Meet Cute - Use of "meet Cute" Situations

Use of "meet Cute" Situations

is conveniently importuned by this attractive young fellow she happens to run into—to "meet cute," as they say—on a Fifth Avenue bus.

The term was standard among screenwriters - Billy Wilder uses it in his Paris Review interview in relation to his 1938 film Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, for instance. Film critics such as Roger Ebert or the Associated Press' Christy Lemire popularized the term in their reviews. In Ebert's commentary for the DVD of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which he co-wrote, he describes the scene where law student Emerson Thorne bumps into the female character Petronella Danforth. Ebert admits that he, as the screenwriter, wrote into the script a "classic Hollywood meet cute." He explains the meet cute as a scene "in which somebody runs into somebody else, and then something falls, and the two people began to talk, and their eyes meet and they realize that they are attracted to one another."

In the 2006 romantic American comedy The Holiday, one of the characters, Arthur, who has been a script writer during the Golden Age of Hollywood, describes what a meet-cute is with an example: "It's how two characters meet in a movie. Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in, and they both go to the same mens pajama department. And the man says to the salesman: 'I just need bottoms'. The woman says: 'I just need a top'. They look at each other, and that's the meet-cute".