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1.
Always Be My Maybe tells the tale of celebrity chef Sasha (Ali Wong) and aspiring-but-stuck musician Marcus (Randall Park) reconnecting in adulthood after a huge fight blew up their childhood friendship. Appropriately enough for the stars of a movie that leans on food as a motif, Wong and Park actually first met through a fried rice competition.
According to Glamour, Park hosted the contest at his apartment when he was a recent graduate of UCLA, where Wong was a student at the time, as well as a member of the Asian American performance troupe LCC Theatre Company, which Park cofounded. Alas, Wong’s fried rice, which featured cranberries in a starring role, didn’t win the crown. That honor went to a chocolate fried rice, which I assume was cooked by a bona fide culinary genius.
2.
In Palm Springs, Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) try to build a meaningful relationship with one another while trapped in a time loop, as you do. One of the benefits of such a life is that since the timeline is reset every night, they can take pretty much any risk and not have to deal with the consequences. Nyles and Sarah take advantage of this as often as they can, and in one memorable moment, give each other stick-and-poke tattoos of penises.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the tattoos were improvised by Samberg and Milioti, who shot the scenes involving them in a single take. In lieu of actual ink — since, you know, most of us aren’t living in an eternally resetting timeline — they used eyeliner.
3.
According to an extract from From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy by Scott Meslow published by inews.co.uk, the famed fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally was a true team effort on the part of the cast and creative team.
Meg Ryan (Sally) suggested that her character fake an orgasm, while Billy Crystal (Harry) came up with the “I’ll have what she’s having” line, which ranks at #33 on AFI’s list of “100 Years…100 Movie Quotes,” a compilation of the “greatest movie quotes of all time.” And, of course, that line was said by none other than director Rob Reiner’s mother, Estelle.
4.
In Enough Said, one character’s odd habit of avoiding the onions in salsa and guacamole was taken from the ex-wife of screenwriter and director Nicole Holofcener’s boyfriend. (With her blessing!)
Holofcener told Screen Daily, “He told me about this habit she had. I loved it. She knows it, she’s seen the movie. She laughed.”
5.
In The Birdcage, Hank Azaria played Agador Spartacus, the perennially overwhelmed assistant/housekeeper employed by Robin Williams and Nathan Lane’s Armand and Albert. During a chaotic family dinner, Armand slips and falls in the kitchen before popping back up as if nothing happened. Everyone else, Agador among them, plays it cool, and for a good reason: The fall wasn’t scripted and was a genuine accident on Williams’ part.
Azaria told the AV Club, “That was absolutely not intentional. And if you watch that little piece of film again, you’ll see me laughing and Robin laughing. It’s one of those things that happens that you never really think they’re going to use, but I was so emotionally upset in the scene — I was supposed to be crying — that I just pretended that he was making me cry even more. But I was actually laughing.”
6.
According to an oral history of the Clueless party scene published by Vulture, Donald Faison came up with the “I’m keeping it real” line his character Murray says while his head is being shaved. When director Amy Heckerling mistakenly recalled that the line was in the script, Faison jumped in to say that he actually added it after he heard a local kid say it.
Faison said, “Some kid in my neighborhood said, ‘Just keep it real. Just make sure you keep it real.’ And I was like, ‘Oh. That’s what the kids are saying now?’ And so I put that in there myself: ‘I’m keepin’ it real. Because I’m keepin’ it real.'”
7.
Becky Albertalli, the author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, talked to the Hollywood Reporter about the process of adapting her book into the teen rom-com Love, Simon. One major change made to the story was the addition of the character Ethan (Clark Moore), an openly gay student at Simon’s high school. While some authors may be skeptical of such a significant addition to their story, it’s safe to say that Albertalli is a fan.
She said, “There’s this really lovely scene that screenwriters Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker added between these two boys [Simon and Ethan] who are not a couple, not into each other at all and are not even good friends, but they find that common ground and they talk about that. I wish I had explored that in the book, but I’m so glad it gets explored in the movie. … Ethan is like my adopted child. I didn’t create him, but if I can have him, I will claim him. I’m obsessed with that character.”
8.
Isn’t It Romantic director Todd Strauss-Schulson told Slash Film that he watched “somewhere between 80 and 100” romantic comedies to prepare to make his spoof on the genre. He said, “I watched every romantic comedy between 1988 and 2007 in the course of, like, two weeks, alone in my apartment like a true lunatic. It made my heart so tender and my brain turn to mush.”
He said he chose the 1988–2007 time frame because he sees it as “the modern heyday of romantic comedies.”
9.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Sandra Bullock initially turned down the starring role in The Lost City, but she agreed to take the gig after Paramount agreed to some of her suggested changes. Namely, that the script be altered to make her character, a successful romance novelist, a more powerful and dynamic hero, while her love interest, a cover model played by Channing Tatum, was changed to be more in touch with his feminine side.
Bullock said, “I love that there’s a man in it willing to be many aspects of himself that weren’t traditionally shown in films like this because they had to be the action hero. And Chan was so game.”
10.
Bridesmaids director Paul Feig told Insider that one of the moments cut from the film’s script was a fantasy sequence Annie enjoys in the bridal dress boutique about an idealized life shared with none other than Matt Damon.
Feig said, “Annie goes in the dressing room to try on this really expensive dress, and suddenly she has a fantasy of what her life could be in this dress. It’s this romance feel with her running through the woods and Matt Damon is shirtless chopping wood.” Ultimately, this scene was replaced with the one where Annie inadvertently causes all of her friends to contract food poisoning. The Damon sequence was never shot, with Feig promising, “If we shot with Matt Damon, you would see that scene.”
11.
During the ABC News special The Laughter & Secrets of Love Actually: 20 Years Later, director Richard Curtis said that Alan Rickman was genuinely frustrated while filming a scene in which an extremely detail-oriented salesperson, played by Rowan Atkinson, takes his sweet time wrapping a present Rickman’s character Harry is attempting to secretly buy for a woman he works with.
In the special, Curtis said that some of Atkinson’s takes lasted for 11 minutes and that his improvisation actually annoyed Rickman, who just like his character, only wanted to literally and figuratively wrap things up.
12.
In an interview with Vulture, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before star Lana Condor recounted how her future castmate Noah Centineo requested to run lines with her while they were waiting to audition — and Condor gently turned him down.
Condor said, “For the pre-read, when I first met Noah and he asked me to read lines with him, I was sitting in the waiting room. And I saw this beautiful tall man walk through the door. I immediately clocked that he clocked me, and he walked over to me. And I was like, ‘No, don’t come over here. Don’t come over here. Don’t come over here. I have to focus!'”
When the two later did a chemistry read together, Condor said she was “horrified” to learn the identity of her scene partner, worrying that the audition room incident would, to paraphrase a line from The Princess Bride, put a damper on their relationship. However, it all worked out in the end, and Condor said that in that chemistry read, she “knew immediately he was gonna be cast.”
13.
And finally: In an interview with NPR, Mandy Patinkin called filming The Princess Bride scene where Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) attempts to bring a “mostly dead” Westley (Cary Elwes) back to life as Inigo Montoya (Patinkin) and Fezzik (Andre the Giant) watch the “three greatest days of my life.”
Patinkin said, “[Crystal] improvised 13th century period jokes, three days straight, 10 hours a day, never the same thing, never the same line twice. Rob [Reiner, the director] got so hysterical on almost every take, he’d have to leave the room because he couldn’t keep quiet from laughing and it would end up on the soundtrack.”
Patinkin added, “I bruised the muscles on the side of my rib because I was so tight trying not to laugh.”
