"I was going to make it happen," Garcia says. In the 1995 movie "Clueless," Alicia Silverstone's character Cher orchestrates a romantic connection between her two teachers, Mr. Hall and Miss Geist.

Sometime during the the mid-2010s, the quantity of praiseworthy romantic comedies took a significant nosedive. Romantic comedy, or rom-com, production hasn’t entirely ceased — but the golden age of ...