The Rom-Commers(21)

Charlie frowned.

“Still sure about doing this?” I asked, one last time.

“You’ve already put that check in your bra,” Charlie said, gesturing in that direction before abruptly deciding that was a bad idea.

“Buckle up, then,” I said, with a shrug.

The teaching rule I had for myself was to never criticize more than three things about a student’s work at a time. If you hit people too hard with too much too fast, they shut down. They feel attacked instead of advised. It stops helping and starts hurting.

Three criticisms at a time was the magic number.

But was I going to follow that rule for Charlie Yates?

No way in hell.

He wasn’t some beginner kid at community college. He was a ridiculously successful titan of the genre. With a mansion. And a “whole drawer” of Oscars.

He could handle it. And even if he couldn’t—all writers are mushy goo, deep down—that wasn’t my problem.

He was paying me handsomely to share my thoughts, and share them I would.

All of them.

And if they happened to crush him? That was just a bonus.

“First of all,” I began, “this screenplay shouldn’t even be happening. I want to register my objection at the outset. This movie is a beloved classic that brims with rare magic and its legacy should not be defiled by some appalling remake.”

“Noted,” Charlie said.

Now I began in earnest—and maybe I should have been intimidated to say all this to a writing god. But my outrage made me fearless. I had a higher purpose to serve. “Just for an overview,” I said, “when I say this screenplay is ‘apocalyptically shitty,’ I mean that it has no tension, no character growth, no longing, no buildup, no anticipation, no banter, no fun, no play, and no shimmer.”

“No shimmer?” Charlie said.

But I was just getting started. “It is a romantic comedy that is neither funny nor romantic. It doesn’t do any—any—of the things that a rom-com is supposed to do.”

“What’s a rom-com supposed to do?”

“Great question. One you should have asked before you wrote this thing. But let’s talk about it.”

Charlie’s pen was still lying idle atop his open notebook. He wasn’t taking notes. But he was—and I’ll give him credit for this—listening.

“The job of a rom-com,” I said, “is to give you a simulated feeling of falling in love.”

Here Charlie blinked, and I found myself wondering if this might be news to him.

I went on. “A rom-com should give you a swoony, hopeful, delicious, rising feeling of anticipation as you look forward to the moment when the two leads, who are clearly mad for each other, finally overcome all their obstacles, both internal and external, and get together.”

Now I gave Charlie the stink eye.

“This is the first, most sacred rule of rom-coms,” I said, in a tone like You know what you did. “The leads wind up blissfully together in the end.” I paused for effect. “And you broke that rule when you made Claudette Colbert’s character marry the wrong guy.”

Charlie must have read my dramatic pause like I wanted an explanation. “It’s more interesting that way,” he said.

Ugh. The pomposity. “It may be ‘interesting.’ But it’s not a rom-com. And when you rewrite the greatest rom-com of all time, it needs to be a rom-com.”

Charlie considered that.

And here I weaponized my encyclopedic knowledge of Charlie’s body of work. “In The Destroyers, did the aliens win? Did they turn Earth into a desiccated hellscape and eject the little orphan boy into a black hole just so you, the writer, could do something ‘interesting’?”

He didn’t have to answer. Of course they didn’t.

“Did the Navy SEALs in Night Raid give up after the submarine sank and let themselves drown in a watery tomb? Did the sleuth in The Maharajas’ Express hunt down all those clues just to get to the end and say, ‘Huh. I’m stumped’? Did the protagonist of Live and Let Kill just lose interest in solving his wife’s decapitation and lie down on the guillotine?”

Charlie was watching me.

“Of course not! You know this! All genres have a promise. The Destroyer will save the universe. The soldiers will win the final battle. The sleuth will solve the mystery. The hunted, grieving husband will figure it out just in the nick of time. I can’t believe I have to say this to you, but the same is true for romantic comedies. The two leads will wind up together. That’s what the audience showed up for. The joy of it all. If you don’t give it to them, it’s beyond unsatisfying—it’s a violation of trust. It’s like sex with no orgasm! What was even the point?”

At that, I froze.

Did I just say the word “orgasm” to Charlie Yates?

Charlie looked like he was asking himself the same question.

But the point was valid. I decided to own it.

“A great rom-com,” I said, “is just like sex. If you’re surprised by the ending, somebody wasn’t doing their job. We all know where it’s headed. The fun is how we get there. Seriously—have you ever had fantastic sex that culminated in an epic orgasm and then said to yourself, God, that was so cliché. It should’ve had a different ending?”