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.
JESSE OXFELD, '98, is the online editor of Editor & Publisher.
