‘I Do’ It My Way

The double wedding of Jason Blumenthal to Chrissy Richards, and his sister Dana Blumenthal to David Weinrot, was staged like an elaborate film production.

Los Angeles wedding planner Alyse Sobel, functioning more like a movie director, rented Paramount Pictures’ New York Street, hired extras to pose as stockbrokers and staged the vows in the studio’s movie theater.

“We really made it look like a movie set,” recalled Sobel of the June wedding. “They arrived in a New York taxi that came honking up the street. The guests got to walk into bars and a personalized pizza parlor, Mel and Paulie’s [named for Blumenthal’s parents, Mel and Paulette]. The cake’s design was an aerial view of Central Park with a double bride and groom waving from the center of the park. One of the grooms even produced a short movie on how the couple met.

“They had been to so many cookie-cutter weddings, they wanted it to be an experience,” Sobel said. “They wanted it to be more personal. That was taking it to the nth degree.”

A trend toward more individual, if not always so extravagant, weddings is changing the way today’s couples celebrate their union and reflects social and demographic changes. The desire for personalized weddings has never been greater, as planning shifts into high gear for the first summer weddings of the 2000s.

Today’s sophisticated couples, who often have blended cultures or families, have the resources and vision to create one-of-a-kind weddings. Small gestures in a wedding can speak to the experiences, relationships and cultures of modern couples. “Bridesmaids” may be men, the menu a Korean and Cajun combo and the setting the summer camp where the couple met.

“We’ve gotten rid of the textbook wedding,” said Colin Cowie, a Los Angeles style guru who plans celebrity weddings. He counsels his couples to abandon time-honored but tired practices such as the receiving line, favors, garters and, sometimes, the bouquet toss.

Weddings today, with their carefully wardrobed cast, exotic locations or personally written vows, are like a pilot episode for the show called “Your Married Life.”

“Planning a wedding is like producing a small movie or a live television show,” said Cowie, who is fond of saying that weddings are a new couple’s first chance to make a good impression.

“There is no second take,” he said. “Your wedding is not just another party, it’s a statement of style. It’s your chance to tell the world who you really are in terms of the big picture.”

There’s a rush to take vows this year. Millennium fever ushered in a higher-than-average demand for year 2000 weddings as couples either postponed proposals or planned ahead to have that nice round number on their marriage license. In Los Angeles and across the country, favorite ceremony locations are booked. The surge in demand caught many brides-to-be off guard, including Lisa Choi of Redondo Beach, who works in the bridal industry at Theknot.com (https://www.theknot.com), a wedding-planning Web site.

Getting Help With Untraditional Nuptials

By October, several reception locations were already booked for this year, she said. For one ocean-view site in Malibu, “I was No. 16 on the wait list.” Elsewhere, she found prices were higher than a few months earlier.

Without traditional wedding sites, some couples are having to be more creative--but that’s not a problem. There is an ever-larger cast of experts to help assemble an untraditional wedding. The February/March issue of Bride’s magazine, at 1,270 pages and 4.8 pounds, is a reflection of consumers’ enormous appetite for wedding information. Engaged couples are barraged with how-to books, other ad-stuffed magazines and Web sites that offer everything from online gift registries to digital previews of 15,000 wedding gowns.

The wedding industry has blossomed from a network of cottage industries to a $38-billion-a-year business, a growth of $6 billion over the past five years, said Deborah McCoy, a wedding consultant and author of wedding guides.

Just four years ago when Carley Roney co-founded Theknot.com, she saw a generic-looking market unable to fit the needs of today’s worldly couples. Blended cultures, religions, ethnicities and families are creating a demand for the kind of information that’s way beyond Emily Post and her old-fashioned peers.

“The rules don’t necessarily apply anymore. They were written when we didn’t have so many intercultural weddings and so many stepfamilies,” Roney said. “I’m married to a Chinese man. We had a Chinese banquet and an American wedding.”

Couples Have More to Spend

With brides and grooms marrying later in life than at any other time in history, they tend to have more money to create their special day. They spend about $20,000 for an average wedding. “More than 70% of engaged couples pay for their own weddings,” said wedding consultant McCoy. A refrain she hears often from couples: “If we’re going to spend $20,000 on a party, it better be good.”

Overwhelmingly, weddings are still formal affairs that aim to reflect the couples’ good taste and appreciation of the finer things in life. That doesn’t mean brides and grooms need the budget of a blockbuster to make a personal statement. Simple gestures can reflect heritage, private memories and more. To honor a groom’s memory of picking blackberries in his grandmother’s garden, Sobel added a blackberry cobbler to the wedding menu. She drew the cake’s icing to mimic the vine embroidery on the bride’s dress.

“People feel the best when the couple has taken the time to have that wedding ceremony be a reflection of them,” Sobel said. “Then people feel drawn in.”

With more news than ever on the minute details of celebrity weddings, the rich and famous are reshaping weddings, said Janice Min, an assistant managing editor at InStyle magazine who edited the new Weddings special issue.

“Celebrities, because they work with top planners and are in creative fields themselves, come up with ideas that you can use,” she said. “Anything goes to some degree at weddings now.”

Some long-standing notions are changing, too. Liz Bell, a 27-year-old media relations manager from Westlake, is breaking with tradition for her Feb. 5 evening wedding.

Two of her “bridesmaids” are men. “My brother and a dear friend are standing up for me. They’ve been an important part of my life,” she said.

Social and demographic changes continue to help rewrite the rules for weddings.

“Getting married today is a choice,” said Millie Martini Bratten, editor in chief of Bride’s. “As such, we choose to do it however we’d like.”

The Second Time Around

Divorce, and the consequently older second-time brides, are emerging as strong forces for change, too.

“Forty percent of weddings include either a bride or groom who has been married before,” said Martini Bratten. When she started working at the magazine 21 years ago, “people didn’t talk about second marriage at all.” Now her magazine, for the first time, has given remarriage its own section.

As more children of previously married couples take part in the ceremony, the wedding industry has responded with products to help blended families create their own traditions, said Roney of Theknot.com. “There are even family honeymoons,” she said.

“We also tackled that issue when we built our wedding registry. Not every couple wants china. They already have pots and pans. They want mountain bikes and trips to Paris,” she said.

The 21st century wedding may actually be a healthier way to start a marriage, said Robert Ziller, a University of Florida psychology professor who studies long-term relationships.

“People are rebelling against the idea of being uninvolved in family or community,” he said. Weddings, especially the ones that reflect the personalities and differences of each individual, are a way to reestablish bonds among individuals, their families and their communities, he said.

“The attention to weddings also reflects the fact that marriage as an institution is still popular, in spite of high divorce rates,” said Whittier College’s Chuck Hill, a psychology professor who has conducted a 25-year study tracking the relationships of 231 couples in the Boston area. “The high divorce rates, rather than implying that marriage is doomed, instead partly reflect the higher standards we have for marriage. But now people want their psychological needs to be met in marriage,” he said.

The search to fill those needs begins at the wedding and, hopefully, plays out like a good, old-fashioned Hollywood love story.

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Valli Herman-Cohen can be reached at valli.herman-cohen@latimes.com.