Wary Hollywood Plans More Chick Flicks (Hoping to Lure the Guys)
TriStar Pictures
A scene from “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (1997), a so-called chick flick that was a box office success.
LOS ANGELES — In Nora Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle” a weepy Rosie O’Donnell, watching “An Affair to Remember” with a sniffling Meg Ryan 15 years ago, said, “Men never get this movie.”The notion of the “chick flick” thus came into its own. And Hollywood has been fretting about it ever since, trying to recapture that box office magic yet chafing at a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap. In New York and other locations, two of the most successful directors of the form — Nora Ephron and P. J. Hogan — are currently shooting what might pass for a couple of next-generation chick flicks. But those involved seem determined to avoid having that classification hung on their films, even if it is rooted in honest observation.
Mr. Hogan, who directed the 1997 hit “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” starring Julia Roberts, is filming “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” with Isla Fisher in the lead role, for Touchstone Pictures, owned by the Walt Disney Company. The film is based on a literary series that began with the British publication of Sophie Kinsella’s novel with that title in 2000, about a financial journalist with relationship problems and a penchant for overspending.But the movie is not just for women, the filmmakers insist. “We all have spending habits, a lot of us do,” said Jerry Bruckheimer, one of the film’s producers, speaking by telephone last week.“
If we do our job right, this could be another ‘Wedding Crashers,’ ” added Mr. Bruckheimer, best known for testosterone-fueled entertainments including “Bad Boys”and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy. He was referring to the 2005 comic hit that included Ms. Fisher, but actually starred Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as a couple of playboys who cruise weddings for easy sex — really not the stuff of chick flicks.
But that could be a guy thing, right? “We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating,” said Laurence Mark (“Dreamgirls,” “Working Girl”), one of the film’s producers. He spoke briefly after conferring with Ms. Ephron, who declined to be interviewed for this article.In fact, both films are rooted in a phenomenon — widely styled “chick lit” — that has swept the publishing world in the last decade. The books are written for, and mostly by, professional women in their 20s. The covers are often bright and fluffy, with amusing illustrations. And narrative is often rooted in the first person singular.And the outlook is unabashedly feminine. “There were a lot of romans à clef, from the young working girl’s point of view,” said David Kuhn, of Kuhn Projects, a New York literary agency.
“The Devil Wears Prada,” Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel about the travails of a young working girl in the cutthroat New York fashion magazine industry, spawned the genre’s biggest movie hit, for 20th Century Fox, in 2006. The film, which was directed by David Frankel and starred Ms. Streep and Anne Hathaway, took in about $125 million at the domestic box office, and more than $200 million abroad.“Bridget Jones’s Diary,” based on Helen Fielding’s novel about a British woman, made about $72 million at the domestic box office for Miramax Films in 2001.But “The Nanny Diaries,” based on a 2003 novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, about the travails of a worker in the competitive New York child care business, did less well for the Weinstein Company last year. (Its domestic box office total came in a tad under $26 million.)
At the same time, a run of recent female-oriented romantic films — “The Holiday” with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet; “Catch and Release” with Jennifer Garner; “27 Dresses”with Katherine Heigl; “Music & Lyrics” with Drew Barrymore; “P.S., I Love You” with Hilary Swank; and “The Jane Austen Book Club,” with an ensemble cast — has stopped far short of the peaks established years before by films like “Sleepless,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Runaway Bride” and “Notting Hill.”
Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. “An Affair to Remember,” in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. “Knocked Up,” in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not.