Page 7 of The Rom-Commers

If you haven’t seen it yourself, please do yourself a favor: stop whateveryou’re doing and go watch it. This movie is ninety years old, and it still sparkles with life and vitality and charm. A down-on-his-luck newspaper reporter tries to help a runaway socialite travel by bus to New York in hopes of getting her exclusive story—and falls madly in love with her instead. Clark Gable is fan-yourself sexy, Claudette Colbert is sassy and gorgeous, and the romantic tension? You couldeatit with aspoon. This is the road trip rom-com that launched a thousand road trip rom-coms—and it swept the Oscars, winning all of the big five categories, including Best Screenplay. It’s a titan of the genre. It’s practically sacred.

And Charlie Yates, my beloved Charlie Yates, my gold standard, my writer by which all other writers are judged, my absolute all-time screenwriting hero…

He mutilated it.

He besmirched it.

Hedesecratedit.

This thing he did—I don’t even want to say “wrote”… It had no spark, no build, no banter, no joy—and no scenes that even resembled the original movie. The title was the same, and the character names were the same. But that was it. Was heasleepwhen he wrote this? Was hein the middle of dental surgery? How could someone so good and so masterful at writing—someone who could make you root for serial killers, and believe in ghosts, and genuinelylikecannibal robots—take something that was already working, and had been working for ninety years, and chuck its charming soul into a wood chipper?

I mean, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert had to be weeping up in heaven.

He had their characters going to a line-dancing competition.

Aline-dancingcompetition!

Something was going on here. Did Charlie Yates have a stroke? Had a chat bot secretly rewritten the real script as a gag? Was Charlie Yates being held hostage somewhere and forced at gunpoint to write a career-endingly bad story?

Butcareer-endingly baddidn’t even capture it.

This thing was apocalyptic.

And there it was. Somehowthatwas the tipping point for me.

Real life was allowed to be disappointing. Heck, real life wasguaranteedto be disappointing. Living alone in a tiny apartment with my sick father? Teaching community college freshman English so we could have health insurance? Denying my own dreams so my overindulged but lovable baby sister could live all of hers struggle-free? All fine. I didn’t get to make the rules for reality.

But stories had a better option.

I was not letting Charlie Yates ruin this movie, his career, the romantic comedy genre as a whole, andall our liveswith this nuclear-waste-fueled dumpster fire of a screenplay.

Thatwas where I drew the line.

Nobody was dishonoringIt Happened One Night. Not on my watch.

I didn’t even make a decision, really. Just finished reading, clamshelled my laptop, swung myself up to the top bunk, and stared at Sylvie until she took off her headphones and said, “What’s up?”

“I’ve just read a romantic comedy script,” I said, “that will destroy human civilization as we know it.”

Half an hour later, she had the whole story: Logan’s call, Charlie Yates’s situation, my life-changing opportunity. And before I even knew what she was doing, she was typing out an email to withdraw from her summer internship, citing “a family emergency.”

“You can’t not go to your internship!” I said when I realized what she was doing.

“Sure I can,” she said.

“It’s a week away! You made a commitment.”

“They’ll pull someone off the wait list.”

“But—” I shook my head. “But it’svery prestigious.”

Sylvie shrugged. “I’ll go another year.”

“What if they don’t take you another year?”

“I’ll go somewhere else.”

But I was shaking my head—fervently. I mean, I recognized that I’dgotten this started. I was the one who’d climbed the bunk ladder and told her everything. She was a good-hearted person, after all. I could’ve predicted she might try to solve this.

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