Overcoming Rejection in Match Me if You Can

When life swipes left: Georgina Reilly as the rejected Kip Parsons in Match Me if You Can (Courtesy of Vertical)

Ever felt like the entire world looked at you and decided to swipe left? Betsy Morris wrote e-LOVE, a script based on the experiences of a friend who suffered the ultimate indignity of being rejected by a dating app – not by other users, but the app itself. Morris submitted it to the Austin Film Festival's 2008 screenplay competition, and it ended up in the "no" pile. That's where, in the style of every great literary rom-com, another reader turned it over, read it, and shuffled it into the "yes" pile, and it ended up winning the festival's award for Best Comedy Screenplay.

That reader was producer Monica Lund, who stayed in contact with Morris and eventually heard that the script was available for option. That's when she contacted her creative partner, Marian Yeager. "I was in West Texas looking after my mom," Yeager recalled, "and Monica was like, 'We need to make Betsy's script.'" In November 2021, they started filming e-LOVE around Austin, directed by Yeager. Now called Match Me if You Can, it arrives on Amazon and iTunes this week.

Over the 15 years, the script has undergone several rewrites, most especially to reflect the changing nature of online dating. But the core narrative "didn't need a lot of updating," Yeager noted. "It's a universal story. … Girl wants to find somebody who will understand and love her for who she is, but the world's telling her that you have to be this, this, or this for that to happen."

Match Me if You Can follows the romantic misadventures of Kip Parsons (Georgina Reilly, Pontypool, Murdoch Mysteries), a programmer who not only faces the day-to-day struggles of being a woman in tech but also gets that vicious rejection letter from dating site iPromise. The problem for iPromise founder Riley Detamore (Wilson Bethel, possibly best known as Bullseye in Marvel's Daredevil) is that he has no idea how that message could have been sent.

In the tradition of 10 Things I Hate About You and The Shop Around the Corner, Match Me if You Can sees them change from enemies to lovers. Since the immediate sympathies of the audience lie with Kip, the challenge was to make sure that viewers don't turn on Riley. Yeager said, "Betsy and me and Monica and Georgina really worked on creating some scenes for him so that we could show a more sympathetic side to him." However, that meant giving some of Riley's worst actions and traits to his overprotective mother (Jennifer Griffin). "She realized when she was on set. 'Am I the villain?' I'm like, 'Yeah, you are, just a little bit.'"

Aside from the universal aspects of the romance, as a former IT professional herself Morris wanted to represent that hard reality of being a woman in the notoriously sexist world of tech. Yeager said, "At the Dallas Film Festival, we had somebody who is in STEM, she waited until everybody had talked to me and she came over and was like, 'I just want to tell you – I feel seen, I feel heard, and that was me.' I'm so glad that it felt like it was speaking to her."

Match Me if You Can will be available on Amazon and iTunes from Aug. 11.