October
13
House Bunny Scribe Smith Turns Glam Director
Thanks to Glamour Reel Moments, Kirsten Smith is making the move from screenwriter to fledgling director.
Yes, Reel Moments is about promoting the Glamour brand (and sponsor Suave). But the fact remains that Glamour Magazine's annual series has given 14 women (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Rita Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, and Kate Hudson) the chance to make their film directing debuts. This year's installment, premiering Tuesday, October 14 at the DGA, unveils the rookie shorts of actresses Courteney Cox and Demi Moore--and House Bunny scribe Smith.
Smith dove into directing with The Spleenectomy, based on a Glamour reader's own story. The short stars House Bunny comedienne Anna Faris "as an aspiring community theater actress," says Smith, "lacking in natural ability, who goes on the audition of her life."
Smith, 38, loved the freedom of directing, with help from Reel Moments producer Freestyle Productions and Faris. "She's crazy talented and easy relaxed," says Smith. "It's great to encourage people to give their best, to get all these ideas and take credit for them. The auteur theory is so cocakamamie and untrue."
Authors of some 25 scripts over 12 years, Smith and writing partner Karen Lutz first sold 10 Things I Hate About You in 1997. Then came the post-feminist rom-com Legally Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon, which broke out in the summer of 2001--with support from both teen girls and gay men-- to gross more than $96 million at the domestic boxoffice. Some of the duo's scripts were originals, like She's the Man, some were page-one rewrites, like Ella Enchanted. And the team has also delivered various polish-jobs-for-hire.
This summer Smith and Lutz scored again with 2008 hit House Bunny, custom-made for Faris, who plays a buxom ditzy femme thrown out her Playboy Mansion paradise and into house-mothering a college sorority of Plain Janes. "We're particularly drawn to underdog and fish-out-of-water stories," says Smith. She and Lutz first approached Faris after admiring her work in Just Friends. "This girl is rad," they decided.
Over coffee, Faris proposed a darker vision of the Playboy mansion evictee; the writers blended it with their own lighter idea about a dysfunctional sorority house mother. Smith and Lutz wrote 28 drafts for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison before the script was put into turnaround by Paramount, winding up at Sony. The House Bunny "is about integrity, nurturing, caring, generosity," says Smith. "She does not have a mean or calculating bone in her body. She's pure goodness. A lot of that has to do with Anna's kind, open, wide-eyed spirit."
Smith and Lutz's fifth produced picture, The Ugly Truth, starring Katharine Heigl and Gerard Butler, is directed by Legally Blonde helmer Robert Luketic. Due in April from Sony, Smith describes the comedy as "an edgy battle of the sexes, a Tracy/Hepburn picture with an R rating."
Having experienced the frustrations all writers in Hollywood suffer, Smith is ready to launch a directing career. "The studios are in business," says Smith. "They're not there to nurture and coddle the artist. It's a heartbreak when you sell an original idea and write a script and it doesn't move forward. It belongs to the producer and studio. There are quite a few projects under the doormat. We can't unearth them; we have to leave them by the wayside."
Next Smith is optioning a book she wants to adapt (possibly with another writer) to direct. After 12 years, she and Lutz will no longer be in an exclusive writing relationship. "Our movies are about not letting other people define you," she says. "We have to support each other while we are still free to be ourselves."
The NYT's John Anderson profiles Smith and Lutz/.
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