Director takes on rom-com regression

Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis) subvert audience expectations in Sleeping With Other People, a grown-up romantic comedy by Leslye Headland, a writer-director who often wonders how the master Ernst Lubitsch might approach a film.
Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis) subvert audience expectations in Sleeping With Other People, a grown-up romantic comedy by Leslye Headland, a writer-director who often wonders how the master Ernst Lubitsch might approach a film.

Playwright, screenwriter and director Leslye Headland is not a casual student of romantic comedies. She's a world expert. During a telephone conversation, she explains in minute detail why past films in the genre worked. She constantly cites the work of directors like Ernst Lubitsch (The Shop Around the Corner, Trouble in Paradise) and his disciple Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment).

"I'm giving you a history of the romantic comedy. I hope this is fun," she says with a laugh.

She also keeps reminders on her person.

"I have 'How would Lubitsch do it?' tattooed on my arm," she says.

Though the question is permanently scrawled on her flesh, Headland admits she doesn't always have the answer handy. The kinds of films that Lubitsch and his peers used to make are tough sells now.

Her current offering -- Sleeping With Other People -- reverses the ancient formula where boy and girl meet and eventually, um, mate. Saturday Night Live and Horrible Bosses alumnus Jason Sudeikis and Community and Mad Men veteran Alison Brie star as a pair of promiscuous 30-somethings who lost their virginity to each other in college but later form an emotional bond after years of disastrous pairings.

Headland muses, "I don't know if I succeeded, but it's out there. I tried."

Long Past Physical

How Lubitsch might have matched Sudeikis and Brie can only be speculated, but Headland convincingly explains why he wouldn't do it the same way he did in the 1930s.

"During the reign of the Hays Code [which dictated what couldn't be shown in Hollywood films from 1934 on], when you look at The Shop Around the Corner and Twentieth Century, Trouble in Paradise, all of that incredible, incredible work, you could see how inventive people had to be. They had to be very, very smart to talk about relationships, specifically romantic and sexual relationships. The rom-com is one of the first genres that occurred once we had sound. These guys like Lubitsch out of the gate created a genre that is basically foreplay for 90 minutes, and in the end, they [had sex with] each other," she says.

"I think they stopped making as much money as they used to, and I'm not exactly sure why people stopped going. I think that part of it might have been that it's such a recognizable formula that they sort of got a little bored with it. It could be that the dating landscape has just changed so intensely from, I would say, in the last 15 years or so. So much of it is Internet-based now, which is not very fun to show onscreen. If I wanted somebody to come and have sex with me right now, I could do that. I'm not going to. It's such a thing that's so accessible that it's tough to titillate an audience with a story about it.

"Why would I spend money in a theater to see people talk about it when I could literally go on my Internet or on my phone and get it or watch it for free? There isn't really any mystery to it anymore.

"Now, I sound like I'm someone who's 65 years old," says Headland, who was actually born in the 1980s.

For example, how would the two get reacquainted without tapping on a keyboard or using Tinder or even Siri as a matchmaker? Headland has the two New Yorkers wander into a support group for sex addicts.

"My financiers were a bit concerned that my characters meet at a 12-step meeting," Headland recounts. "They were sort of like, 'Can't they meet somewhere else?' And I was like, 'I'm not sure where people go anymore, honestly.' I think it's just as believable as people running into each other in a bookstore, which is how in When Harry Met Sally ... they reconnect."

Headland also had to keep viewers sympathetic with her lecherous male lead. Sudeikis' Jake may cheat, but he's capable of forming romantic attachments while Brie's Lainey frequently crushes her own heart chasing after a reptilian, married gynecologist (Adam Scott). If the character seems eerily real, it's because he's based on a mustachioed physician she consulted.

"I only went to see him twice because he was so creepy. I was like, 'This is so weird.' I had just moved, so my insurance set me up with someone. I shared that with Adam, and also Adam was also inspired by Fred MacMurray's performance in The Apartment. I had written this sort of one-note character. I thought I'm really going to need someone brilliant to have him make any sense in the world. He was willing to take away all the natural charm that he has and channeled this very intense person."

Headland knows she isn't the only filmmaker to ponder this question. Currently, her best-known work is the script for director Steve Pink's remake of the 1986 film About Last Night ... (with Rob Lowe and Demi Moore), which itself was based on David Mamet's play Sexual Perversity in Chicago. The play explored the idea that monogamy had become a type of perversion after the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Pink's film, unlike the previous version or the play, had a primarily black cast.

Not So Literary

Unlike some dramatists who express frustration with how their work was brought to life by other directors and actors who go too far into improvisation, Headland, who also wrote the play and film Bachelorette, which she directed, reveals, "They didn't change anything [I wrote] just because it was an African-American cast. Everything they're saying in that film is stuff that I wrote, with the exception of a little bit of improv, which is the same with this film. Most of it is in the script, with a nice 10 percent of things that people came up with on the set. I actually leave a lot of room for that when I'm shooting. With About Last Night, I was actually surprised they didn't do more improv. When I was shooting [the now infamous] 'dirty DJ scene' (in Sleeping With Other People), I wouldn't call, 'Cut,' and they just kept going. I think that a lot of writers are afraid of it. I think it's just an amateur move to be afraid of improvisation because it means you don't trust your own idea."

Contrary to some of the laments she has made, Headland admits there are some comedies like hers around, even if they don't seem like it initially. "There are a lot of rom-coms that are just a little bit more com than rom. I think, for example, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which admittedly was 10 years ago, is still a romantic comedy. It might not occur to people that it is a romantic comedy because it's so funny."

While she likes redefining genres and exploring taboos, Headland confesses that she finds the appeal of the supposedly edgy Fifty Shades of Grey elusive, especially for people who can read and write complete sentences.

"Fifty Shades of Grey makes zero sense to me. The only thing I can think of to attribute the success of it to is the rampant sexism in our culture, that we've reached a place that's so unencouraging that women would crave an abusive sadomasochistic relationship. The fact that some women think that it would translate to love boggles my mind."

MovieStyle on 10/09/2015

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