The real BFFs behind a perfect movie friendship
How Lauren Pomerantz wrote Am I OK?
I’m an influencer in one regard, which is that I’ve gotten a lot of friends to watch Am I OK?. My latest influencee is my good friend Rebecca, who texted me earlier this week: “Finally watched am I ok on the plane! It was a really sweet movie!” Her review could have been more ecstatic, but I agree. It’s the best kind of sweet, like a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s on a cozy Friday night at home.
Am I OK? is not a comedy where the protagonist trips down a flight of stairs or careens into a pole nuts-first. Nobody barrels through a conversation in such painfully awkward fashion that you, the viewer, are left twitching on the floor. (For what it’s worth, I did like Friendship, Tim Robinson’s latest carousel of cringe.) The punchlines aren’t shouted. Instead, Am I OK? is quiet and sneaky in its comedy — a relatable tale of female friendship that warms you through the heart and makes you think fondly of your best friend. I’ve seen it, conservatively, six or seven times since it was released last year.
Because I’ve spent so much time thinking about this movie, I did the normal thing and emailed its writer, Lauren Pomerantz, to see if she would agree to an interview with The Scumbler. Several months ago, she popped up on my Zoom screen, bright-eyed, from her home in New Jersey. I soon learned that we share a spiritual connection that transcends her script: We are both germaphobes who eat finger food (dinner rolls, pizza, etc.) with cutlery if hand-washing isn’t on offer, even though this makes us look weird and slightly insane.
I also came to understand why Am I OK? is such a believable story about friendship: Lauren based its central relationship on her and her best friend, Jessica Elbaum, whom she has known for over 20 years.
In the film, which was directed by real-life spouses Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne, Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a spa receptionist and creatively-blocked painter who is struggling to tell people that she’s gay. Shortly after she comes out to her best friend Jane (Sonoya Mizuno) — and amidst her early forays into dating women — the two get into a protracted fight. There’s a ticking clock on their reconciliation: Jane is imminently leaving Los Angeles to open a London office for her company. Will they make up in time?? (You get one guess.)
For Lauren, formerly a writer on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, her friendship with Jessica was the genesis of the project. They had long discussed making a movie together: Jessica is the co-founder of Gloria Sanchez Productions with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, and has produced films like Booksmart, May December, and Bachelorette. Lauren describes herself as a bit of a rule-follower, while Jessica is “very bossy,” a doer with the tendency to dictate their hiking routes and party plans. Thanks to Jessica, Lauren has found herself in some unusual situations over the years: “I mean, I ended up at a dinner with Sharon Stone one time. I was like, what’s happening right now?”
Like so many best friends, they’ve developed a shared language of dumb jokes and bits, like leaving a fart sound when they reach each other’s voicemail. Lauren was eager to write a script that made use of their specific dynamic, but whenever she sat down to work on it, she found herself stymied. “I thought about it for years, and nothing came of it because there wasn’t a there there,” she told me. “I didn’t have the story that I wanted to tell yet.”
But something else was brewing. During this time, Lauren was wrestling with the idea of telling the people in her life that she was gay. “I swear — and I hope people will believe me when I say this — I was not going to come out. I was adamant that I was not doing it,” she said. Lauren had told her therapist, but that was it: As close as she and Jessica were, Lauren avoided bringing it up.
Gradually, Lauren warmed to her therapist’s advice to sign up for a dating app and try having coffee with a woman. And, in time, she opened up to Jessica, too. “When I finally told her, it made our friendship so much better. It was such a relief,” she said. A year later, in 2015, Lauren met her now-wife on Tinder.
At last, there was a there there. Realizing that she was living a story that she hadn’t seen onscreen — and correctly sensing that it might help other people, too — Lauren began writing, banging out the first 30 pages in a day. In her script, the coming-out story gave traction to the friendship, and the friendship helped externalize a coming-out process that, for Lauren, was deeply private. “Coming out was such an internal thing for me in real life, and I felt like that was the best way to show it: I won’t even tell this person, who probably thinks it and is afraid to say it herself but wants to,” she explained.
I can imagine a lesser version of Am I OK? that focuses tightly on Lucy’s experience and minimizes Jane’s solo screen time — after all, the thinly-written best friend is a Hollywood classic. Instead, Lauren gave Jane plenty of scenes, including a detour to a “hammock sanctuary retreat,” where she has a (very funny) meltdown while processing her fight with Lucy. Where Lucy is neurotic and self-doubting, Jane appears confident and decisive. She wears sharp blazers to work and looks cool and commanding doing so. But Lauren wanted to reveal the squishy feelings under her best friend’s armor.
“It was important for me to show both sides of the coin,” Lauren said. “It was frustrating from [Jessica’s] point of view that I was squashing this thing. I wanted to show [her] character’s frustration and disappointment. How could you not tell me this, and why did you think you couldn’t? And I wanted to show that she’s tough, but she’s vulnerable, too. She’s not without emotion.”
There’s a moving idea at the center of Am I OK?: Great friendships aren’t ones where things stay the same forever, but where both people are growing into themselves, side by side, whether that means coming out or journeying abroad. (We learn that Jane spent her early life in England, so the move is an opportunity to reclaim a home that she was reluctant to leave as a teenager.) In fact, the more yourself you become, the stronger your bond might be. By the end of the movie, Lucy and Jane’s dynamic feels more buoyant and open than ever before. They’re radiating sunbeams at each other.
Lauren has a gift for dialogue, Jessica told me. She isn’t cursed with the class clown’s desire to captivate a room, and her writing is the same way — low-key and precise, but persistently funny. “It’s not needy,” Jessica said. “She doesn’t need things to be broad or big.”
Some of that talent lies in the power of observation. Lauren told me that she filched from life, jotting down all of her and Jessica’s weirdest in-jokes and exchanges, before fictionalizing the details and, alas, removing the poop jokes. “I sometimes say I write the documentary first, where it’s based on a real person to a degree that is uncomfortable,” said Lauren.
Lucy and Jane are about to go on a hike.
Jane: Oh, I almost forgot. I got muffins.
Lucy: Oo-ooh! Bluebs?
Jane: A bluebs and a bran. We each have half of one now, and half when we’re done.
Lucy: I can’t have a whole one now?
Jane: No, half and half! Then we have a snack waiting for us when we’re done. It’s the smart way to do it.
Lucy: It’s the controlling way to do it.
Bluebs! It’s perfect. That’s how friends talk. As Jessica told me, that scene was lifted from a real-life hike, for which she’d provided the muffins and unsolicited direction.
“I always felt like a big sister taking care of her,” said Jessica. “I was like, ‘Listen. I’m not going to tell you how to eat your muffins, but if I were you, this is how I would do it. Because you’re going to eat it all right now, and then you’re gonna want it in three hours when we’re not even there yet.’ She was like, ‘I can’t believe you’re telling me how to eat my muffin.’ But then, of course, at the end, in a very Lauren way, she was like, ‘I’m really glad I saved it.’”
For Lauren and Jessica, who produced the movie, it was surreal to watch Johnson and Mizuno playing versions of them. “The two of us watching the fight play out, or the coming-out scene — that was wild and intense,” said Lauren, adding that she was surprised to see Johnson capture her awkwardness so effectively.
Jessica occasionally had to quell her inner control freak while watching her life play out on set, but, like a good producer, she told me that she didn’t want the actors to feel like they had to embody her and Lauren perfectly. On a hike, Jessica told Mizuno about the feelings of vexation that she felt before Lauren came out — how she would poke and prod at her best friend in an effort to shake the truth loose. “I remember sitting at a bar with her and almost making up stuff about dating — dating I wasn't even doing at the time — to get her to talk,” she said. “I told Sonoya about how frustrated and angry and helpless it made me feel.”
The muffin scene, which takes place shortly after Lucy has come out to Jane, leads into an exchange about Lucy’s fear of jumping into the dating pool. “Lucy, these are lame fucking excuses so you don’t have to step outside of your comfort zone. You are more than capable of being happy. Don’t spew that bullshit at me,” says Jane.
The scene isn’t played in a particularly dramatic way; Mizuno delivers that indictment almost off-handedly, jogging up and down a flight of stairs while Johnson fiddles with her water bottle. Still, it hit Jessica in the gut. “I just felt bad,” she said, groaning at the memory. “Sometimes I was too much. It was a little hard for me to watch. Dakota’s whole body sank into herself, like she couldn’t take it anymore.”
Jessica told me that Lauren is uniquely able to call her out, and Lauren hazarded that she offers a more emotional perspective than Jessica does. If you believe that mutual honesty is a form of love, as I do, then that difficult moment on the stairs is a worthy tribute to the arc of their friendship.
When I asked Lauren if any movies provided a north star for her script, in terms of tone or spirit, she referenced Gillian Robespierre’s delightful abortion comedy Obvious Child (which would make for a great double feature with Am I OK?). She also mentioned Garry Marshall’s 1988 film Beaches, starring Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey, describing it as “the ultimate friendship movie.” When I told her I hadn’t seen it, she threw up her hands and immediately assigned me a two-paragraph report on it.
I have now watched Beaches. So, Lauren, here is my report:
What I like most about Beaches are the fights. First there’s the Really Big Fight, when the dam holding back Bette and Barbara’s long-simmering resentment breaks in such a destructive way that they don’t speak for a long time. That one feels bad to watch. But once they reconcile, every subsequent spat is oddly reassuring. These are the kinds of fights you get into with your sister — there’s grumpiness and criticism, but no real threat to the relationship, which you know can withstand just about anything.
Similarly, I love the scenes where they play gin rummy, as locked in and competitive as professional gamblers. There’s no pretense of ladylike graciousness. You treat someone with kid gloves when you don’t know them very well; with your best friend, you can show your true feelings, including the desire to kick their ass.
Also, it’s weird that Beaches is a drama and basically a musical, but I loved all of Bette’s numbers. Loved. Bette forever.
That’s all for today! If you have a friend with whom you share dumb inside jokes, please consider also sharing this newsletter with them.
Seems like it’s time for rewatch #8,
Eliza