Schiff’s been living with Romy and Michele for nearly 30 years, but this summer will mark a new milestone for the characters: she’s bringing a musical version of Romy and Michele to the stage, at Seattle’s 2,000-seat 5th Avenue Theatre. Her original film, she says, was “so low-concept”-unlike today’s comedies, which are not just high-concept, but also “gross. Schiff also believes a studio would never greenlight a movie like Romy and Michele today. Sorvino told Schiff that she wants to do a sequel, but though Schiff already wrote and directed a critically drubbed Romy and Michele prequel for ABC Family in 2005-starring Katherine Heigl and Alexandra Breckenridge as the title characters-she thinks a true sequel will never happen. Last month in L.A., Schiff and Sorvino attended a 20th anniversary screening of the film. The longer it went on, the funnier it got.” “I was there for the shooting of the dance”-a bizarre sequence that could give the Movements from The OA a run for their money, set to the very expensive “Time After Time”-“and I’m going, what the hell are they doing? The first time I saw it cut together, I didn’t know what to think. Schiff thinks she wrote an “original” story in Romy and Michele, but also understands why some people might not like the movie. ![]() “And the reviews start coming out,” she remembers, “and they were good!” (Ebert gave it three stars and two thumbs up.) “We all were in an unbelievable state of shock.” Both Grosse Pointe and Romy and Michele ended up being profitable at the box office. “I made plans to go out of town the weekend it opened, because I figured there would be all these horrible reviews and I’d be embarrassed.” When Disney suddenly moved the film’s planned release date back to accommodate Grosse Pointe Blank-another high-school reunion comedy, starring John Cusack-Schiff was stuck at home. “The studio was going to dump it,” Schiff says. “You’d see these two friends, and they looked like they got dressed together and were wearing different versions of the same thing.” She was shocked to see the characters earn “a huge laugh and applause” on opening night from their entrance alone: “I’m standing in the theater going, why? I’m still fascinated what made them applaud just by seeing them.” And the laughs kept coming-especially when Romy admitted that she hates throwing up in public, and Michele replied, “Me too.” “They were loosely based, just visually, on these girls I used to see going into a club on Sunset Blvd.,” Schiff says. Kudrow, whom Schiff knew from the Groundlings improv comedy troupe, played Michele it was her very first role in a professional production. In 1987, Romy and Michele scribe and co-executive producer Robin Schiff decided to add a pair of overgrown Valley girls to a play she had written, Ladies Room. business woman’s special?”), and the heartwarming friendship at its core.īut Romy and Michele’s story actually began more than 10 years earlier. ![]() Directed by David Mirkin, the movie grossed $29 million when it premiered 20 years ago, against a $20 million budget-a whopping $240,000 of which went toward licensing “Time After Time.” Though the film wasn’t an immediate hit, it eventually achieved cult status on video and cable reruns, thanks to its charming stars, its unique wit (“Do you have some sort of. Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino-riding high on the success of Friends and Mighty Aphrodite, respectively-were perfectly matched as the eponymous stars of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, an R-rated 1997 comedy about a pair of ditzy 28-year-olds who share a bedroom in Venice Beach, love Pretty Woman, and design idiosyncratic fashions.
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