Bringing Rom-Coms to life from the Script Doctor Himself, Marc Klein
Rom-com-versations is an interview series with people from the entertainment industry discussing all things rom-coms
Hi Meet Cuties,
This week, I sat down with someone who absolutely blew my mind with how thoughtful and creative he was in this interview. Marc Klein is an American screenwriter, director, producer, and author, whose tales of love and loss have charmed audiences all over the world over. He is the screenwriter of classics like SERENDIPITY, A GOOD YEAR, and MIRROR MIRROR. His most recent project is THE IN BETWEEN, which Marc also wrote and published as a book called, you guessed it, THE IN BETWEEN, published by Poppy Books. Because Marc has been creating rom-coms for the last two decades, he has a unique perspective on the genre, how it’s evolved, and their recent comeback. Thank you to Kiwi for introducing me to Marc; I'm so excited for all of you to meet him through this interview.
💓 Naomi: What is your favorite rom com and why?
💙 Marc: This is going to sound deliberately pretentious and obscure, but my favorite romantic comedy of all time is City Lights, by Charlie Chaplin. It was actually Chaplin's final silent film before he turned to sound – and it has everything that I try to accomplish when I write a romantic comedy. There's a genius meet cute, a moving love story, social commentary, some of the funniest set-pieces ever committed to film, and an ending that always brings me to tears. The premise of the film is that Chaplin’s character, The Tramp, falls in love with a blind flower girl who mistakes him for a wealthy man. The Tramp offers to pay for an experimental surgery so the girl can regain her sight, but of course, he’s penniless. So he’s forced to do all these crazy, desperate things in order to earn the money. At one point, he becomes a boxer. He gets into a boxing ring and gets his ass kicked. But it’s one of the most brilliant physical comedy scenes you’ll ever see. One of the reasons I admire this movie so much is not just because Chaplin’s telling a great story, but because he’s literally inventing the rom-com tropes that were later perfected in the screwball comedies of the 30’s and 40’s. And the most incredible thing of all is that Chaplin wrote, produced, directed, edited, composed the score, and starred in the movie. How’s that for a multi-hyphenate!
💓 Naomi: I was reading a lot about your background and how you started out in writing. It seems like you were born a writer. I'm going to brag for you a little bit: In high school, you won numerous creative writing awards, you received a scholarship to attend NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and you've written numerous screenplays that were sold to top studios. Your first big one that landed on screens being Serendipity, which is often referenced as one of the best rom-coms of all time. Would you give us all a little more context into your early life that propelled you into writing?
💙 Marc: In some ways I guess I was born to write. Teacher evaluations from when I was kid often mentioned my creativity as a writer. In that sense, I follow in the footsteps of my father who was a part-time writer. He was a businessman, but writing books was his side-hustle. Growing up, I’d fall asleep to the sound of his typewriter (this was pre-home computer). So even before I started writing, there was something really exotic and romantic about it for me. The real nexus point, however, was when I was a high school freshman and my parents announced we were moving – from New York to New Jersey – in the middle of the school year. It was incredibly traumatic! I was moving from the place I grew up – where I had loads of friends – to a place where I knew no one. It was a nightmare scenario, especially at the age of 15. I'm a bit shy anyway, so the isolation and loneliness of that experience turned me inward. I spent a lot more time by myself – reading, watching movies, making short films. And then I started to write. It was my emotional escape.
💓 Naomi: Let's fast forward to the early 2000’s. Serendipity came out in 2001. What was the inspiration for that story? What was the context in the early 2000’s that propelled you to write that story?
💙 Marc: In the late 1990’s my psychoanalyst turned me on to the work of Carl Jung. One of the concepts that Jung introduced was “synchronicity,” which I suppose is a more technical term for serendipity. It's the idea that there are no coincidences – that everything that happens in life is manifested because we're all connected by something he called the “collective unconscious.” Right out of the gate I felt this could be an interesting concept to explore in a rom-com because – at some point – we’ve all met someone with whom we’ve had an instant connection. And afterwards we wondered: was that meeting totally random? Or was it destiny? So I thought it would be cool to start a movie with two people meeting cute, spending a few magical hours together, then going their separate ways. But then, because they’re actually soulmates, the universe conspires to bring them back together again.
💓 Naomi: I love that. The idea of serendipity is something that we think about a lot at Meet Cute and in telling these romantic comedies, because often the universe puts two people in the same place at the same time.
💙 Marc: I think that’s one of the reasons the movie has developed a following. The best romantic comedies address something universal about the nature of romance and courtship. The core conceit of Serendipity is that we all have a "what-if" person in our romantic lives. And these “what-if” people just seem to haunt us. In that sense, the film is a wish fulfillment story. It gives us a chance to live out the fantasy.
💓 Naomi: Whether it's with someone romantic or a friendship, it's the "what if" question that the movie explores and it's something that almost everyone has a story that can relate. The rom-com industry and the movie industry has changed so much in the last 20 years. If you were going to work on Serendipity as a script today, are there big changes to the storyline that you would make?
💙 Marc: It's funny you bring this up, because the rights to Serendipity have recently been optioned by Broadway producers who want to turn it into a musical. We’ve had some preliminary conversations about how we should update it. The truth is, the only thing that's an issue is technology, because when the movie was written, the web was in its infancy, and there was no such thing as an internet search or social media. These days, the ability to locate a stranger is just so much easier. So I'm not really sure I could pull it off today because the audience would just ask, "Why doesn't John Cusack just Google her?" But with this sole exception, I think the film has held up. I certainly don’t think there’s anything culturally dated about it, in the sense that the script was written as a two-hander – from the POV of both the male and the female – which is what I prefer to do when I write romantic comedies. I think if a couple is falling in love, it's much more interesting to delve into both sides of the story.
💓 Naomi: I love the idea of multiple perspectives, because there's no one lens we can say love happens through. Shifting gears a bit from Serendipity, I've seen you referred to as "The Script Doctor", especially for romantic films, and some of the ones you've worked on including Dear John, Safe Haven, and The Best of Me. What is it like working on scripts that are your own creations versus someone else's that you're working on?
💙 Marc: From a business point of view, it's awesome because the pay is great, ha! But there’s also an intense amount of pressure because you're on a ticking clock. Sometimes you’re even on location and the production needs scenes rewritten the night before – or even crazier, entirely new scenes while you’re on set. It’s stressful because the stakes are very high. It's also politically complicated because you're dealing with a lot of conflicting creative ideas from actors, producers, directors, studio executives – and you have to find a way to make everyone feel good about what you’re doing. It’s also psychologically guilt-inducing because every Hollywood writer knows what it’s like to be fired off a movie and replaced. It’s the absolute worst feeling. Because of this, I've tried to make a habit of connecting with the writer I’m replacing because when I was first fired off a movie, the new writer called me and said, "Listen, I want to let you know the only reason I'm working on this is because I think it’s good." That made me feel a bit better, so I try to make a habit of that.
💓 Naomi: You and I talked about this in an earlier conversation: people like rom-coms because it gives you a new world to escape into and you know the feelings that you're going to get at the end. People talk about how rom-coms went away for a bit in the last decade, and now they're coming back again. I'm curious what your views are on the genre comeback.
💙 Marc: When I first came up as a screenwriter, it was an incredibly dynamic time for the romantic comedy. Studios were making loads of them – and they were making tons of money on them, which helped the genre flourish. More importantly, the Hollywood machinery was curating a deep bench of leading men and women who were beautiful and funny and could attract audiences. Then, just like that, it the rom-com went away. I can't say for sure why audiences didn't favor the genre anymore. Was it because the films became too formulaic? Was it the introduction of the Marvel Universe that basically had studios saying, "Why should we make a $30 million movie that's going to make $75 million when we can make a $150 million movie that'll make us a billion dollars?" Thank God for Netflix and the streaming platforms, because they’ve undoubtedly revived the genre. All that said, courtship itself has changed significantly in the past decade with the advent of social media, texting, and dating apps. I don’t know – it feels like some of the mystery and romance has been sucked out of our mating rituals. This makes the genre more challenging to write. The other thing that's changed is the newfound focus on gender and identity. The younger generation seem particularly keen on exploring these topics. Despite these societal changes, though, the challenge for writers remains the same: how do we make our stories universal? Crazy Rich Asians is a really good example. Personally, I couldn't be further away from those characters. I'm a Jewish guy who grew up in New Jersey. But I loved that movie because I could watch it and say, "Hey, that's my brother! Wait, that’s my sister-in-law!" It's a depiction of what happens when families go bonkers during weddings. What could be more universal than that?
💓 Naomi: Absolutely, you're tapping into something that transcends the scene in front of you. I have one last question for you: are there any upcoming projects that you're working on or excited about that you can give us a sneak peek into?
💙 Marc: Yes! There was a series of books written in the early-1990s called Griffin and Sabine. They’re a collection of handwritten letters and postcards exchanged between two people who have never met. He lives in London, and she lives on a mysterious island in the South Pacific – but they have this strange, supernatural connection. The books have been optioned, and re-optioned by multiple studios for decades, but no one ever found a way to make them work as a movie, so I suggested trying it as a tv show. It has some parallels with Serendipity, but with a greater emphasis on the magical realist aspects of the story. I've just finished writing the pilot and we're trying to put it together. Fingers crossed! Maybe your readers can send out a few Hail Mary’s for the project?
Thank you for reading this rom-com-versation with Marc! Definitely follow along with Marc’s projects and check out his previous movies if you haven’t already! I love this note on romance: “It's not about the externals, it's about the internals.” What do you think about this point Marc made? Let me know what you think! (naomi@meetcute.com). Also, while you’re at it send me who would you like to see featured in the next rom-com-vo!
Stay tuned for my next Rom-com-versation.
xx,
Naomi