Warning Spoiler at end of article on film changes from book.www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/if-cinderella-had-a-blackberry.html?pagewanted=allAline Brosh McKenna
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Published: August 25, 2011
If Aline Brosh McKenna were to write a script about her life, it might open with McKenna, wavy-haired and underdressed, hopefully showing her work to a series of unsmiling magazine editors in New York. Discouraged but not defeated, she eventually screws up her resolve and decides to take a course in screenwriting. Cut to a classroom where student after student offers high-flown ideas for films that will never be made, until at last McKenna speaks: “I want to make a caper comedy about two girls, and one falls in love with someone she thinks is a criminal who turns out to be an F.B.I. agent.”
A Timeline of McKenna’s Films
Silence. The teacher smiles.
Now comes the Cinderella success story, a whirlwind transformation from struggling freelancer to Hollywood insider. Along the way, there will be a guy who seems like the right guy but isn’t, another guy who actually is, plus some moments when we see McKenna, desolate and anxious, waiting to hear back from an all-powerful producer. In the end, we will find McKenna triumphant (and now smooth of hair!) in her Hollywood office, tapping away at her Mac, surrounded by photos of her husband and children, as well as mementos from the various studio films that have made her one of the most successful screenwriters working today. Hanging on one wall is an illustration of Meryl Streep, chic and haughty, in “The Devil Wears Prada”; near it, there’s a photograph of Harrison Ford, who starred in her film “Morning Glory,” kissing McKenna on the top of her head. In a hallway is a poster for “27 Dresses,” with the face of Katherine Heigl replaced by that of a close friend who inspired the film. In huge letters up top, the poster advertises: “From the writer of ‘Devil Wears Prada.’ ” For screenwriters, that kind of credit is about as close to a Hollywood ending as it gets.
“She’s branded,” said the film producer Lucy Barzun Donnelly. “The way ‘Merchant and Ivory’ makes you think of high-necked blouses and English manor houses, her name is a shorthand for any smart, funny movie about women that feels kind of modern.”
What feels modern about McKenna’s version of the romantic comedy is that, as she explains it, “the women have goals that are not strictly speaking romantic.” When a young news producer in McKenna’s “Morning Glory” is transformed by a stunning dress, it is for a job interview, not a date. “The Devil Wears Prada” concludes with a reconciliation between the heroine and her boyfriend, but it is almost besides the point: the happy ending is delivered by a better job.
“I Don’t Know How She Does It,” which comes out in September, could be considered the third in a trilogy of McKenna work-love movies — a grouping that McKenna refers to as “the BlackBerry 3” because the women in them are forever clutching their phones or chucking them or eyeing them longingly or putting them in the freezer (the relationship maybe be put on ice, but only temporarily). An adaptation of the best-selling novel by Allison Pearson, it’s a witty take on the juggling act performed by working mothers. The film’s trailer is wholly consistent with romantic-comedy tropes: a quick flash of a party heavy on pink décor; a shot of Sarah Jessica Parker, the film’s star, in a passionate clinch. Yes, there will be glamorous settings and a broad-shouldered Mr. Right, but the plot of the film, in which Parker plays a mother and a fund manager, turns on the thrill of work. McKenna makes romantic comedies in which the romance is not so much between a woman and the perfect man but a woman and the perfect career.
It’s not that McKenna has never written a straight romantic comedy: “27 Dresses” is the story of a young woman who is forever a bridesmaid until she meets the right guy; her job (she is an executive assistant to the wrong guy) is purely incidental. But in the many years she spent working on that script, McKenna came to realize that writing a straight romantic comedy — or at least writing an interesting straight romantic comedy — is very, very hard. “Thin people who want to be in love and their concerns about their love life — that’s not a very dynamic want,” McKenna said over lunch near her Hollywood office. “There’s that, and then there’s the nuclear briefcase. There’s a spectrum of urgency, and wanting to find someone is a not-very-directed goal. Whereas, ‘I need to get through this year and then get promoted,’ or ‘If we don’t get the ratings up the show will close down’ — there’s an urgency.”
McKenna, who is 44, has a dry delivery, but when she is telling a story she finds particularly funny, her voice goes up an octave. Her colleagues say, in the parlance of Hollywood, that she is “good in the room,” the room being the place where she persuades directors and producers to trust her with their multimillion-dollar projects. And being good in the room is especially important as romantic comedies compete with “event” movies with more potential for franchises, merchandise and international audiences. The romantic comedies that have managed to distinguish themselves recently all tweak the formula in some way: “Bridesmaids” emphasized slapstick comedy (and female friendship) over love story; “Friends With Benefits” played with the genre’s clichés, recognizing that audiences must finally be tired of watching one lover run dramatically toward the other.
McKenna’s solution to romantic-comedy fatigue is not to ironize the genre or make fun of its characters’ (and therefore its audience’s) quests for fulfillment, but to give them what they want: a great guy and a great job, a happy family and professional success. In “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” Pierce Brosnan may seem like a straightforward object of desire; in fact, as McKenna sees it, his character is especially seductive in that he alone recognizes the heroine’s talent. “He embodies the work recognition she hasn’t gotten until then,” McKenna said.
McKenna certainly didn’t invent the workplace romance, but it is an especially good time to be breathing new life into it. It’s an era of job lust — where there is scarcity, there is fantasy, and where there is fantasy, there is Hollywood. “Some people like their job, some tolerate it, I love mine,” Parker’s character proclaims in the script.
McKenna has never actually worked in an office herself — after giving magazine journalism a brief try, she departed for Hollywood, where, by 26, she had sold that caper comedy and her first television pilot. The way that screenwriters in Los Angeles are forever writing valentines to New York City, McKenna seems to see offices through the rose-colored glasses of the uninitiated. Workplace movies “allow characters to really tell each other the truth,” McKenna said in a lecture sponsored by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. “You need that level of honesty and candor because you’re trying to get something accomplished — people don’t have as much time to say nice things.” In McKenna’s movies, the office is an idealized sphere of efficiency, spontaneous eloquence and utter devotion. In one memorable scene of “Morning Glory,” the character played by Rachel McAdams fields a dozen rapid-fire questions from her new subordinates, takes a deep breath and fires back with a dozen perfectly reasoned solutions, including, as her last directive, the firing of the sleazy anchor who asked her minutes earlier if he could photograph her feet.
There are structural reasons that McKenna’s films are set in the workplace — the urgency of the plots, the relative freshness of the material — but her scripts are also a reflection of her, and she, in turn, is a product of her generation (a generation later than, say, Nora Ephron). If Nancy Meyers is the writer of films about redemptive romance in midlife, McKenna plays out, in a frothy, mass-market format, the fantasies promised by ’70s feminism: that you can have a big career without sacrificing a personal life. “The two albums in most heavy rotation in my childhood bedroom were ‘Free to Be You and Me’ and ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ ” McKenna e-mailed me at one point. “That sort of says it all.”
McKenna’s parents were immigrants, her father an Israeli who fought in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and her mother a Frenchwoman who was a hidden child during World War II. Her mother worked as a midwife before having children, and her father was an engineer (she proudly mentions that he earned 3 of his 30 patents at the age of 80). McKenna has said that one of the earliest things she remembers her father telling her was “how important it is to find work that you love and that is important to you.”
Hollywood has a long and complicated relationship with heroines for whom work is as important — maybe even more important — than love. In the 1940 newspaper comedy “His Girl Friday,” a fast-talking reporter played by Rosalind Russell finally tells her drippy fiancé, as she’s filing a career-making story, “Don’t you see this is the biggest thing in my life?” Cut ahead to “Network” in 1976, in which Faye Dunaway plays a hard-charging television programmer who talks shop through a sex scene and is told, as she is being dumped, that she is “indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy.” By 1987, the workaholic heroine of “Broadcast News,” played by Holly Hunter, was allotted a heart and more than her share of ethics, but she still ends up alone: she rushes to the airport gate at the 11th hour, not to join her beloved as he leaves but to tell him he should go without her.
In McKenna’s films, the protagonists are never left alone with their jobs — the choice is never presented so starkly in the first place. “I like to think that we’ve made some progress,” she said in a recent phone conversation. “That women don’t have to be punished that way.”
Given her success in putting her own stamp on any number of Cinderella stories, it should not be surprising that McKenna recently sold a pitch to Disney for a reported seven figures based on the actual Cinderella story, a live-action version. Her “swashbuckling Cinderella” is not a young woman waiting to be rescued by her prince; McKenna’s take on the fairytale has more in common with classic superhero stories in which the protagonists have secret powers and are waiting for their moment to shine. Cinderella, she said, is “ultimately about that feeling people have that if only someone would give them a chance, they would see what they really could do.”
McKenna’s big chance came when she landed “The Devil Wears Prada.” Four other screenwriters tried their hand at adapting the blockbuster novel by Lauren Weisberger, based loosely on her own experience as a long-suffering editorial assistant at Vogue. But the film seemed unusually resistant to the big screen until McKenna’s treatment. “I was the first woman they hired to write that script,” McKenna said pointedly. She focused the story tightly on the Anne Hathaway character, a young, aspiring magazine journalist adrift in New York in a bad sweater, adding poignancy to the film by gently exposing her naïveté.
If McKenna drew on her own early life to shape that film, she looked to more recent experience in writing the screenplay for “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” “I remember calling home and asking, ‘Is the baby awake?’ ” McKenna said. “And then literally taking off my shoes so I could run across the parking lot to drive home before he fell asleep.” That specific scene didn’t make it into the film, but the general motifs — the working-mother guilt, the mad child care handoffs — all spoke to her. The subject matter, she said, has what she calls the “grab my arm” going for it: “When women hear what I’m working on, they literally grab my arm. They so want to talk about this subject.”
The original book is rich with one-liners that could be needlepointed onto the pillows on Gloria Steinem’s couch (“Because becoming a man is the waste of a woman,” for one). McKenna added a few of her own to the script, stealing a line she once heard her friend, Kate Adler, senior vice president of comedy development for CBS Television Studios, deliver to a husband who was seeking credit for the kind of parenting work most mothers do as a matter of course: “I know, it’s amazing, you’re raising them as if they were your own.”
The project hit a roadblock when the director David Frankel, with whom McKenna also worked on “The Devil Wears Prada,” left for another project. Then it met with something closer to tragedy: the producers of the film, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, died within a few months of each other, Minghella unexpectedly. McKenna, discussing that time in her life, waved her hands for a moment, as if batting something away. “It was unspeakable,” she finally said.
With the movie stalled out at the Weinstein Company, McKenna began meeting with people who might be able to get it moving again. She invited Doug McGrath, a screenwriter and director who worked with Harvey Weinstein on the film “Emma,” to breakfast to seek advice; McGrath suggested she reach out to Donna Gigliotti, who is now head of production at the Weinstein Company. Gigliotti, who was not yet on staff at the time, nonetheless told Weinstein that she wanted to produce it for him, and that McGrath would direct. Weinstein signed off.
“It is abnormal how she would not take no for an answer,” Frankel said. “She made a pest of herself. But without her hocking people to read it, and not give up on it, that movie would not have been made.”
McKenna sweated out the production of “I Don’t Know How She Does It” against the background of her own challenges as a working mother. In July, she was in New York working on editing with Gigliotti and McGrath, doing her best to move things along so she could make the last plane back to Los Angeles and get home before her boys, ages 8 and 11, awoke the next morning. Eventually it became clear that they would not be done in time for her to make her flight, and Gigliotti proposed a solution: why not put the kids on a flight to New York that very night? They could see the town and have fun while McKenna finished what she had to do.
“You don’t want to be inflexible, so you go, ‘Oh, that could be a good idea, I’m going to think about that,’ ” said McKenna, who thought about that for approximately one minute before concluding that she could not, in fact, fling the various puzzle pieces of her life into the air and expect them to land conveniently at her feet in New York. There was a dentist’s appointment, a play date, a husband who had to leave on his own business trip and two children who were expecting her at home. When Weinstein, unaware of the details, asked her to stay, McKenna told him she could not. “I said, ‘Look, Harvey, I gotta go, I have kids.’ ” And then she left.
The point of the story for McKenna is that she said no, which is also the point of “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” Unlike the book’s protagonist, the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker does not quit her job to take up a more modest career that will let her work three days a week or realize that her kids need her more than she needs to work at all. She decides instead to test the boundaries and carve out a better personal life while keeping her full-time job. (Another fantasy: Work-life balance, with no professional cost.)
McKenna has reached a level of success that allows her to go home when she needs to go home; it is also a level of success that allows her to make movies that might leave a cultural impression, perhaps even ones that can subtly alter the collective sense of the norm in the workplace. McKenna has intuited that her audience no longer wants love to triumph over all; the new fantasy is that women triumph over the struggle to have it all. “We weren’t trying to make, ‘I Don’t Know How She Doesn’t Do It,’ ” McKenna said. “She does it.”
Susan Dominus (susan.dominus@nytimes.com) is a staff writer for the magazine. Her most recent article was about conjoined twins.
Editor: Lauren Kern (l.kern-MagGroup@nytimes.com)