Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing presented a new twist on a rom-com—with extra Rod Stewart

It’s difficult to believe that in the outline and frame of what disguises itself as a horny ’80s teen-comedy starring John Cusack, years before High Fidelity and Hot Tub Time Machine, and featuring a young Daphne Zuniga (way before a bizarre character arc on Melrose Place and in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs), it would be 1985’s The Sure Thing that would serve as the core origin story for the most influential romantic comedy of the 20th Century, When Harry Met Sally.

The Sure Thing was often compared to the Frank Capra comedy-romance It Happened One Night. Yet its director, Bronx-born actor, producer, entertainer and political activist Rob Reiner—who directed the archetypal heavy metal mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap in 1984—claimed that any similarities between The Sure Thing and the Capra film were coincidental. In fact, the previous year’s Spinal Tap, featuring such comedic original songs such as “Big Bottom” and “Cups and Cakes,” helped to spark an entirely new movie genre.

Here’s what is—not by accident—The Sure Thing‘s opening credit sequence.

In a white slitting bikini and perfectly tanned skin, actress Nicollette Sheridan saunters along a beach, while shots of the ocean and the golden hues of water crashing upon rocks fill the screen while the opening to Rod Stewart’s 1984 hit “Infatuation” slowly builds up its synthy drum machine wares. Stewart’s video, loosely based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, catches Rod in his mid ’80s MTV comeback, where he’s riding high off that trademark stage presence he’s always had, but now converting it to the small screen for kids cheering MJ and Prince who just found Mick and Bowie.

Stewart’s decision to hire Jeff Beck for a flashy 8-bar solo perfectly captures the essence of the time while still delivering something with unique feel and sound, essentially Beckian. These cameos were not throwaways. Following Stevie Ray Vaughan’s burner guitar connector communique on Bowie’s comeback hit “Let’s Dance” and Eddie Van Halen’s Scoville scale axe work on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” where producer Quincy Jones instructed Van Halen—who friggin had a whole band named after him—to “just be yourself,” these brief appearances served as emerging generational reminders that ’80s guitar solos were now a speedy, melodic and intricate component in the pop song formula. Not the star.

This postcard-type movie frame at the start of the film teleports the viewer to a land of palm trees, hot sand, and panoramic views, helping to establish—before we even hit the one minute mark—you’ve been dropped into a complete male fantasy. 

Reiner even gives us five seconds of AMSR Pacific Ocean waves, doing what they do best, making people who live 3,000 miles away jealous, before all these California beach life tropes get perpetrated. Here’s another non-accident: the cinematographer Robert Elswit, who, through a series of creative shots in this little ’80s teen film, gives the viewer a comfortable seat while our young protagonists move from interested to like, lust, love, back to confusion and then a complete match. 

Long, Richard Linklater-type, conversations between Cusack and Zuniga occur throughout the film, creating a dialogue peppered in friendship, building toward road movie energy, sometimes lasting 7-10 minutes in stretches. They feel casual and unobtrusive in the hands of Elswit who 22 years later would shoot Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and then win an Oscar for it. Reiner always believed in using the best artists of the time and his projects reflected that.

With The Sure Thing, he follows a pretty strict three-act play formula, letting the road-trip middle segment take up most of the film so we absorb the Cusack-Zuniga interactions that slowly create chemistry, allowing the story to move like a silly teen-sex comedy. 

But actually were put in the front row of a young adult rom-com, where both protagonists take into consideration each other’s strengths and shortcomings. Reiner treats these young people with so much respect, allowing them to stumble but never fall, achieving a certain level of maturity, putting the dumb teenage horned-up sex comedy trope in the “gag me with a spoon” trash receptacle. Remember this, director John Hughes is out here, Molly Ringwalding with the best of them, at that time, listening and observing a young Gen X population, coming to grips with a “Let’s Make America Great Again” Reaganomics regime. 

Cusack is so believable as the young guy who doesn’t understand women and serious relationships. In this film, he’s stealing performative archetypes from Anthony Michael Hall’s character—Farmer Ted—in Sixteen Candles, but all that tracks from it is in fact the uncertainty.

Toward the end of the film, before the two youngsters become a couple, there is a rant from Daphine Zuniga signalling how much she actually is in love with the wrong guy, by angrily shouting, “he eats cheeseballs and beers for breakfast,” along with all his other flaws that she’s come to observe as endearing. This? Oh, it’s Meg Ryan’s “repressed” Sally, years, maybe a decade, before she gets in the car with Harry and moves to New York.

You can find The Sure Thing on YouTube, since it’s virtually impossible to stream due to musical copyright legalities. Its soundtrack features, among other artists, Quiet Riot, Sammy Hagar, Wang Chung, and Huey Lewis & the News. But it possesses decades upon decades of comedic intelligence. Remember, Rob Reiner is the son of the comedic God, Carl Reiner—Mel Brooks’ sidekick in the culture-shaping comic routine The 2000 Year Old Man. Carl Reiner also created the classic American sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show. So The Sure Thing is a generational flow-chart of humor and whimsy that has an overall belief in how differences don’t just bring us all together, but in some cases, they make us finer, loving humans.

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