House Bunny Writers Talk Screenwriting

Posted on August 25, 2008

The New York Times has an interesting profile of that rarest of things: the successful female screenwriting team. Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith wrote Legally Blonde, 10 Things I Hate About You, Ella Enchanted, and She's the Man). Their new film is the comedy House Bunny starring Anna Faris as a Playboy bunny who gets kicked out of the Playboy mansion and is adopted by a sorority.

"I guess all our films have been about people learning they don't need to be what others expect them to be," Ms. McCullah Lutz said. "It just happens. We get to the end of a script, and I say, "Well, we did it again.'"

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"I'd been thinking, 'What happens to these women?'" Ms. Faris said by phone from New York. "L.A. is full of beautiful women, and what happens when they start getting older? Do they go into advertising? Do they go back to school? Do they go to IHOP?" In The House Bunny, the exiled cupcake Shelley Darlington (Ms. Faris) is adopted by the sorority women of Zeta Alpha Zeta, who give Shelley a sense of herself in exchange for tutorials on makeup and men.

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Caution, they agreed, is the enemy of comedy. "If you watch 10 Things, it's racy by today's standards," Ms. Smith said of the almost-a-decade-old film. "The most limiting thing in our genre is that the comedic window of what you can and can't get away with has gotten smaller and smaller."

We loved 10 Things I Hate About You, which incidentally launched the careers of Heath Ledger and Julia Styles. The House Bunny is in theaters now.

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