26 Facts about Romantic Comedies - mental_floss List Show Ep. 341 | Mental Floss

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss Video

And did you know that the dance scene at the wedding in Coming to America was choreographed by a young Paula Abdul

According to Abdul, her motto as a choreographer was, Tell everyone, yes, I know exactly what I'm doing, and then I'll figure it out later

So that's what she did when they asked if she knew anything about African dancing. She ended up putting together something the director loved, so it all worked out

Of course, Africa is a gigantic continent full of vastly different kinds of dancing, but this is America

Anyway, that's the first of many facts I'm going to share with you today about some of my favorite romantic comedies, and also some of my least favorites

There's a Shakespeare and Company bookstore in When Harry Met Sally that inspired Nora Ephron to write You've Got Mail

The store closed due to competition from a Barnes and Noble, so she came up with the plotline of two competing bookstore employees in You've Got Mail

Oh, for the days when bookstores competed with each other. And for the days when your computer said, you've got mail

Speaking of books, you know what makes a great present for the holidays? Physical books bought at physical bookstores

Mine especially, but also by other people. Speaking of When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan turned down the role of Shelby in Steel Magnolias

so she could play Sally. Julia Roberts ended up taking the Shelby part

And it turns out the two probably most famous romantic comedy actresses have had a lot of

role swaps. Like Julia Roberts turned down the lead role in Sleepless in Seattle that

eventually went to Meg, and Meg Ryan turned down the lead role in Pretty Woman

Speaking of Pretty Woman, the classic scene where Edward snaps the jewelry box as Vivian

is reaching for it was actually a prank. The scene was filmed on the day after Julia Roberts

21st birthday so Richard Gere and director Gary Marshall planned the trick to you know wake her up a little because she was hungover Honestly she probably should have been allowed to keep the diamond necklace for managing to show up to work on the day after her 21st birthday God knows Meredith didn

Melissa McCarthy based Megan, her character in Bridesmaids, on celebrity chef Guy Fieri. According to McCarthy, quote

I tried for a long time to convince them to let me wear short, white, spiky hair, and they were like, you can't actually be Guy Fieri

There was a contest on the set of Crazy Stupid Love for the crew to name the movie, which didn't have a title yet

The prize was an iPad, but nobody won it and the directors stuck with their terrible working title

The funny thing about Crazy Stupid Love is that it's not a bad movie. It just has such a bad title that you assume that it will be

M. Night Shyamalan has claimed he ghost wrote the 90's rom-com She's All That

The credited screenwriter R. Lee Fleming Jr. tweeted that wasn't true at all, but some have suspicions that Fleming is actually a pen name of Shyamalan

Or maybe the trees did it. Or possibly an evil grandma. Anna Kendrick added the cup song to Pitch Perfect. Originally she was gonna sing another song, like I'm a Little Teapot

but she'd learned the cup song after seeing a viral video of it on Reddit, and so they put it in the movie

Speaking of little teapots, look how little this one is. It's one of the smallest items on our wall

Katharine Hepburn wanted her future significant other Spencer Tracy to co-star in the Philadelphia story with her

and this was before the two had ever worked together, possibly before she'd even met him

but he was unavailable and so James Stewart got the part. I noticed that here in the script Meredith wrote, insert flawless James Stewart impression, to which I say, no

Before Clueless became a movie, Amy Heckerling and her producing partner Twink Caplan pitched it to 20th Century Fox as a TV show

but it got rejected because it had, quote, too many girls. So Heckerling and Kaplan reworked it into a film a perfect film the greatest film of the 20th century Well other than Hitch Speaking of Hitch it was almost called The First Last Kiss The Switch was originally called The Baster because artificial insemination

and While You Were Sleeping was originally known as Coma Guy. I honestly don't know which of those is worse

Speaking of While You Were Sleeping, in the film there's a newspaper boy who tries to throw a newspaper and then fails

That was actually an unplanned moment. That kid broke his wrist. Paul Simon signed a deal to write three new songs for the movie The Graduate, but he was touring a lot and he only turned in one song before the film was done being edited

And then he met with director Mike Nichols and played a little of a song titled Mrs. Roosevelt, which he hadn't written for the movie

Instead, he said it was a song about the past. Nichols convinced him to change the title to Mrs. Robinson

The classic 1934 romantic comedy, It Happened One Night, was the first film to win all five major Academy Awards for picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay

The only other two films to do this, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Silence of the Lambs

For his role as Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, Billy Crystal brought two pictures to the makeup artist for inspiration, one of his grandmother and one of former baseball player and manager Casey Stengel

Marilyn Monroe probably wasn't as well paid as you think she was

For instance, she was initially paid $100,000 for her work on the unfinished film Something's Gotta Give

At that time, it wasn't unusual for Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, to receive a $1 million salary

As of now, Jerry Maguire is the lowest-grossing number one movie at the box office in U.S. history

During its fourth week in theaters, it earned just $5.5 million, but still managed to be the number one film that week

As I always say when the staff begs for a pork chop party, show me the money

There isn enough in there yet As David O Russell was writing Silver Linings Playbook he imagined Zooey Deschanel and Vince Vaughn in the lead roles In the original screenplay for Groundhog Day Phil was stuck in that day for a full 10 years

Director Harold Ramis eventually said he was probably stuck there for about 30 or 40 years

Speaking of early scripts, the original ending of Fever Pitch had the Red Sox losing in the playoffs, of course

But then, in 2004, when they were filming the movie, there were three games that indicated, you know, that the Red Sox had a pretty good chance to win the World Series

so the Farrelly brothers decided to have Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore attend the next game, and the Red Sox won

So Fallon and Barrymore rushed the field in character to kiss, which ended up in the movie

Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, are partially responsible for the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Wilson brought Hanks to one of Nia Vardalos' stand-up performances and convinced him that they should produce a movie about it

The film Coyote Ugly was based on an article published in a 1997 issue of GQ that was written

by Elizabeth Gilbert, who went on to write Eat, Pray, Love. And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you that before Bridget Jones's diary went

into production, Renee Zellweger spent three weeks undercover working at a publishing firm

in the United Kingdom. She spent her days doing pretty ordinary tasks, answering phones, calling literary editors

making photocopies, and of course perfecting her British accent. And according to her boss, only a few people noted that she looked, quote, just like the

girl from Jerry Maguire, but all in all, she went pretty unnoticed