ROMY AND MICHELE - 25 YEARS LATER
Michele: “You’re as cute as me. You are! In some cultures, maybe cuter.”
I loved Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion when the film first came out 25 years ago. But I didn’t yell about because it was a little bent, and I’d just moved to a new city and wanted to present as normal as possible. Well, it’s now *normal* to be a fan of this movie about two underachieving best friends who adore Pretty Woman and lie about being successful businesswomen to impress classmates. It’s normal to dress as them at Halloween. And it’ll be normal to part with your hard-earned cash to see the musical version of the film when it appears on Broadway next year.
Romy and Michele’s popularity is a massive result when you consider the film was close to never being made because everyone hated the script. And when it was made - the studio wanted to release it straight to video because everyone hated the edit. And finally, when the edit passed muster, there was barely any money left to promote it. This is the story of how a group of filmmakers transcended ridiculous obstacles to create something so special that its fan-base is booming a quarter of a century after its modest release. It’s the story of a film that was pitched as a female Beavis and Butt-Head, but ended up being a profound ode to female friendship - the echoes of which can be seen in everything from Bridesmaids and Broad City to Booksmart.
Romy and Michele’s journey started when playwright Robin Schiff wrote Ladies’ Room, a play inspired by banal conversations she’d overheard in LA clubs in the late ‘80s. Romy and Michele, played by Christie Mellor and Lisa Kudrow, weren’t even the show’s central characters. They were meant to lurk in the background, kind of like Hamlet’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. And like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they ended up walking away with the show.
With the backing of super-producer Aaron Spelling, Schiff tried to turn the play into a TV series called Just Temporary. They shot a pilot, which included Mellor and Kudrow in the cast, but it never went to series.
After that, Schiff decided to turn Ladies Room into a feature film with Romy and Michele as the central characters. But she needed to come up with a workable premise and toyed with Romy and Michele going to college, and then Romy and Michele going to Japan, before settling on them going to their high school reunion. She pitched the idea to Disney-owned Touchstone Pictures who immediately came on board. But the script would go through years of rewrites, where it was shelved and then un-shelved, before director David Mirkin was hired and the casting process could officially begin.
At first, Mellor and Kudrow didn’t feature in the conversation to play the roles they created on stage because they weren’t big enough names. Then Kudrow started getting a lot of work with scene-stealing appearances on Cheers and Mad About You. But Touchstone remained unsure about her until the success of Friends made her case impossible to ignore.
Unfortunately, Mellor didn’t get the same breaks and the hunt was on to find a new Romy. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was considered. But the producers wanted a movie star opposite Kudrow. They moved to Toni Collette after loving her in Muriel’s Wedding – but apparently Collette’s Valley girl accent was, at that stage, not up to snuff.
Then Mira Sorvino appeared in Mighty Aphrodite and the producers set their sights on her. But Sorvino’s team thought the script too bawdy. They wanted her to be doing more serious work as a point of difference to Aphrodite, which had earned her an Oscar nomination for playing a ditzy sex worker with a heart of gold.
"I remember my agents … were like, 'You have an Oscar nomination, we should be really precious about your decisions,'" Sorvino told TODAY. “(But) my instincts told me Romy and Michele was special and I related so much to it. I related to being the outcast, being not one of the popular kids in high school because that was my high school experience. I felt that there was a lot of heart to it and a lot about female friendships that I’d never seen explored anywhere else. That love between best friends.”
When Sorvino signed on, the terms of her contract stated that if she won the Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite, she’d be paid double. But here’s the thing, Kudrow’s contract said she had to be paid the same as the actress playing Romy – so the studio suddenly had to pay Kudrow double as well and wasn’t happy about it.
“The day after the Oscars, I got a call from executives screaming at me because they were gonna have to pay more money,” Mirkin told Vogue’s The Blonde Leading the Blonde: An Oral History of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. “I was just like, ‘Do you not realize the return of investment from having an Oscar winner in the movie? This is a good thing!’”
Kudrow and Sorvino bonded immediately. During the two week rehearsal period, Sorvino was acutely aware Kudrow had played ‘Michele’ opposite Mellor’s ‘Romy’ for years and asked that she be patient with the “new girl”. But Sorvino soon made the character her own, changing Romy’s accent from Valley Girl to Philly-Jersey - an adjustment she kept under wraps until the first day of principle photography.
“Mira’s accent really made me laugh,” said co-star, Janeane Garofalo. “Maybe she didn’t share it with many people beforehand because she didn’t want to have doubts introduced into her process. And who knows how the movie would play without it?”
Although, the shoot was a happy process, the edit was not. When the studio saw early cuts of the film, they thought it was “curiously edited” and substantially weirder than what they were expecting. And test audiences were equally nonplussed.
“The whole time I was sitting in the back going, ‘This is so embarrassing,’” Schiff said. “People just didn’t think it was funny, and I thought it needed a lot of work. I was told that it was the lowest-testing movie in the history of Touchstone.”
Touchstone wanted changes. Director Mirkin not only stepped away from the film, but threatened to take his name off the credits. Touchstone didn’t want the bad press associated with a credit removal and got comfortable with the idea of not releasing the film in cinemas and sending it straight to video instead.
But Schiff made the case to Touchstone’s executives that they’d shot a better film than what was represented in the edit. The studio gave her the weekend to make her her own changes, and she and the film’s editor, David Finfer, spent every minute of it in the cutting room. On Monday morning, they submitted the new cut to Touchstone’s executives who liked it enough to give Schiff and Finfer another two weeks. Their next edit made the film substantially shorter, with Schiff saying it concentrated more on the relationship between the women rather than cutting straight to jokes. Mirkin disputes the fact that big changes were made and argues that most of his original edit was preserved.
In any case, Touchstone was swayed enough by Schiff and Finfer’s work to release the film in cinemas. But they didn’t invest much in marketing – only paying for a couple of TV spots, a few billboards, and a hastily arranged premiere at a multiplex in LA, to which Sorvino and Kudrow arrived in a Jaguar convertible.
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion opened across 1,600 theatres on April 25, 1997, where it debuted at #2 behind the Anne Heche thriller Volcano. It would end up being a modest success, grossing $29 million against a $17 million budget, and earning many rave reviews.
But whenTitanic came along a few months later, everyone stopped talking about Romy and Michele. Kudrow went back to Friends and Sorvino, her feature films. But the popularity of the movie quietly grew on video, DVD and cable, and soon fans were wearing Romy and Michele costumes to Halloween, and Sorvino and Kudrow were dressing as their former characters to present gongs at televised awards shows.
The love is only going to get more acute with the forthcoming musical and now there’s even talk of a sequel.
“I’m interested in what it looks like when these characters turn 50 and try to figure out what they wanna accomplish that they haven’t yet, only to realize that they have no interests or hobbies,” Schiff told Vogue. “I love Mira and Lisa, so if Disney can get onboard, it feels like a no-brainer. I also think it would just be fun, and I’m at a point in my life where it’s really important to me to enjoy my work.”
ROMY AND MICHELE’S FUNNIEST LINES:
Romy: “You’re a bad person with an ugly heart, and we don’t give a flying fuck what you think.”
Romy: I've been killing myself for eight days and I gained a pound.
Michele: “That’s impossible (you gained weight). Did you deduct sixteen pounds for your shoes?”
Romy: “Oh, big whoop, (you lost your virginity) with your cousin Barry. I wouldn’t brag about it.”
Michele: “You’re as cute as me. You are! In some cultures, maybe cuter.”
Michele: “Like if there’s a guy in a rowboat going X miles, and the current is going, like, you know, some other miles, how long does it take him to get to town? It was like, who cares? Who wants to go to town with a guy in a rowboat?”
Romy: I just love how cute I look! You know what? I think this is like, the cutest we’ve ever looked.
Michele: Oh, it’s definitely the cutest.
Romy: Don’t you love how we can just say that to each other, and know we’re not being conceited?
Michele: Oh, I know, no, we’re just being honest. Ah!Romy: All I’ve had to eat for the past six days are gummy bears, jelly beans, and candy corns.
Michele: God, I wish I had your discipline.Cowboy (Justin Theroux): You were right, I was a brain dead redneck asshole. Though I never screwed a sheep or my sister.
Heather Mooney (Janeane Garofalo): Why not, couldn't catch 'em?”