High school reunion
of feature development at Touchstone Pictures: Ladies’ Room got sent to me as a writing sample and I asked to meet with Robin, who I thought was hysterical.
Now, one sees its DNA everywhere from Broad City’s central slackers to the gleefully over-the-top antics in Barb and Starr Go to Vista Del Mar.Īlex Schwartz, then-senior V.P. Based on two ancillary characters in a play by Robin Schiff, Romy and Michele trudged through half a decade of script overhauls, studio interference, disastrous test screenings, a director who threatened to take his name off of the film, and more before becoming one of the most influential comedies of its time. Released 25 years ago this week, it’s something of a miracle that the film even made it to theaters. Instead, it ended up being the first Romy and Michele: a sweetly daffy ode to female friendship, bedazzled heels, interpretative dance, and businesswoman specials. Starring Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino as two ditzy best friends who concoct a lie to impress their classmates at a 10-year reunion, the film was pitched to its leads as an estrogen-fueled Beavis and Butt-Head. The ’90s in particular had this genre in spades, with buddy comedies like Wayne’s World and Dumb & Dumber among the era’s biggest moneymakers.īut when Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion came out in 1997, it went where few other major studio comedies had dared. Since Abbott and Costello first met Frankenstein, it’s been a grand cinematic tradition to place dim-witted duos in absurd scenarios, wind them up, and watch them go.