The following conversation was recorded at Matteo’s Restaurant in Los Angeles.  The waiter has just brought the martinis. 

TOM BAUM:  Cheers.

CAROL BAUM:  Cheers.

TB:  We have the restaurant to ourselves.

CB:  Because of Rosh Hashanah.  He was happy to see us.

TB:  He’s used to seeing us on Date Night.

CB:  How many Date Nights have we had?

TB:  Since we moved to L.A.?  It’s been 40 years…but since we started having baby-sitters…maybe 35 years…times, say, 50…more than 1700 Fridays.  Plus occasional Wednesdays.

CB:  Our first date, we went to a movie, but it wasn’t a love story—

TB:  We saw ”Career”…Anthony Franciosa, Shirley MacLaine…not a love story?

CB:  It was about ambition.  My second favorite subject.

TB:  You grew up on love stories.  Before we met.

CB:  Baby-sitting, when I was 13, all alone, watching Million Dollar Movie.  For some reason Million Dollar Movie showed melancholy movies.

TB:  But the theme song was “My Own True Love,” sung by Jimmy Clanton.

CB:  From “Gone with the Wind.”

TB:  This bread is new.  It’s not garlic bread…it’s cheese with basil.

CB:  It’s good.  Nice change.

TB:  Did we watch a lot of movies together back then?  I know we didn’t talk much on that first date.  We didn’t go out to dinner.

CB:  Who had money?  Kids went to Joe’s Pizza.  Or Don’s.  CB:  We hit it off because we both enjoyed old movies.

TB:  Funny, I don’t remember any conversation.

CB:  I remember.  Because I’m romantic.  To me you were like an Angry Young Man in your Richard Burton turtleneck.  And later on we did watch movies together.  But not love stories.  It’s my favorite genre, and you can’t even watch kissing on screen.  You talk through all the love scenes.

TB:  Through the sex scenes.  Or I yawn.  Or just wait them out.

CB:  Because of your father.

TB:  Every time there was kissing, on TV, he’d go, “Mmm, plum cake.”  That could have broken either way, but I guess I took that to mean, “This is something to be embarrassed about.”  So yeah, whenever there’s kissing, I have the impulse to close my eyes.  I’m watching the Primal Scene, and I shouldn’t be.  “Roman Holiday”—that’s my idea of a love story.  My all-time favorite.

CB:  Why?

TB:  Why?  Because there’s no kissing, and also they don’t get together at the end.  I mist up twice—when Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn say goodbye, and then when Audrey Hepburn says “Rome.”  And “Sabrina” too.  No kissing in that.

CB:  But they’re both so light.  (to Waiter) We’re ready to order.  (to TB) I don’t think of “Sabrina” as a love story so much as a Cinderella story.  (to Waiter) I’ll have the veal marsala.

TB:  And I’ll have the linguini frutti de mare, white.

CB:  Mostly I remember watching movies by myself.  Movies to me were a solo experience.

TB:  When I start to make comments—

CB:  —I want you to shut up.  Movies are a very profound experience to me, and I don’t want anybody talking.  During or after.

TB:  They’re not a shallow experience for me.  But I like to talk.  Though I’ve learned not to.

CB:  The beginning of addiction for me was Bette Davis.  “The Letter”…”Dark Victory”…”Now, Voyager.”

TB:  Is that the one where Paul Henreid lights two cigarettes and hands one to her?

CB:  Yes.

TB:  And Shelley Berman did that routine about lighting two cigarettes and forgetting to hand one to the girl.  You sort of educated me about Bette Davis.

CB:  Why would you need an education about Bette Davis?

TB:  Because I don’t think I saw that many Bette Davis movies growing up.  “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte” and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”—those are the ones I saw.

CB:  Because so many of the other ones were love stories.  [as noisy people are seated at the next table]  Why do they do that?  Every other table empty, and they put them right next to us.

TB:  Finish your drink, you won’t mind as much.  Do you think you’d have more love stories on your all-time list than I would?

CB:  Absolutely.  I’m a girl.

TB:  “The Lady Eve?”  That’s number three on my all-time list.

CB:  “The Lady Eve” is great but it’s a comedy.

TB:  OK, we can get into definitions here—

CB:  “Wuthering Heights.”  Movies that are sad… unrequited love…doomed romance…

TB:  “Roman Holiday” is unrequited.  But you’re right.  Romantic comedy is a subcategory.  But that means they don’t make pure love stories anymore.  Except for Nicholas Sparks.  You taught me to appreciate those.  “Message in a Bottle.”  I’ve seen that three times.

CB:  I’m partial to “The Notebook.”  I cried.  But it pales beside the old ones.  “The Fountainhead.”  “Picnic.”  It’s the passion.  Passion is at the center of those movies.  Not plot twists.

TB:  And even the word “passion” has gone out of style.

CB:  For a lonely 13-year-old girl, movies like “Picnic”…”The Rainmaker”…”The Long Hot Summer”…”Rebecca”…they all had the same theme for me…somebody glamorous and exotic changes the life of the quiet person.  William Holden, Paul Newman, Laurence Olivier, Burt Lancaster…they could sweep you off your feet.

TB:  And I was in that category?  All proportions kept.

CB:  Yes.  Absolutely.

TB:  Wow.

CB:  I totally identified with Joanne Woodward, the schoolteacher in “The Long Hot Summer.”  I even tried to wear my hair like her.  In a bun.

TB:  Did you really?

CB:  Oh yeah.  My mother had a bun, but it was more of the party-girl variety, surrounded by a velvet bow, or rhinestones.  Joanne Woodward’s was the sedate version, which was more to my taste and disposition.  Sassy, but nice.  The movies that spoke to me were the ones where the guy understands the woman who’s misunderstood up to that point.

TB:  And the girl is right under the guy’s nose, and he doesn’t realize it.  “Jane Eyre.”  “The Sound of Music.”

CB:   The guy who saves the girl…that was a fixture of the 40s and the 50s.  When I was pitching “Jacknife,” that’s what I emphasized:  De Niro bringing Kathy Baker out of her shell and they fall in love.

TB:  What about  “Daisy Kenyon”?  That’s another one of my favorites, and it’s a total love story—two guys…which one is Joan Crawford gonna go with?  And it’s not completely obvious, though we’re rooting for Henry Fonda over Dana Andrews—Dana Andrews isn’t Ralph Bellamy.  But is it true what we’re saying, they don’t do pure love stories anymore?

CB:  Well, “The Way We Were” was 1973.  In the star-crossed category…radical Jew and apolitical Gentile…but that’s a long time ago.

TB:  “Love Story,” that was even further back.

CB:  Oh God.

TB:  “Love is never having to say you’re sorry”?  What marriage can last without cordiality?  Lucky she died.  But I have a theory.

CB:  Yeah, so what’s your theory?

TB:  For one thing…violence took over.  “The Wild Bunch” let that cat out of the bag.  Once filmmakers could do violence, they kept doing it.

CB:  Yeah, but women don’t like that.

TB:  Some women get turned on by boxing matches…hockey fights…

CB:  I’m talking about the majority.  Women do not go to those movies.  That’s not the demo.

TB:  The audience for horror is majority-women.

CB:  That’s totally different.

TB:   And for some reason…the major directors of the 70s…Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Altman, Coppola…they stayed away from love stories.

CB:  Except for “Always,” which didn’t work.

TB:  As opposed to the previous generation…Preminger….”Daisy Kenyon” and “Laura”…and Lubitsch…”The Shop Around the Corner”…William Wyler….

CB:  And Billy Wilder.  “The Apartment” is maybe the greatest love story of all.  Shirley MacLaine running through the streets to get back to Jack Lemmon…movies have been copying that ever since.

TB:  But why did the Easy Rider generation stay away from love stories?  It makes you think of Leslie Fiedler…his thing about how American literature basically never dealt with mature relations between the sexes…It was more about men together…men of different races…Huck and Jim…Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook…and exploring the frontier…leaving the women behind, who all they want to do is domesticate them…plus Jake Barnes, who’s totally impotent and incapable of loving Lady Brett Ashley….And come to think of it:  Preminger…Lubitsch…Wyler…Wilder…they’re all Europeans.

CB:  And Kazan, he was from Greece.  “On the Waterfront.”  That has such a great love story.  And “Splendor in the Grass.”  I cry every time at the end, when Natalie Wood pays a call on Warren Beatty…he’s married Zohra Lampert and he’s become a farmer.  And “East of Eden,” with the two guys vying for Julie Harris.

TB:  So today it’s Nicholas Sparks or nothing?

CB:  Well, they do keep remaking “A Star is Born.”

TB:  But that’s love gone bad.

CB:  And “Brokeback Mountain.”

TB:  OK, but that’s Ang Lee, and he’s Chinese.

WAITER:  (serving the entrées)  Another drink?

TB:  No, I think we’re good.

WAITER:  More bread?

TB:  I wouldn’t say no to bread.

CB:  So we agree, except for Nicholas Sparks, and a couple of exceptions, love stories have faded from view.  Judd Apatow makes “Knocked Up,” instead of tugging at the heartstrings.

TB:  Is “Something Wild” a love story?  The mismatched-couple variety?

CB:  Yes, in a way, but not as much as “Wuthering Heights.”  The working-class guy pining for Cathy, who’s out of his league.  That’s a very powerful concept.

TB:  That seems to be a theme with you:  class differences make for the best love stories.

CB:  Well, what did you use to say about me?  “Up from Irvington”—the wrong side of the tracks.  As opposed to your family—German Jews and seventh-generation Wasps.

TB:  What about the femme fatale though?  Isn’t “Gilda” one of your favorites?  More than mine?

CB:  Yeah.  The more Glenn Ford hates Rita Hayworth the more he loves her.  “Out of the Past.”  “Double Indemnity.”

TB:  Who doesn’t love those?  But then there’s “Love Actually.”  A lot of people sneer at that movie, and it’s got a bunch of different themes.

CB:  Mostly about finding the right person.  Like the stories in “Mumford.”

TB:  We love both those movies.  And “Brief Encounter”—there’s no plot in it…except the love story.  Wall-to-wall.  Again, that’s the love that can’t last…where they don’t get together in the end.  Because if two people get together, it’s not really an ending.  Do they have a happy marriage?  Do they break up?  It’s artificial.  If they can’t ever see each other, that’s actual closure.  More satisfying.

CB:  “A Place in the Sun” is a great love story.  He’s ambitious, he’s willing to kill for her, the upper-crust girl.

TB:  Again, the class difference.

CB:  “Sayonara,” what sub-category is that?

TB:  “All for love and the world well lost.”  Red Buttons gives up his life for Katsumi.

CB:  And Marlon Brando gives up the perfect marriage everybody planned for him…he turns his back on America, basically.  All for Hana-Ogi.

TB:  Parallel love stories, and there’s nothing else going on in that movie.  No B story.  It’s unique in a way.  There’s a double suicide, and yet it’s not a downer.

CB:  OK, but we’ve forgotten a new class of love story—the vampire love story.  The whole “Twilight” series.

TB:  Never saw it, set that aside.  So what sank the love story?  The parity between men and women?  Total partnership?  You’ll pick up the dry cleaning, I’ll make the beds, and between us we’ll have a good life.  That’s not exactly a romantic notion.  Were love stories dependent on women’s dependence?

CB:  Women don’t need saving anymore.  Now it’s men that need saving.

TB:  But where are those movies?  They don’t exist.

CB:  Because of the international audience.  Action dominates.  They say, when you pitch a love story, they can’t find the actors to do it.  Maybe actors today would rather carry a gun than kiss a girl.

TB:  That’s always been sort of true.  John Wayne…Steve McQueen…

CB:  Newman, Redford…they didn’t mind being romantic.

TB:  What about couples?  There used to be Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn.  People went to see them as a couple.  Because they were a couple in life…of sorts.

CB:  There’s George Clooney…for a while he was Cary Grant…but he’s never made anything like “Notorious.”  He’s not basically a romantic leading man.  So many of his movies are political.

TB:  That’s really telling.  Today’s Cary Grant is not a romantic lead.  That’s the clincher.

CB:  So what do people want from their lovers nowadays?  That’s the question to ask.  What did you want when you were 17?

TB:  When I was 17?  I didn’t know what I wanted…until I was 19, and we started going together…Before that I was just going through the motions, because that’s what you did, you dated.  I was just playing a role, all fake, and I felt completely inauthentic…and then, from that first date with you, I didn’t.  I made you break your New Year’s date, and when I went back to college, I announced to my roommates that I was going to marry you.

CB:  Without consulting me.

TB:  Runs in the family.  My father didn’t consult my mother either.  Have you ever made a love story?

CB:  Well, I developed “An Officer and a Gentleman.”  But that was more than 35 years ago.

TB:  I’ve definitely never written one.

CB:  So what are we complaining about.

TB:  I have another theory.  We don’t have love stories in the movies, because people are living them instead.

CB:  That’s very sweet.

TB:  Are we going to have dessert?