Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (13 page)

‘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 wasn’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 pap 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. Whereas if
When Harry Met Sally
was released today, people would 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 any more because they don’t work overseas. There’s a different kind of funny today – less wit. Wit and nuance doesn’t t
ravel,’ 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 rom-com’. ‘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 sexualisation 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’ (i.e., 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 because, 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 schticks, 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 and spoilt 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 complicated human emotions for overseas sales, I guess, and car explosions are a lot easier to write anyway.

As to whether it’s simply too hard in this modern world to translate real modern life into romcoms, it would help if romcoms weren’t so scared of real modern women. I can’t remember the last time I saw a romcom where a woman’s job wasn’t seen as some kind of freaky extension of her personality. Sally has a job, but unlike, say, Sandra Bullock in
The Proposal
, this doesn’t mean she’s a ball-breaking bitch, nor is it the reason she’s still single in her thirties. And unlike, say, Kristen Wiig in
Bridesmaids
, who in that film plays a failed pastry chef, or Wendy in the appalling
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, who plays the manager of a baby clothing store, Sally doesn’t have an unthreatening ‘feminine’ job: she’s a journalist, and she’s apparently just as successful as Harry, who works as a political consultant. In fact, Sally has exactly the same job, a journalist for
New York
magazine, as Jess, Harry’s male best friend, played by Bruno Kirby. There is no distinction in this movie between Jobs for the Boys and Jobs for the Little Ladies. Ephron understood, as bafflingly few filmmakers do nowadays, that a woman’s job doesn’t have to define her or diminish her – it’s just something she does. Like a man does. Fancy that!

The depiction of women with high-powered jobs wasn’t always perfect in the eighties – Sigourney Weaver’s bitch boss character in
Working Girl
probably won’t go down as a feminist classic – but it was a lot better than it is now, and no one seems to talk about this. Women in 1980s romcoms didn’t just work, they were often even more successful than their male co-stars. Kathleen Turner’s character in
Romancing the Stone
, Joan Wilder, is far more successful and famous than Michael Douglas’s character, Jack Colton, and this ultimately saves their lives when potential killers recognise her and profess themselves to be fans: ‘Ha ha! Poor Michael doesn’t get much credit in that movie, does he,’ cackles Turner delightedly.

Cher in
Moonstruck
plays an accountant while Nicolas Cage is a baker. Holly Hunter in
Broadcast News
is more senior to both Albert Brooks and William Hurt, and they both fall for her, and even though she ends up with neither of them, she doesn’t end up alone. In
Raising Arizona
, Holly Hunter (again) is so much more successful than her doting husband (Nicolas Cage, again) that she is the cop who takes his mugshot every time he’s arrested. In
Baby Boom
Diane Keaton is forced to give up her high-powered job on Wall Street when she inherits a baby because the men in her office can’t handle it, including her boyfriend, played by Harold Ramis (for shame, Egon). So she then moves to the countryside, becomes a successful baby food magnate and, once again, is much more successful than her vet boyfriend (Sam Shepard). And nowhere – nowhere – is this seen as an issue.

Thanks to the eighties movies I grew up watching, this is how I imagined as a kid my adult life would be: every day I’d walk into a steel and glass office building in a skirt suit, pantyhose, high heels and a camel-coloured coat, fresh from a 7 a.m. salon appointment, clutching a briefcase in one hand and sipping my black coffee in the other, while two men who looked like catalogue models in Brooks Brothers suits would walk alongside me, talking urgently about how we had to close the Del Monte deal that day. I’d then go to my corner office, handing my coat to my secretary Tom on my way in (Tom would then bring in a cappuccino, on my orders), and I’d go through my various urgent messages before meeting my silver-haired boss, Chesterton, for lunch at a new French place ‘downtown’ with white tablecloths and white wine. The afternoon would be taken up with meetings, which I would run, of course, and I’d close the Del Monte deal and everyone would cheer for me. Then in the evening, my camel coat and I would meet my not-quite-as-high-powered boyfriend for dinner at a darling Italian place ‘uptown’, but we’d have to stay at mine as my personal trainer was coming over the next morning at 6 a.m. I couldn’t WAIT to be a grown-up.

That world isn’t really shown in movies today, partly because the corporate world isn’t quite as aspirational as it was in the eighties, but also because the role of women in movies has changed. Now, if a woman is more successful than a man in a movie, it means she’s a bitch and will have to be broken down, as in
The Proposal
,
The Ugly Truth
or
The Devil Wears Chauvinistic Stereotypes
.
^fn4
What makes this mentality even more ridiculous is that women are now the primary money-earners in America. ‘To make a woman adorable you have to defeat her at the beginning. It’s a conscious thing I do – abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry, fifteen minutes into the movie,’ one successful female screenwriter told the
New Yorker
.

‘This is the backlash. The backlash comes when women make strides. The studio convention now is that movies work better when the women characters have unthreatening jobs. They say audiences think it’s cuter,’ says Obst. But audiences, of course, aren’t even given the option. It’s the studios and filmmakers who decide.

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 per cent of the writers working on the 250 top grossing films. If the remaining 90 per cent 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 co-chairman, 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 any more. 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 any more.

Anyway, I grew up and the more I grew the more I became a mix of Harry (Jew-ish) 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 who 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.

TOP FIVE RICK MORANIS MOMENTS

Ahhh, sweet Rick Moranis. He was the uber-nerd in the eighties and then, suddenly, he was nowhere. This bothered me for years, so finally I decided to ask the man himself: ‘Hey Rick! What the hell happened?!’

And this is what he said: ‘I took a break because I was a single parent
^fn5
and it got too hard, working and looking after my kids,’ he says. ‘The break got longer and longer and I realised I didn’t miss what I had been doing, keeping in the mind that the last films I’d done weren’t as gratifying as they weren’t collaborative comedies.
^fn6
Movies were changing, my kids were changing, so I decided just to stop doing it and one thing led to another. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a performer or an actor. It was only after I had a pretty high degree of success and became a marketable commodity and was asked to act in other people’s projects and to function as an actor and not comedian, and I didn’t find it that enjoyable. So I just stopped.’

Does he miss it?

‘Oh goodness, no.’

So very Moranis, don’t you think? It makes me miss his sweet nerdy face even more. Still, at least we have his finest moments.

5 Wayne Szalinski,
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids

Moranis enters franchise hell. He clearly enjoyed the first one the best and he’s (unsurprisingly) great as the batty scientist.