Time for reunion with Romy and Michele?
IN APRIL this year, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion marked 20 years since its release in the 1990s.
The movie told the story of Los Angeles underachievers Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michele (Lisa Kudrow), heading home to Tucson for their 10-year high school reunion.
While a modest box office hit — it made a respectable $30 million worldwide — the film has lived on as an endlessly quotable cult classic.
Here’s a few things you probably never knew about the comedy classic ...
◗ BATHROOM BEGINNINGS: Robin Schiff, who wrote the film’s screenplay, took the characters from her stage play Ladies Room, which also featured a then-unknown Kudrow (they were both members of the famed Groundlings improv troupe).
Romy and Michele only had small parts in Ladies Room, which focused on the comings and goings inside the women’s bathroom of a Mexican restaurant. This LA Times review of the play from way back in 1988 described the characters as “a pair of totally awesome Valley girls vapidly looking for guys with good jobs (it makes them sexier).”
◗ OSCAR CHOPS: Romy and Michele was the first film that Sorvino signed on for after she’d won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite.
◗ MAD SKILLS: It’s said that Lisa Kudrow improvised Michele’s monologue, in which she claims to have invented a ‘special kind of glue’, on the spot — putting those Groundlings skills to good use.
◗ BIG DISGUISE: Remember the film’s crazy dream sequence, when Michele fronts up to the reunion only to find that nerdy Sandy Frink (Alan Cumming), who she’d always ignored in high school, was now a square-jawed, beefy hunk?
Incredibly, ‘Hot Sandy’ wasn’t played by a different actor. Cumming took on both roles, thanks to some pretty serious make-up and prosthetics.