The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead And since when does holding a job necessitate that a woman pull her hair back in a severe, tight bun? Do screenwriters think that loose hair makes it hard to concentrate? I’m not always barking orders into my hands-free phone device and yelling, “I have no time for this!” Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to “relearn” how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something. But that’s not how working women are depicted in movies. Yet, like most people I know who are similarly busy, I’m a pleasant, pretty normal person. ![]() She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would pay to see that? A female who is not one hundred per cent perfect-looking in every way? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours. When a beautiful actress is cast in a movie, executives rack their brains to find some kind of flaw in the character she plays that will still allow her to be palatable. It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who-like Vulcans or Mothra-do not exist in real life. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. But that has not stopped me from enjoying them. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But what I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy. Those movies all sound great to me, and, incidentally, I am prepared to write any of them, if there is interest. “The Cute Bear from Those Toilet-Paper Ads Movie” “The Untitled Liam Neeson Vendetta Project” “Apples to Apples 4D” (The audience is pummelled with apples at the end of the movie.) Based on what I’ve learned from my time in Hollywood, the following titles are my best guess as to what may soon be coming to a theatre near you: I’m even more surprised at how often they are correct. I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. People really seem to respond to those.”įor the rest of the meeting, we talked about whether there was any potential in a movie called “Yahtzee!” I made some polite suggestions and left. ![]() ![]() He finally said, “Yeah, but we’re really trying to focus on movies about board games. One of the execs sheepishly looked at the other execs. After I finished pitching one of my ideas for a low-budget romantic comedy, I was met with silence. The junior executives’ office at Thinkscope Visioncloud was nicer than any room within a fifty-mile radius of the “Office” studio. ![]() It’s snobby and grossly aspirational, but it’s true. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. I’ll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. I have a great job writing for “The Office,” but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. Thinkscope Visioncloud had put out several of my favorite movies, and they wanted to see if I had any feature ideas. A few years ago, I sat down for a meeting with some executives at a movie studio that I will call Thinkscope Visioncloud.
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