New Year’s Films 5 – When Harry Met Sally

Last week we had the fun of looking at Trading Places—a terrific comedy. This week, still in the 80s, we head to New York and to a truly iconic romantic comedy—When Harry Met Sally [1989] by Nora Ephron.

Talk about a great writer. If you want to learn about writing romantic comedies—look at her work: Heartburn [1986], Sleepless in Seattle [1993], You’ve Got Mail [1998], Julie & Julia [2009] among others. Academy Award stuff? Not necessarily. But most people just love her films, because she understands that angst that accompanies almost every relationship at one time or another. And to top it off, she can be both funny and insightful about that angst.

As When Harry Met Sally unfolds, you see two people slowly… I mean slowly… come together. Take a look at the trailer for the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E10AcydCuk

Notice that you don’t see any big New Year’s plot thing—because that’s not what the film is about. It’s about two people finding each other. But the New Year’s scenes become hugely important.

Once Harry and Sally become friends, they go to a New Year’s party together and decide that if they don’t have dates for New Year’s Eve next year, they’ll be each other’s date. It’s a cute, funny moment in the evolution of their friendship.

But during that year, they fall in love, have sex, and break up. And at the end-of-the-year New Year’s Eve party he rushes to her to convince her that he’s now ready for them to be together. Will she believe him? Can she trust him? The tension of that moment at the party is what the whole film has been building toward.

The film is a good example of how to use New Year’s as a seminal event that will be the place where things are decided. So it’s a nice piece of the story. But it’s not the whole story.

Nora Ephron’s method of writing is interesting. She talked about breaking the story down into, basically, 10-page [i.e., 10-minute] segments. And EACH 10-minute segment she saw as a having a first act, second act, and third act. Her point being that you need constant action going on. You need that intro to a problem or concern, the dilemma of how to work it out, and the resolution to it. So that every 10 minutes of her screenplay would have that kind of structure.

I think the upshot of this is that you don’t have draggy moments of just explanation or something in your script. Every moment is leading to something, each moment builds on the one before, and the script is constantly full of climaxes and surprises.

And like all romantic comedies featuring New Year’s Eve, this one has a happy ending and it’s full of hope. It would be difficult to walk out of this film without a smile on your face.

Next week we head to the 90s and another charming romantic comedy. See you then!

Copyright © Diane Lake

23Jan22

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