"From Hollywood With Love" by Scott Meslow; Dey Street Books (432 pages, $27.99)
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Who doesn't enjoy a good romantic comedy? Grumps and cynics, maybe. But for the rest of us, rom-coms have been providing comfort viewing and distorted ideas of how love is supposed to work since long before Harry Burns met Sally Albright.
The rom-com has evolved quite a bit over the last three-plus decades thanks to titans of the genre like Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers and even Judd Apatow. As dismal box-office showings suggested that interest in rom-coms was waning, newer hits like "Crazy Rich Asians" and the Netflix rom-com boom of the last few years have proven there will be always be space in audiences' hearts for cheesy, life-affirming tales of love.
Anyone who calls themselves a rom-com fan has probably heard about "From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy." Writer and critic Scott Meslow published this essential rom-com tome earlier this year and spends nearly 400 pages thoroughly chronicling the genre's history, interviewing some of its seminal figures and dissecting its most well-worn tropes.
"From Hollywood with Love" is so committed to these films that it recreates the feeling of watching a rom-com with its zippy pace and obvious infatuation with its subject matter. It's not all sunshine and roses, though. Meslow doesn't pull punches when it comes to some of the genre's problematic tendencies and its darker stories.
For Meslow, a rom-com is any movie in which the central plot is focused on at least one romantic love story and "the goal is to make you laugh at least as much as the goal is to make you cry." Even if you quibble with his definition, it's a concise formula and remains consistent.
Meslow's book is organized around 16 rom-coms that he believes represent notable junctures in the genre's modern history. His narrative begins with 1989's "When Harry Met Sally" and runs through 2018's "To All the Boys I've Loved Before." Though he acknowledges many other rom-coms along the way, some readers will be disappointed that favorites are glossed over or not mentioned at all.
Each chapter contains in-depth breakdowns of each movie's development process, creative choices and impact on rom-com lore. In each chapter, Meslow peppers shorter anecdotes in boxes with their own titles and fonts. They tend to break up the flow and force the reader to backtrack, but they generally feature something interesting.
In between each chapter is an essay about a specific actor or two who has contributed significantly to the rom-com landscape. They include tributes to and interviews with folks ranging from Hugh Grant to Drew Barrymore to Mindy Kaling. The sidebars usually only take up a few pages and add yet another enjoyable element to an entertaining and enlightening read.
There's a clear methodology behind the movies Meslow chose for this project. He uses 1990's "Pretty Woman" as an example of the link between rom-coms and fairy tales, 1994's "Four Weddings and a Funeral" to illustrate a rom-com that doesn't "reflexively focus on the lighter side of the circle of life," and "There's Something About Mary" and "Knocked Up" as standard-bearers of the "raunch-com."
Hollywood's view of rom-coms has ebbed and flowed with the times. Meslow explains how the genre went from women-centered films in the 1990s to the Apatow era of R-rated rom-coms that focused more on its male leads in the 2000s. The 2010s rom-com lull was quickly followed by the runaway success of "Crazy Rich Asians" and Netflix ushering in the age of "the rom-com franchise."
Although he undoubtedly loves these movies, the author expresses his displeasure with how homogenous — both in terms of race and class — the genre has become. In his essay on Will Smith, Meslow describes Hollywood and rom-coms as "an industry and a genre that defaults to whiteness." He also chastises studios for not doing more for Black moviegoers after 1995's "Waiting to Exhale" proved there was an audience for such films.
One of the more fascinating celebrity interviews Meslow includes is with "Knocked Up" star Katherine Heigl, who candidly discusses how difficult it has been to shake off the bad reputation she gained after daring to criticize that movie's male-dominated perspective. It serves as a great reminder that the real world is often far messier than the fantasy lives depicted in rom-coms.
Even at its most serious, though, "From Hollywood with Love" is still a relatively light affair and a quick read for film enthusiasts. Like most rom-coms, it ends on a hopeful note, that the genre "seems to have an unusually bright future on the horizon" thanks to its resurgence in the streaming era.
If you already enjoy settling in at night with a glass of wine and your favorite rom-com, this book will evoke the same sensation of fun escapism. Who knows if Meslow did that on purpose or if it was just a happy accident.
Either way, I'll have what he's having.
