With Valentine’s Day having just passed, I got to thinking about love  stories, and specifically the Romantic Comedy, or RomCom as they’re often referred  to in Development offices. RomCom’s are a dime a dozen, and are generally dismissed as so much fluff. There have certainly been plenty of RomComs that merely served as vehicles for stars trying to break previous molds (I’m looking at you, Maid In Manhattan) or as vehicles for Hollywood power couples to work together (that’s you, Gigli) or more recently to bring ensemble casts together with varying degrees of success (Love, Actually; New Year’s Eve; Valentine’s Day).

                                     

However, there have been quite a few iconic Romantic Comedies that have become timeless for their brilliant story telling, magnificent acting and memorable screenplays. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan hit RomCom gold twice with Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Before that, Meg Ryan starred with Billy Crystal in arguably the greatest Romantic Comedy of all time, When Harry Met Sally. Who can forget all of the great lines of dialogue in that film? And who will deny that Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in the coffee shop is one of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema, let alone Romantic Comedies? Julia Roberts became a household name after starting in Pretty Woman. Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy became cinematic legends working together in films like Adam’s Rib, Woman of the Year and countless other Romantic Comedies. Indeed, Katherine Hepburn also starred with Cary Grant in such memorable Romantic Comedies as The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby. Doris Day and Marylin Monroe both became superstars primarily starring in Romantic Comedies.

The Romantic Comedy has an audience and has great history. What it lacks is respect.

You know who you are. Pretentious auteurs who pooh-pooh the simple and formulaic models of these contrived, feel-good affairs. To you the Romantic Comedy is nothing more than a thinly veiled money grab from the studios to sell a shallow movie with cheap laughs and gratuitous sex. Certainly, most RomComs are profitable. Even if the film has one or two A-listers in the lead roles, it’ll still be a cheaper movie to make than y0ur average Avengers or Pirates of the Caribbean bonanza. Plus, fans of those A-listers will guarantee an audience. The films are formulaic so you can get almost anyone to write and/or direct it without breaking the bank, and they usually have little or no special effects. They’re small, seemingly simple movies to make, that are a dime a dozen and still not worth the two hours that you’ll spend in the theater.

However, a closer examination of the Romantic Comedy would show you that there’s a lot more to them than that. As any writer knows, writing comedy is perhaps the most difficult writing there is. It’s hard to make something funny. When you add romance on top of that, it means that you have to create characters who are engaging and likable, whom the audience will actively root to end up together. Another (fair) criticism of the RomCom is that they’re predictable. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end. What makes a RomCom fun is when the filmmakers come up with new ways to make that formula work. Think about When Harry Met Sally or Pretty Woman. What made those films so memorable is that they’re unique in the way they told their stories. When Harry Met Sally is on of the funniest and most memorable films of the 80’s and it holds up for a lot of different reasons. First off, it had a great director in Rob Reiner. Secondly, it had a brilliant writer in Nora Ephron. Those two combined to create a story about two people that the audience wanted to know. They were two people who seemed totally wrong for each other and yet kept finding their way back to each other. The story was told with wit and humor and grace so that you can’t help but be entertained by it. It’s also a story with depth. It’s about the loose and free spirit personality of Harry clashing with the obsessive compulsive Sally and figuring out how to make this square peg fit into the round hole.

Pretty Woman is another example of making conflicting personalities work together. It matches a prostitute from Hollywood Boulevard with a Wall Street Corporate raider. What also adds depth to Pretty Woman is that it’s a fish out of water story. Vivian is taken from the gritty world of the streets and has to somehow figure out how to fit in with the high society Beverly Hills set. So not only is the audience rooting for Vivian to end up with Edward, but they know that doing so will give her a better life that will get her off the street. Giving the main character a deeper goal of a better overall life is more tangible to the audience than merely boy meets girl.

So now you’re asking, won’t the main character’s life automatically be better if they end up with the love interest. The answer is a resounding “probably.” It very well may be the case, but giving the main character something beyond that adds depth to the story. When you do something like that to a RomCom, you’re really giving yourself a chance to do something special. RomComs have a built in audience. They’re looking at the very least to be emotionally engaged in a simple love story.  If you give them a story that also has depth and engages them beyond just the love story, then you have a chance to create a film that could become classic.

Naturally, adding depth to the story should be the goal of any screenwriter.

But when thinking about the Romantic Comedy, adding depth could be the difference between being on in the crowd or one in a million.

If you’re working on a Romantic Comedy screenplay and you’re not sure if it has depth like the films mentioned above, hiring a professional reader to evaluate it is something you should seriously consider. Monument Script Services can evaluate your script for you and provide studio-level coverage to let you know if your script has the potential to become the next great Romantic Comedy or Action Thriller or Drama.