Adam Sandler sings in a scene from the film The Wedding Singer, 1998. (Photo by New Line Cinema/Getty Images)
With more than 80 films to his credit and more than $5 billion at the global box office, it’s no wonder the industry has been celebrating Adam Sandler top The 56-year-old actor was honored last Sunday with the Mark Twain Award for American Humor, which the Kennedy Center has been presenting for 24 years. And he did it surrounded by all his famous friends. Conan O’Brien, Judd Apatow, Chris Rock, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Aniston and of course her collaborator and friend, Drew Barrymore. No one wanted to miss the opportunity to celebrate their career as an actor, producer and screenwriter spanning three decades with laughter and comedic genius. However, it is worth noting another Person who helped catapult him to stardom: Carrie Fisher.
Although it is contradictory that the most celebrated works by Adam Sandler Whatever his brilliant forays into drama (I still can’t believe he wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for Uncut Gems), his worldwide success obviously lies in comedy. This is how his career began, as a comic actor and successful signing on Saturday Night Live in 1990, to quickly make his mark in the world of cinema. Going Overboard (1989) was her film debut, although few remember her BillyMadison (1995) and Lucky Gilmore (1998) served as an infallible bridge to audiences loving the genre. However, they weren’t big box office hits (they grossed $25 million and $41 million respectively – Source: The Numbers), but productions that gained notoriety through word of mouth and VHS and over time have become modern classics. Actually, it was another film that managed to elevate it. The first he did with Drew Barrymore, declaring to the industry that he had the stuff to star in a romantic comedy: The best of my weddings (The Wedding Singer1998).
Directed by Frank Coraci, Adam Sandler played Robbie Hart, a wedding singer who was dumped by his girlfriend (Angela Featherstone) on the wedding altar . Because of this, sarcasm took over and he stopped believing in love, while his work made him celebrate it from party to party. But then he meets Julia Sullivan (Barrymore), a waitress who works at one of those weddings. They quickly become friends, but the platonic dynamic they share soon morphs into something more, despite Julia being engaged. The charisma of the two actors, the closeness and chemistry they convey make the film a treat for the romantic comedy genre. with an iconic ending sequence and song (Grow Old With You, which Drew Barrymore didn’t want to hear until the moment of filming so he would react spontaneously), a cameo by Billy Idol and a plane about to take off.
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Drew Barrymore said that several times Adam Sandler is his cinematic soulmate (Huffington Post) that he already knew before meeting him in person. And in that moment, with The Best of My Weddings stepping into her life, she rebuilt her career. She’d spent her entire teenage years in the image of a runaway child star, and her brief appearance on Scream had helped revitalize her image. Drew was 22 years old. Sandler had turned 30. And no one suspected that this first collaboration would be a success. That he would fill US cinemas and bathe his protagonists in the popularity that has accompanied them ever since. However, it probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Carrie Fisher and the role she played away from the Hollywood spotlight.
Coraci and Tim Herlihy – screenwriters for Madison and Gilmore – had been friends with Adam Sandler since their years together at New York University. They knew the comedian had an idea for a wedding singer to be left at the altar. Herlihy was planning something that would take place in the 80’s. And so they combined both ideas into one and wrote the screenplay. But what started as a comedy soon found its romantic undertones and put the writers against a wall (E! News). Because they got stuck with the incorporation of the romantic elements. “We didn’t know how to proceed,” Herlihy told Yahoo! lately.
So they called Carrie Fisher. Because the legendary actress practiced a second profession behind Princess Leia’s crown: She was a recognized and sought-after “screenwriter doctor”. That is, he retouched, polished, and sculpted typefaces that didn’t quite work. Without going further, he rendered his services in the screenplays of Hook, the return of Captain Hook (1991), change habit (1992), deadly weapon 3 (1992) and epidemic (1995).
Carrie Fisher brought the director and co-writer over to her house and they worked on the script for Best of My Weddings for six months. How Coraci Responded to Yahoo! remembered, he used to be surrounded by famous people, going in and out of Debbie Reynolds’ daughter’s house. “Be it Richard Dreyfus or Bernardo Bertolucci, Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics. People would show up at his house… And I was playing with Billie Lourd, who was little at the time,” he recalled in surprise at his first Hollywood experience at the Star Wars princess’ home.
LOS ANGELES, CA – NOVEMBER 28: Actress Carrie Fisher signs copies of her new book ‘The Princess Diarist’ at Barnes & Noble at The Grove on November 28, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic)
What Carrie Fisher did was shape the female characters and help unravel the narrative arc of the leading couple. They drew inspiration from classic rom-coms like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and along the way the actress shaped the main obstacles the couple would face in the story: namely, the comings and goings of Robbie and Juliet. Like when Robbie finally decides to confess his feelings, only to see Julia through the window admiring her wedding dress. Or Julia opens the door and finds Robbie’s ex-girlfriend wearing only a t-shirt.
During that six-month work, Carrie Fisher helped bring “heart, strength, and dimension” to Drew Barrymore’s character. After all, her secret as a ‘script doctor’, how said once before he died in 2016, he was “Makes women stronger and love scenes better“.
And it did, resulting in a screenplay with a romantic heart, with a charismatic and believable female character providing the script with the feminine and dramatic voice it lacked. After receiving Fisher’s completed script, Coraci, Herlihy, and Sandler set to work restoring it to its original comedic tone (according to Herlihy, Fisher had completely altered it, adding his voice to the story and removing Sandler’s). “But she did those structural things that really saved us in the second act” Herlihy admitted.
The result was one of the best romantic comedies of the 90’s and Adam Sandler’s filmography. The story’s balanced tone without being another half-baked Adam Sandler comedy or run-of-the-mill rom-com helped The Best of Weddings to engage mainstream audiences and carve its place at the worldwide box office when Titanic took over.
And the rest is history. The best of my weddings was the first collaboration between Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, a friendship that has lasted over time and which they shared with As if it were the first time (2004) and Luna de miel en family (2014).
In short, and according to what Sandler related on his friend’s show, The Best of My Weddings is the film he would put in a time capsule as a great example of his filmography.
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