 |
HER REEL CALLING: Fox, who
tried to be a producer, found she liked writing
movies more.
Pablo Serrano |
The Wedding date
did not get good reviews. It would not be unfair, in
fact, to say The Wedding Date got horrid reviews.
Dana Fox knows this. “The reviews were really,
really painful,” she says about her screenwriting
debut. “But what they’re talking about is
the movie,” emphasizes Fox, ’98. “Which
isn’t my script.” People in Hollywood know
the difference between what’s written and what
gets made, and they liked her script. Fox knows the
movie had problems.
And a month or so after the premiere, she knows something
else, too. The Wedding Date, a romantic comedy
with Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney, cost $8 million
to make, and it grossed $11 million on its opening weekend.
In domestic theatrical release—this is before
DVDs, before TV and cable, before international box
office—it grossed $30 million. (Never mind even
this financial success: in 2004, some 55,000 screenplays
were registered with the Writers Guild of America, and
only 443 films were released. Getting any screenplay
filmed is a huge accomplishment.)
Fox can appreciate all these numbers, because initially
she was going to be a businesswoman. “I graduated
from Stanford saying, ‘I love movies. I’m
pretty sure I want to be in movies,’” she
tells me one summery morning, sitting in the living
room of her light-filled, three-bedroom West Hollywood
bungalow. “But I never thought I would do anything
creative in the movies.”
Instead, Fox has ended up at this creative-person epicenter.
A short walk from Fox’s home is a central-casting
L.A. coffee shop, with hippily named drinks, screenplays
on many of the tables, and that actress—you know,
the tall one from the Christopher Guest movies—walking
past our table on the patio. “You and I are the
only two here who aren’t anorexic,” Fox
whispers, displaying her flair for snarky dialogue.
“These are all people with looks.”
She speaks with italics, excitedly, self-effacingly,
conspiratorially.
An English and art history major from upstate New York,
Fox “had always been on the critical or theory
side of things,” she says, “where I got
to look at works of art other people made, and then
I got to talk about them in smart ways. To be the one
who made the work of art, that would be scary, because
I’d be putting myself on the line.”
With her creativity firmly repressed, Fox enrolled in
the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC’s film
school, a two-year master’s program that teaches
its students to become film executives. One homework
assignment was to write a short, 30-page screenplay.
“I understood the paradigm of ‘homework
must be done on time,’” she says, mocking
her own Goody Two-Shoesness, “so I was able to
put aside a lot of my fears about writing and just kind
of do it.” Fox found that she loved writing. She
earned the producing degree, but she decided to become
a writer.
Aspiring Hollywood writers become assistants to established
Hollywood writers, and an agent Fox had met while in
film school set her up with Al Gough and Miles Millar,
who had written the Jackie Chan movie Shanghai Noon
and who were creating the WB series Smallville while
Fox was working for them.
It’s often not so fun being a Hollywood assistant
(“When I was on my only vacation in two years,
I got this call from an intern at Smallville,
saying ‘Dana? Al wanted me to call you and ask
what kind of coffee he drinks.’”), but the
job brought Fox a lot of connections. In May 2002, Gough
and Millar’s film agent called: A successful writer
was looking for a “baby writer”—Hollywood
parlance for an unknown who would work inexpensively
on a low-profile project.
The established writer was Jessica Bendinger, who’d
had a hit in 2000 with Bring It On, an unexpectedly
smart cheerleader movie. The project, from a pair of
independent producers, was just an idea: gal hires a
male escort to be her date for her sister’s wedding.
Bendinger had agreed to serve as a producer and to shepherd
a baby writer through the development of a script.
Fox was determined to be that baby writer. But there
was a problem: She didn’t even have a sample.
A sample is a completed, if unproduced, script that
proves a purported writer can actually write. It’s
a chance for a potential backer to see what you can
do. “I meet with Jessica, and we have lunch, and
we have this great time,” Fox says. “And
I basically decide, ‘I have to get her pregnant
with my ideas. I have to make them love my ideas so
that they don’t ask me for a sample.’”
She worked nonstop for two days, writing a memo for
the film: figuring out the characters, their motivation,
the story. Bendinger loved her ideas and introduced
Fox to the two other producers. Who asked to see her
sample.
“I kind of knew I had them over a barrel at this
point, because all my ideas were down on paper, so they
can’t use them without me,” Fox says. They
commissioned an outline, and for the next six months
or so, she worked on that, again tailoring it so the
producers couldn’t move on without her. There
was one hole in the plot that no one could quite solve,
but they still sent Fox off to write a script.
And she fixed the problem. “I handed the script
in,” she says, “and they were just over
the moon about it. Never since then have I gotten a
call an hour and a half after the messenger arrived,
with the producer on the phone going, ‘Oh, my
God, I love this script.’ And I probably never
will again.”
By April 2003, Dana Fox was, legitimately, a screenwriter.
And the good fortune didn't stop. No big-name writer
was brought in for a rewrite. The producers decided
Debra Messing, of Will & Grace, would be
the perfect star, and Messing—the first actress
they contacted—agreed. (“That was when full
Twilight Zone hit,” Fox laughs.) With
an actress attached, Gold Circle Films, one of the production
companies behind My Big Fat Greek Wedding,
wanted to produce it. “I handed in my first draft,”
Fox says, “and four months later they're shooting
the movie in London.”
Bendinger, for her part, isn’t surprised the planets
aligned for Fox. “Dana is the whole package,”
she says. “To be smart and funny on the page is
one thing, but to have such positive energy ‘in
the room’ is quite another. People flat-out like
Dana. That likeability actually translates into her
writing, and that’s a rare combination. Working
with her is fun because she has no ego about trying
things out.”
Buzz about this new screenwriter then attracted studios
to Fox. Soon enough, she was attached to three new projects.
One producer wanted her so badly he even threw in an
office at—no relation—Fox Studios. And in
February, Dana Fox’s first movie—the job
she never should have gotten, because she didn’t
have a sample—opened on 1,700 screens nationwide.
A few months before the movie opened, in that time
between filming and finished product, Fox marveled at
her good luck. “Now I walk around waiting for
a piano to fall on my head,” she joked. With the
bad reviews, one sort of did. And, you know what? She
survived. |
