allen movie. Sally and her female friends are so different from the kinds of women you find in Allen’s movies they may as well be aliens, because the women in When Harry Met Sally . . . were written by someone who didn’t just like women, but understood them.
Unusually for a romcom—or any movie, for that matter—When Harry Met Sally . . . is equally interested in the women in the film as it is in the men, and the reason for this is that Ephron was writing about real people. Harry was based on Rob Reiner, the film’s director, and Sally was based on Ephron herself: “I realized that I had found a wonderful character in Rob Reiner. Rob is a very strange person. He is extremely funny, but he is also extremely depressed . . . but he wasn’t at all depressed about being depressed; in fact, he loved his depression,” Ephron wrote. “And because Harry was bleak and depressed, it followed absolutely that Sally would be cheerful and chirpy and relentlessly, pointlessly, unrealistically, idiotically optimistic. Which is, it turns out, very much like me.”
Incidentally, the first great female character Allen ever wrote was also based on a real person—Annie Hall, which was a straight-up homage to his ex-girlfriend Diane Keaton (real name: Diane Hall). The next was Hannah in Hannah and Her Sisters, which was clearly and heavily based on Mia Farrow. Anyone who thinks that an author is cheating if they use real life in their fiction is a fool. Real life is often what gives fiction its truth, and good fiction in turn helps us understand real life. Ephron knew better than anyone that real life is the stuff great fiction is made of: “Everything is copy,” was her mother’s mantra and this attitude turned her into a legend when she turned her brutal divorce from Carl Bernstein into one of the funniest novels ever written, Heartburn. So it seems like the best way to honor her memory would be to write a little bit about the personal relationship I have to this movie.
I first saw When Harry Met Sally . . . when I was a teenager, almost a decade after it came out. I must have watched it in London, where we moved to from New York in 1989, in our living room on our dying VHS, and the character I related to immediately wasn’t Sally, the female lead who wants to be a writer, but Harry, the miserable and proud-of-his-misery Jew. Harry was the first character I’d ever seen in a film who was Jewish the way I was Jewish: if someone was asked what religion they thought Harry and I are, they’d probably say “Jewish,” but it wouldn’t be the first personality attribute you’d list about either of us (that would be “self-absorbed”). This was Jewishness the way I knew Jewishness—being Jewish—and not the self-conscious outsider and faintly minstrel Jewyness that Woody Allen portrayed. Also, like Harry, I was miserable, in a way that only an extremely privileged, middle-class teenage girl from a very nice family can be miserable. And like Harry, I made the mistake of thinking that made me deep.
It wasn’t—and it still isn’t—easy being a female movie fan. Movies tend to be written and directed by men, which means that the female characters are generally insane or boring. I began to notice this only when I moved on from eighties teen films, where I had Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Winona Ryder, and Jennifer Jason Leigh for companionship, to nineties movies for grown-ups, where my options felt hugely reduced. So when I was a teenager and I wondered who would play me in the biopic of my life (I told you I was self-obsessed), I settled on Bill Murray. Only he had the qualities of humor, cynicism, and lovableness that I was sure would be appreciated in me one day. Until I saw When Harry Met Sally . . . , that is, and then I thought Billy Crystal might just make the cut. After all, he was Jewish. And miserable. And deep.
But as I grew older, I began to see a different strength in the movie, one I had entirely missed when I was younger because, like Harry, I was too self-obsessed: I began to see Sally. And this is when my life began to change thanks to When Harry Met Sally. (I’m going to skip the ellipses hereon: I get the point of them in the title but they’re annoying to type and even more annoying to read, and I don’t think Ephron would mind. She never even liked the title.)
So as I was saying, it’s not always easy to be a female movie fan, especially a female fan of comedies. Men are generally the protagonists of comedies, because comedies tend to be written by men, so it’s easy to grow up resenting your gender, a little. Why do you have to be a woman? Women are boring. Women are there just to laugh at the men’s jokes, or be the disapproving shrew. Women don’t get the good lines. Women are Margaret Dumont and men are the Marx Brothers, and I like Margaret Dumont (especially when she was wearing a swimming costume—her swimming costumes in the Marx Brothers films were amazing), but I prefer clowning to making moues of disapproval at Groucho. Worse, when you grow up watching men play leads in films, as I increasingly did, you get used to wanting everything to work out well for men, because you’ve been trained to be on their side. I spent years staying in relationships with men who were not worth my body, let alone my time, because I worried that if I broke up with them they’d be sad like Lloyd Dobler was in Say Anything (it turned out, they weren’t, because Lloyd Dobler is fictional) (and also, 90 percent of the guys I went out with when I was young were idiots).
Until, that is, When Harry Met Sally. It’s written by a very funny woman and therefore features many funny women. Sally is not just Harry’s straight sidekick—the Sigourney Weaver to Dr. Venkman, or the Buttercup to his Westley. Sally doesn’t even have to perform any of the three functions women are usually lumbered with in romcoms: pine desperately for the man, make the man grow up by being a nagging shrew, or be liberated from her frigid bitchiness by the power of his amazing penis. In fact, for the first half of the film it’s Harry who’s heartbroken after his ex-wife left him for Ira the accountant, making him the vulnerable, humiliated, needy one. Sally supports him—helping him lay carpet, singing songs from Oklahoma! with him—because she is seemingly over her ex-boyfriend Joe (“ ‘I am over him,’ Sally says, when she isn’t over him at all; I have uttered that line far too many times in my life, and far too many times in my life I have believed it was true,” Ephron wrote).
Here, I realized, was an adult female character who wanted love, but wasn’t pathetic, and was loved, but also human. She wasn’t just Harry’s romantic quarry—she was her own person. I was thrilled when I read that Ephron based Sally on herself because that meant Sally must be Jewish. I’m not some cinematic Zionist who can enjoy her characters only if they’re kosher, but this proved that the film doesn’t follow that insufferable template of having a goyish woman fall for a Jewish man because of his allegedly adorable Jewish qualities, and the Jewish man falls for her in turn because she is not (mazel tov, sir!) a Jewish woman. Woody Allen populated the cliché and Judd Apatow has since flogged it to death (while Larry David has waved the flag for it on TV). In Sally, Ephron coined that rare-to-the-point-of-nonexistent film character: a desirable Jewish woman. A Jewish woman. Sally also pointed out to me that being miserable didn’t mean I was deep. It meant that I was just ruining my own life.
Sally’s relationship with her girlfriends, especially Marie (Carrie Fisher), is one of my favorite things about the movie. Her friends are portrayed as a source of support but also have lives of their own (an extreme rarity in a movie, in which friends usually exist merely to be friends with the protagonist). This makes their friendship feel utterly real. “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right,” Marie chants in self-recrimination whenever Sally tells her, for the ten thousandth time, that Marie’s married lover will never leave his wife for her.
Like Sally and Marie, I lived in New York City in my early thirties and, like them, I dated some absolute shockers whom I should have been smart enough to avoid. It turned out, much to my surprise, that even those of us who grow up hoping to be as wise and cynical as Dr. Venkman make the same grim, boring, sad mistakes as so many other women, and for exactly the same reasons: we’re hopeful, we’re suckers, we’re lonely. Ephron knew that, but didn’t mock women for it, or depict them as pathetic for wanting companionship; rather, she regarded them with fond affection, and that made me do the same about myself, eventually. Bad romcoms stigmatize and deride feelings of heartbreak and loneliness, and make me feel like I’m being a shameful cliché for desiring love, like some subnormal character in a Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl movie. Good romcoms, like When Harry Met Sally, reassure me that this is what it’s like to be a human being. Every time my best friend Carol made these mistakes we’d call each other for reassurance, just as Sally and Marie do, and the other one would say, “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.” And eventually, the point would sink in: don’t beat yourself up about this, but get yourself together and move on.
Writing good romcoms is hard. You can’t fake them because most people recognize when something is funny and most people have been in love, whereas no one is a superhero so you can do whatever you want there. I was amazed when I read in an essay that Ephron “struggled” with the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally and that “it was really hard” (“I was just doing it for the money,” she cheerfully admits), because it reads as smoothly and effortlessly as a bunch of friends talking.
It makes me laugh when I hear male screenwriters today insist they don’t write female characters because, well, how can they possibly understand women, what with them just being dumb lugs? In an interview with the Guardian, Evan Goldberg, writer of the bro-heavy comedies Superbad and This Is the End, offered what he thought was a reasonable explanation for why there are so few female roles in his movies: “I’m a guy! I’m not as good at writing about women. Kristen Wiig [who wrote Bridesmaids] is way better. I don’t fully understand my wife’s emotions—and I’m supposed to write an excellent female character and unravel the secret of women?”
And he learned this mentality from his mentor, Judd Apatow, who that same year said the following to the New Yorker: “The reality is, I’m a dude and I understand the dude thing, so I lean men just the way Spike Lee leans African-American.” Imagine how different movies would be if more men realized that women are humans and not an entirely different species. Because insisting you can’t write dialogue for the opposite gender is not being gender-sensitive, it’s being lazy.
So what happened after Harry and Sally’s ellipses? Well, there was an absolute glut of romcoms in the nineties, starting with the mighty behemoth of Pretty Woman, the timeless and romantic tale of what happens when a rich asshole picks up a hooker in Los Angeles for a blow job. Some nineties romcoms were a complete delight (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Groundhog Day, The Wedding Singer), but even Ephron’s romcoms had diminishing returns, going from the magic of When Harry Met Sally to the sweetness of Sleepless in Seattle to the mehness of You’ve Got Mail. By the late nineties and early noughties, the trend had switched to raunch with male leads, kick-started by There’s Something About Mary. Hollywood made more romcoms with male leads (Along Came Polly, Garden State), which were increasingly tired and formulaic and were written solely from a male perspective.
“Audiences aren’t tired of romance, they’re tiring of formulas,” one director told the Hollywood Reporter, a claim that would make a lot more sense if Hollywood weren’t subsisting on The Avengers 7 and Batman 22. And without wishing to state the obvious, maybe if audiences really are tired of formulaic movies, Hollywood could make romcoms that are, you know, less formulaic. Just a thought, guys!
Even if no one had ever before made a romcom, audiences still wouldn’t want to see awful junk like He’s Just Not That Into You, Love Actually, or Valentine’s Day, because they’re terrible. And people definitely don’t want to see them now because they know that romcoms can be good. If When Harry Met Sally were released today, people would definitely want to see it. But it probably wouldn’t get released today because movies like that struggle to get made now.
“Women’s films, like weepies and romcoms, don’t get commissioned anymore because they don’t work overseas. There’s a different kind of funny today—less wit. Wit and nuance doesn’t travel,” says producer Lynda Obst, who worked in the romcom market for years before having to move on to sci-fi due to what she describes as “lack of windows for romcom.” “Funny is an Asian man who’s going to blow up your car. Comedies take place in the same style as action movies and they go from set piece to set piece—you don’t see that in Cameron Crowe or Nora Ephron’s films. You see writing and dialogue. Now it’s about dialogue moving you to another set piece where something big will happen. Comedy writers are taught to write set pieces,” she says.
“There is also a creeping sexualization of women in recent romcoms, particularly in those starring Jennifer Aniston,” says film writer Melissa Silverstein, and she’s right. It’s amazing to see how “frumpy” (that is, normal) Sally looks, with her shaggy hair and baggy clothes, compared to the glossy female stars of today’s romcoms.
Christopher Orr in the Atlantic argued that the reason romcoms struggle today is that, well, love is too easy now: “Among the most fundamental obligations of romantic comedy is that there must be an obstacle to nuptial bliss for the budding couple to overcome. And, put simply, such obstacles are getting harder and harder to come by. They used to lie thick on the ground: parental disapproval, difference in social class, a promise made to another. But society has spent decades busily uprooting any impediment to the marriage of true minds. Love is increasingly presumed—perhaps in Hollywood most of all—to transcend class, profession, faith, age, race, gender, and (on occasion) marital status.”
Well, if Mr. Orr thinks love is easy these days, I’ll have what he’s having. Love is a freaking nightmare today, as it always was and always will be, and that’s because human beings are ridiculous. There was no real impediment to Harry and Sally’s love—they’re the same age, often single at the same time, and they like each other—but it took them twelve years and three months to get together, because that’s what people are like. Ephron knew that, and she was smart enough also to know that love wasn’t about set pieces, or shticks, meet cutes, or clichéd impediments—it’s about people. Jane Austen knew that, too, and even though so many of the relationships in her books seem to be rooted in issues about money (Darcy is richer than Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, Edward is richer than Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, and so on), the only real impediment to them is the characters themselves: Darcy is too proud, Elizabeth is too prejudiced; Edward is too loyal to his commitments, Elinor is too self-effacing; Anne Elliot in Persuasion was too easily persuaded by bad advice, and Captain Wentworth’s pride was hurt; Emma in her eponymous novel is too immature to see what is in front of her face. This is why her novels have lasted, and it’s why When Harry Met Sally has lasted: because stories that are about human emotions don’t date. But it’s hard to translate witty dialogue about complicated human emotions for overseas sales, I guess, and car explosions are a lot easier to write anyway.
Another factor is the lack of women working today behind the camera on movies. Women have been running studios in Hollywood since 1980, when Sherry Lansing became the president of 20th Century Fox, and Cheryl Boone Isaacs is currently president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group behind the Oscars. But as the New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis notes: “trickle-down equality doesn’t work in Hollywood, even when women are calling the shots and making the hires.”
In 2013 women constituted just 10 percent of the writers working on the 250 top-grossing films. If the remaining 90 percent of working screenwriters are too lazy to write a movie from a woman’s perspective, then the result is what we see now: an absolute dearth of movies written about women and for women. Amy Pascal, Sony’s then cochairman, said, “You’re talking about a dozen or so then female-driven comedies that got made over a dozen years, a period when hundreds of male-driven comedies got made. And every one of those female-driven comedies was written or directed or produced by a woman. It’s a numbers game—it’s about there being enough women writers and enough women with the power to get movies made.”
Not that studios especially want these female-driven movies anyway: they want franchises, and romcoms and female comedies aren’t seen as blockbuster material. “Studio executives think these movies’ success is a one-off every time,” Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, said. “They’ll say, ‘One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack was in it,’ or ‘We hadn’t had a comedy for older women in forever.’ ” According to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood, “Whenever a movie for women is successful, studios credit it to a million factors, and none of those factors is to do with women.”
Romcoms aren’t heart surgery, but they—at their best—explore and explain the human heart, and that’s why great ones are so great and terrible ones are so very, very terrible. This is also why it feels like such a shame that studios simply think they’re not worth their time anymore. To be fair, writers as wise and funny and fair as Ephron—and Austen, for that matter—don’t come along every day. But things have reached a pretty pass when film trade publications admit that When Harry Met Sally wouldn’t even get made anymore. There are many smart and funny women screenwriters around these days: Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling, Lake Bell, Tina Fey, Jennifer Westfeldt, Katie Dippold, to name just half a dozen off the top of my head. The question is whether the men who still run movie studios have the courage to let them do their thing, without insisting on adding in what they imagine are male-audience-pleasing details (gross-out scenes, raunch, cutesifying the female lead, a schlubby male lead who is so clearly unworthy of the female counterpart).
Anyway, I grew up and the more I grew the more I became a mix of Harry (Jewish) and Sally (journalist, dependent on my friends, wanting love) and, like them, I eventually found the right person for me, although, also like them, I took my sweet time about it, and I sure didn’t make it easy for myself along the way. Like Harry, I waited for someone who made me laugh, and like Sally, I waited for someone who wanted me to make them laugh. But the person in this movie whom I learned the most from was Ephron, because she taught me everything I know about, not just men and women, but love and marriage and friendship and funniness and good writing. And I know that’s a lot to ask for from a movie but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for occasionally. I’m right, I’m right, you know I’m right.
I. Possibly because everyone was too distracted by Cher and Cage’s awesomely hammy acting and even more awesomely hammy lines, for example,“I ain’t no monument to justice!” “A WOLF WITHOUT A FOOT!” Seriously, go watch this movie, it’s just the business.
II. Can we please have a moment of respectful silence for the hot tamale of awesomeness that is Kathleen Turner?
III. Other screenplays that lost that year to Dead freaking Poets Society: Do the Right Thing, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The Oscars were completely hilarious that year.