Last night's Hamilton Behind the Camera Awards ceremony was as packed with meta-literal moments as it was with unabashed enthusiasm for the cinema. Onscreen talents such as Jason Bateman, Bill Paxton and Diane Kruger mounted the Highlands stage to thank their behind-the-camera colleagues, who then jumped in front of our cameras to accept their awards. But the most meta moment was claimed when Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt honored screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber by ditching their presenter script to improv how 500 Days of Summer would have looked without Neustadter and Weber's screenplay.
As the teleprompter operator started popping Zantac, Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt treated the audience (and now, you) to a muted re-enactment of their chemistry-charged, Smiths-induced elevator flirtation scene. Only after the brief skit, Deschanel realized that without the script, the pair wouldn't have had screen directions. So the pair quickly reclaimed their improv stances and acted out an actually scriptless 500 Days of Summer scene. The complete sequence below.