How 'My Best Friend’s Wedding' messed with Julia Roberts’s image and changed rom-coms for good. An excerpt from scottmeslow's 'From Hollywood with Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy'
My Best Friend’s Wedding changed the rom-com genre. All it took was a spate of rewrites. Photo: TriStar Pictures When TriStar Pictures announced that Julia Roberts, who’d broken out in Pretty Woman in 1990 and subsequently become the subject of endless tabloid fixation, was set to star in another rom-com, no one was particularly surprised, Scott Meslow points out in his book, From Hollywood With Love. But the project was bolder than it first appeared.
But if not for one truly disastrous table read, My Best Friend’s Wedding could have been a very different movie, because Hogan had an actor he thought would be perfect for Michael in the back of his mind all along. “My first choice was actually Russell Crowe,” says Hogan, whose wife, the writer-director Jocelyn Moorhouse, had worked with Crowe on 1991’s Proof. “Russell was, I thought, probably the most amazing actor I had ever encountered.
Still, Julia Roberts was concerned that an actress who was too charismatic — and who Michael ultimately chooses over Julianne — might steal the movie from her altogether. Many, many young actresses auditioned, including Drew Barrymore, Calista Flockhart, and Reese Witherspoon.
The first rewrite session did not go entirely smoothly, due in large part to the presence of the Ronettes — Bass’s all-female group of young screenwriting consultants. “I had been warned about the Ronettes, but I thought it was sort of an urban myth,” says Hogan. “But I arrived to work with Ron, and there was Ron in the middle of a big circle that reminded me of like a group therapy session. And they were all young women.
Hogan and Roberts ended up dueling over the climax to that all-important karaoke scene, in what turned out to be a microcosm of the tonal tug-of-war at the heart of My Best Friend’s Wedding. In the scene, Julianne has set Kimmy up to embarrass herself, secretly knowing that she can’t carry a tune. She hopes that Michael will be mortified and repulsed at his fiancée’s awkwardness.
The original ending for My Best Friend’s Wedding finds Julianne sitting alone at Michael and Kimmy’s wedding, sadder and wiser as she lets the man she loves slip away. She goes outside to call George. Suddenly, a devastatingly handsome single man, played by John Corbett, approaches. “Hi, I’m Andy Connelly. We haven’t met,” he says.
This romantic comedy, which had been so carefully engineered to interrogate its heroine, had ultimately gone too easy on her. A precise series of reshoots were conceived and shot to fix that problem. First came the climactic confrontation between Julianne and Kimmy at Comiskey Park, which was tweaked so Kimmy would explicitly call out Julianne’s awful behavior instead of forgiving her right away. “You kissed him! At my parents’ house! On my wedding day!” she yells.
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