More in ‘Neil Simon’

Midway through Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first play of Neil Simon’s autobiographical trilogy, the playwright has his fictional stand-in make a confession directly to the audience. “How am I going to become a writer,” asks Eugene Morris Jerome, just shy of 15 and already full of artistic yearning, “if I don’t know how to suffer?”
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Cybill Shepherd and Charles Grodin
In the 1972 hit The Heartbreak Kid, screenwriter Neil Simon took the ethnic and class differences hinted at in Bruce Jay Friedman’s short story “A Change of Plan” and made them explicit. New Yorker Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sporting-goods salesman, marries Lila (Jeannie Berlin) in a ceremony where a wineglass ...