1/25/23
Newsletter #230
The Crack of Dawn
I dislike the term, “Meet cute,” which sounds to me like some Eastern European movie mogul telling a director, “What kind of putz are you? The boy and the girl should meet cute.” It really ought to be, “Cute Meet.” Although this used to strictly be a Hollywood term, it’s now made its way into the public domain. But considering that the term has been around forever, I find it surprising that there have been so few good examples so far. The classic Cute Meet, and still the best, is from Gone With the Wind (1939).
At the jubilee at Twelve Oaks plantation, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) first sees Scarlett O’Hara as she and a bunch of other young girls are heading upstairs for their afternoon nap. As Rhett leans on the balustrade and watches Scarlett go up the stairs, the camera pushes in from a high wide shot to a close-up and Rhett grins appreciatively. Soon thereafter, Scarlett bails on the nap, tracks down her unrequited love, Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), drags him into the library, shuts the door, then basically throws herself at him, saying, “You can’t love that mealy-mouthed Melanie, you love me.” He assures her that he doesn’t love her and he’s going to marry Melanie, so Scarlett really slaps his face hard. Ashley exits. Scarlett is so furious she picks up a vase and throws it against the wall where it shatters. Just then Rhett sits up from the couch, which is facing the other way so both they and we couldn’t see him. Scarlett is mortified that this stranger just overheard her conversation with Ashley, and says, “You, sir, are no gentleman.” Rhett grins and says, “From what I just heard, you’re no lady.”
It's been 85 years and nobody has yet been able to top that. I can’t think of anything that even comes close.
In my one film that’s a love story, Lunatics: A Love Story (1993), my cute meet is too coincidental to actually be cute. The boy (Ted Raimi) is an agoraphobic who never leaves his apartment, and the girl (Deborah Foreman) has been dumped and robbed by her awful boyfriend (Bruce Campbell), and now wanders the streets of L.A. with nowhere to go. The boy who never leaves calls chat lines (this is pre-internet). The girl, who is being threatened by a street gang, hides in a phone booth. The boy mis-dials the chat line and gets the girl in the phone booth.
Interestingly, I think, in my first couple of drafts of the script the girl just worked at a sex chat line, so there was no coincidence. My initial idea was that the girl was in all sorts of trouble, including having been evicted and threatened, so when the boy calls the sex line and pleasantly invites her over, she accepts. I think my original idea is better than what made it into the movie. Why did it get changed? Studio pressure. She can’t work at a sex chat line, nobody will like her. Whatever. I got the movie made.
A really good cute meet is in Anne Tyler’s book, Breathing Lessons (Pulitzer Prize-winner, 1988), but was not used in the film that was made of the book in 1994 (that was perfectly cast with James Garner and Joanne Woodward). It’s an OK movie, but the book was better, surprise, surprise.
In the book it flashes back to how this middle-aged couple met. They attend the same high school in the 1940s, but they don’t really know each other. They’re both in the school choir, which is run by a batty old lady teacher. At one point the teacher says to the girl, “Isn’t it terrible that Tommy died?” The girl is horrified. She didn’t really know him, but she now remembers that they had been going to school together for years, and were in many of the same classes. Having never known anyone who had died before, she starts to feel really sad, and writes a sincere, heartfelt letter to the boy’s parents telling them how much she admired him, and what good friends they’d been.
At the next choir practice he comes walking in, very much alive. Now she’s so utterly horrified that it’s beautiful. He sees her, smiles, and takes his place at the other end of the choir. The girl turns to the goofy old lady teacher, and says, “You said that Tommy died.” The teacher says, “Tommy? No, not Tommy, I meant Fred.”
Here’s a stupid expression, “And then it writes itself.” No. The prolific, and mostly unknown, author, Anne Tyler, stuck her nose into it, and went and wrote it, and got a Pulitzer Prize for doing it. More about Anne Tyler later.
Anyway, I think that’s a really good cute meet. And when you think about it, there aren’t all that many.
May the force at least be flowing in your general direction.