Chapter 32

You’ve Got Mail

Let’s move beyond the one scene covering several tasks and walk through a full-length movie using the model we’ve been working on. All four elements (Meet, Crack, Why You?, Obstacle) are necessary, but sometimes they come in different orders. Let’s look at:

You’ve Got Mail (1998, written by Nora and Delia Ephron).

The Cute Meet

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is on an afternoon outing with two kids. Annabelle, 8 and Matt, 4. After tiring of the street fair, they drag Joe into the children’s book store owned by Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan). She assumes these are his kids, but he introduces them (correctly) as his aunt and his brother. Pretty cute. His father and grandfather remarried much younger women and fathered these two. Joe manages to get through the scene without her realizing who he is.

The Obstacle

Her life’s work is running the little children’s book shop her mother started, The Shop Around the Corner. His mega book store, Foxbooks, opens across the street and puts her out of business. Ruining her mother’s legacy, her livelihood, her daily life, her finances, and her chance to make a contribution to the world, her work family is torn apart. Joe Fox pretty much ruined everything for Kathleen Kelly. And she hates him.

Added to this, at the beginning of the movie they are both living with lovers. She with Greg Kinnear. He with Parker Posey. He is actually engaged to his wrong mate when we meet them. So unavailable.

And each is flirting with and sort of falling for an online penpal, which they have no idea is the other. So doubly unavailable.

Got obstacles? Check. Check. Check.

Why You?

They are twins. Smart. Charming. Funny. Endearing. Book people.

They email each other about things like a butterfly who flies onto a subway car at 42nd Street and gets off at Bloomingdale’s. They like the same adorable little things. Like twins do.

The Crack

As Joe Fox’s book superstore cracked open Kathleen Kelly’s world, he fell in love with her, though she has no idea. By the end of Act Two it is her turn to fall into the crack in Joe’s shell.

Sometimes the wound is not physical, but it is no less painful. No less of a wound. And it may even be inflicted by the beloved. Kathleen Kelly doesn’t even like Joe Fox until the scene in the café. They have been anonymous email penpals. He knows she’s his internet crush. She still has no idea.

Kathleen has had several cracks over the course of the story which have stolen Joe’s heart. She still grieves her dead mother Cecelia who created the adorable children’s book shop, which he inadvertently put out of business. Then Kathleen gets sick and Joe goes to see her at her apartment where she is a mess and he is kind and brings her daisies, which he knows are her favorite flowers. He is completely gone on her by this scene in the café.

But Kathleen still thinks she hates him. She is waiting for her penpal blind-date to arrive, and instead Joe shows up, wanting to sit at her table and talk. Finally, frustrated and worried that her date will see him there and get the wrong idea, she insults him, telling him he’s nothing but a suit and if someone cut him open they’d find a cash register instead of a heart. This hurts him so deeply that he can’t even respond. He’s devastated and simply stands, excuses himself, and walks away. And takes her heart with him. At that moment she is hooked. See how this works? Watch this scene closely. At the top of the scene she is not in love. Four minutes later she totally is. It happens right in front of our eyes.

A side note about Mail, people do not fall in love on the internet or by writing letters. Sorry. They can get interested. They can flirt and banter, get excited, titillated, and infatuated, but real love only happens between two human beings coming together. Abelard and Heloise situations (love letters only) happen about once in a century and even then they are based on fantasies about who the other is. They might not even like each other face to face. This is why the internet is such fertile ground for cyber predators. To fall in love, two people need to be able to see and hear and touch each other. Stephen Foster may have said it best. “In the eyes abides the heart.”

You’ve Got Mail is an adorable, charming movie. I have seen it many times and it never fails to engage me and touch me. My only problem is with the ending. Nora Ephron was working from an old and beloved tale that had already been made many times. From the original play by Hungarian Miklos Laszlo, which he adapted into the Jimmy Stewart/Margaret Sullavan The Shop Around the Corner (1940). Which became the Judy Garland/Van Johnson musical In the Good Old Summertime (1940), and the Broadway musical She Loves Me. Which was also filmed for television (1978) and has now been recently revived on Broadway. And all of these versions end the same way. Let me offer an alternative.

Here’s how it goes in the Ephron version, You’ve Got Mail:

Near the end of the movie, Joe is in love with Kathleen. She is in love with him, but still believes that her penpal is someone real. Someone else. She has a date to meet him, finally, in the park. By this point she and Joe are friends.

She goes home and changes her outfit, then goes to the park where they have agreed to meet. She knows her blind-date’s dog is named Brinkley, one of the few personal details his emails have revealed. She stands waiting for him to arrive and hears Joe’s voice calling, “Brinkley!” She sees Joe coming into the park with the dog, and she realizes he’s the penpal she’s been writing to. And she starts to cry. He comes over and wipes her tears with his handkerchief, and says, “Don’t cry, Shopgirl.” She says, “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it so badly.”

What? If she had any idea that it might be him, she never let on. And if she did, why didn’t she just ask him? They’re friends. And we can’t tell how she really feels. If she hadn’t wanted it to be him, she probably would have said it anyway. We’re not sure why she’s crying.

Then they kiss and Harry Nilsson starts singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the crane pulls the camera back to include all the flowers and the beautiful blue sky. Everything trying to cover the creeping feeling that something’s not totally all right with this scene. In Nora Ephron’s defense, this is pretty much exactly the way all five of the earlier versions ended.

Here is an alternative, I offer, in the interest of education.

I propose that the whole scene between Joe and Kathleen on the sidewalk (above) is perfect and nothing changes there. Then she goes to the park (I’d cut her changing clothes, to speed things along) and the scene changes to the following:

Kathleen stands there looking around and realizes that she’s made a mistake. She says to herself, “What am I doing?” and starts walking away, then jogging, then running. When she gets to the street, she runs into Joe walking toward the park.

And she grabs him and they kiss more and we pull back and it doesn’t really matter if Nilsson or Durante or Garland or nobody sings “Over the Rainbow.” Does it? Is this a better ending? Here’s why it is for me. It’s better when your protagonist has a choice and in the filmed version Kathleen Kelly thought she was making a choice, and then it turns out she doesn’t have one to make. She thought it was A or B and it turns out that there is only A. So we can never be sure what she might have chosen. This is weaker. It is always stronger when a protagonist chooses her own destiny.

When I was working to break into screenwriting in my early twenties, my kid sister (now Young Adult novelist Laura Whitcomb) and I would go to a double bill, two movies every Monday afternoon, because she wasn’t happy in 9th or 10th grade at her city high school, so it gave her something to look forward to. Monday Matinee Day made Sunday nights better. And we’d go to the movies whether or not there was anything good playing. We’d go to whatever was running at our multiplex.

If the movies were good we’d talk about every line and scene and what we liked about it. And if they weren’t great, we’d sometimes spend more time talking about them than watching them and we’d fix them. We’d rewrite and recast and reshoot them verbally until they were good movies in our minds. It made us feel better. When we’d finally get them right we’d say, “Yeah. That would have been good.” And move on to a new topic. But it taught us how to break story, as the saying goes. How to work out story problems. How to revise and edit. Try this at home. Don’t just say, “That was lousy.” Figure out how it could have been better. How it should have been written. You’ll learn some things.