Her Type Is Strong, Not Silent

For a woman who has written the screenplays for two major movies appearing within a month of each other, Susannah Grant sounds remarkably modest. “I’ve had good luck,” says the young screenwriter of her current successes: the critically praised, blockbuster hit “Erin Brockovich,” starring Julia Roberts, and the soon-to-be-released “28 Days” with Sandra Bullock.

“Erin” and “28 Days” share certain traits: Both combine drama and comedy in surprising ways, both feature breakout roles for their charismatic stars, and both are about strong, if flawed female protagonists--the kind of characters women rarely get to play in big studio movies.

Sprawling in an easy chair in her hillside Pacific Palisades home, Grant often punctuates her remarks with a merry chuckle, but she turns serious when she views her work in the context of female screenwriters. The Writers Guild estimates that during the past decade women wrote only about 17% of all the screenplays produced. It’s a shortage accentuated by an acute lack of women in top management positions (though women head three of Hollywood’s seven major film companies) and relatively few female directors and producers.

But the biggest hurdle of all, say Grant and other female writers, is a bottom-line-oriented industry that views “chick flicks” as the kiss of death at the box office. Grant is the first to recognize that her success makes her the exception to the rule among Hollywood’s female writers, which she attributes to a mixture of making shrewd choices, being “uncannily fortunate” and having an “accessible voice.”

“I’m very passionate about writing things that will appeal to women as well as men, because there are so many things that are told specifically from a male perspective for a male perspective,” Grant says. “A lot of times women don’t feel real to me in movies. They don’t feel like people I know. I’ve just felt my own worldview has not been represented.”

In only eight years, the thirtysomething Grant has written episodes of the Fox TV series “Party of Five,” for which she won a Golden Globe, as well as worked on four feature films: 1995’s “Pocahontas” (she was one of three credited writers); 1998’s “Ever After” (an updated Cinderella story co-written with director Andy Tennant); and now “Erin Brockovich” and “28 Days,” for which she has sole writing credit.

It’s no coincidence that all four are stories about women on quests or journeys of self-discovery. And despite Hollywood hesitations, the three films that have been released have all been hits.

“I feel really good about these [last] two movies because the female leads are not simply adjuncts to men,” she says of “Erin” and “28 Days.” She thinks of the lead characters in both films as ordinary yet complicated women who sometimes make mistakes, and tend to crack jokes to get through hard times.

Grant says that “weighty parts for substantial actresses like Meryl Streep and Glenn Close don’t exist these days. When I look at the parts that really great actresses are now playing, often they don’t seem as weighty as they used to in the ‘70s and 80s. . . . I think it’s harder for them to find good parts.”

Grant says her career was jump-started when she won the 1992 Nicholl Fellowship, given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to young, unpublished screenwriters. After that, she says, “people throw a lot of things your way. And I just found it much easier to decide what I wanted to do, to ask myself what do I want this chunk of my career to be about. And I thought, well, there aren’t really interesting well-rounded women in movies. And there aren’t enough female leads.”

In “Erin Brockovich,” based on on a true story and person, Roberts portrays a poverty-stricken single mother with a buoyant sense of humor and outrageous fashion sense who becomes a crusader for justice, rallying residents of a Southern California desert community to take action against Pacific Gas & Electric, which had contaminated their water.

In “28 Days,” Bullock is Gwen, a party-going, wisecracking alcoholic writer who ends up in a rehab center after crashing a limousine she’s taken during her sister’s wedding. The film tracks Gwen’s sometimes hilarious, obstacle-strewn transformation from live-for-the-moment self-absorption to a more thoughtful sense of autonomy.

Grant and those who worked on the film hasten to add that “Erin,” released by Universal Pictures, and “28 Days,” a Columbia Pictures release opening April 14, are intended to attract both men and women. Certainly there’s no lack of strong male characters or romantic entanglements in either film. Brockovich falls for a gentle biker, George (Aaron Eckhart), who in a male-female role reversal baby-sits her kids and takes care of the house while she’s out fighting for justice. In “28 Days,” Gwen’s charismatic, hard-drinking boyfriend Jasper (Dominic West) pops in and out of the movie, and she forms a close friendship with another rehabber, Eddie (Viggo Mortensen). But Grant deliberately kept the romance subservient to the stories of two women who come into their own.

After writing “Ever After,” in which Drew Barrymore played a modern Cinderella who was “a little bit delicate,” Grant says she wanted to work on a film about a “kick-ass broad.” When she broached the idea to Gail Lyon of Jersey Films, Lyon said, “‘I think I have something for you.”’ That “something” was the story of Brockovich, who worked as a file clerk in a law office where she stumbled on a cover-up by PG&E; of its role in contaminating the water in the town of Hinkley. (PG&E; has not contested the facts in the film.)

Grant says that when she met the real Brockovich, she was hooked. “She’s exactly like the character in the movie, only with a slightly dirtier mouth. I thought this is a great opportunity to tell a story about a woman’s struggle for success on her own very stringent terms.” Grant followed Brockovich’s real story closely, adding some composite characters and additional dramatic scenes. (There is also uncredited material written by Richard LaGravenese.)

*

To write “Erin Brockovich,” Grant read stacks of legal papers and adhered fairly closely to a true story. In “28 Days,” she had more creative license. The unlikely concept of a funny film about a woman in recovery emerged during a conversation hashing out ideas with Amy Pascal, chairwoman of Columbia Pictures, Grant says.

But the story really came together on a long walk Grant took with her brother in the Santa Monica Mountains, when they talked about people they knew who were alcoholics and drug addicts. When the script was done, Pascal sent it to producer Jenno Topping at Tall Trees Productions.

“It felt very original . . . and I loved the fact that it was both emotional and comedic,” Topping says. Keeping the film from being hokey--”all those big hugs!” Grant says--and accessible to people unfamiliar with recovery programs was a tough line to walk.

“I knew what tone I wanted in this movie, and I knew I didn’t want anything too sappy,” says Grant, who was on the set of “28 Days” (a YMCA conference center in Asheville, N.C.) for months, very pregnant. (Her daughter Olivia is now 8 months old.) Working with director Betty Thomas helped Grant get the feeling she wanted. Thomas is “totally unsentimental and she has a background in improv,” Grant explains.

Having Bullock in the role of Gwen helped the filmmakers retain the delicate balance between comedy and drama. “She allows people to gain entry into the story because she’s so much a girl of the people,” Topping says.

Much of the film’s comedy comes from visiting real rehab centers, where the filmmakers cribbed funny lines from the patients. “The truth is, people who have been through recovery are quite irreverent,” Topping says. “You laugh so much because what you’re going through often seems absurd.”

One of their most bizarre-seeming discoveries was “equine therapy.” Patients are instructed to lift a horse’s hoof as part of their effort to gain self-esteem. Still, when Thomas told Grant to try “lifting the hoof” on their research trip to a recovery center in Arizona, she failed miserably. Afterward she told Thomas, “This horse thing is going in the movie because I refuse to have done that for nothing.” As a result, equine therapy became a wacky but significant element in the film.

*

Everyone who works with Grant comments on her mix of seriousness, quick wit and her ability to write fast-paced narrative, which sometimes comes close to Hollywood sentimentality but never quite steps over that line. Grant says she simply tries to be authentic. “I don’t have to stifle any part of my creative voice to write. I tend to write the kind of stuff I want to make.”

Other female writers haven’t enjoyed the same freedom, or the same success, however.

“The opportunities to write movies are so much less for women; one, because people don’t hire them and, two, because they think women can only write certain things,” says veteran screenwriter Delia Ephron, whose most recent film (co-written with sister Nora) is of her own novel “Hanging Up.”

Screenwriter Robin Swicord (“Little Women,” “Matilda”) has been keeping track for 20 years of how many women get screen credits; in 1999, she says, 320 writers were represented on the screen, but only 34 of them were women. The numbers go up and down slightly each year, to as low as nine female-written screenplays in 1982, and as high as 49 in 1995, she says. “But in the last four years it has been dropping again, because the problems never go away.”

One of the “problems” is the kind of movie women get offered. Ephron says she’s been fortunate in getting work because she writes romantic comedies and family movies, “the only pool women are allowed into.” Women tend to get what Swicord calls “lighter fare” like “10 Things I Hate About You” and “My Favorite Martian,”--not the kind of movies that get treated seriously in Hollywood. Female writers often turn to TV, which is reckoned, in contrast to film, to have a largely female audience and is more sympathetic to female-centered drama.

Discrimination is pervasive throughout the system, say female screenwriters. Agents are often reluctant to represent a woman because their scripts are harder to sell. Readers with studios may see a woman’s name on a script and dismiss it. Female writers say it’s also ironic that, while there are male writers sensitive to women’s concerns, like James Brooks (“As Good as It Gets”), women writers often feel compelled to impose self-censorship.

“‘You know if it’s a part for a woman over 30, or if it doesn’t have a big part for a man, studios are less interested,” says Ephron.

There are female writers, like Grant, who want to bring complex films about women to the screen, but others feel ghettoized by the category “women’s films.” “It’s wonderful to have an opportunity to write intelligent, complex characters for women,” Swicord says. “And it’s a thrill for an actress to be in a film where she doesn’t just have to wear a bath towel and be cute. But on the other hand you don’t want to feel that you have to do over and over the last thing you wrote. We have a lot of stories in us.”

For some, the problem of being a female screenwriter is more subtle. All screenwriters expect their work to be altered to some degree by film executives, but there are some changes that lessen women’s roles in films. Speeches by women are removed because they seem too strong, or because they interfere with the male lead role.

Writer Dana Stevens recalls that she and producer Amy Robinson would have disputes with lead actor Kevin Costner and male producer Armyan Bernstein over the character of Jane (played by Kelly Preston) in last year’s baseball movie “For Love of the Game.” “The men wanted to soften her up and make her a little less ballsy,” said Stevens. “I wanted her to be a New York dame, and she didn’t quite end up that way.”

Pamela Gray recalls arguing with one of the male producers of her autobiographical screenplay “A Walk on the Moon” (1999) over whether or not the mother in the film (Diane Lane) would show her feelings at the end of her affair with a traveling salesman. “I felt it was important for Pearl to express her grief, but the producer thought since she had chosen to stay with her husband she wouldn’t be upset. He was making it black-and-white.”

*

Veteran screenwriter Amy Holden Jones has written films in most genres, from the diner movie “Mystic Pizza” (1988), featuring a young Julia Roberts, to thrillers and film noir. But she still smarts over changes made in her movies, especially in “Indecent Proposal” (1993), where the omission of certain lines of dialogue lessened the woman’s role (played by Demi Moore) and gave greater emphasis to the men in the movie (Robert Redford and Woody Harrelson). Indeed, she says, Redford added a line, “If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anyone,” which angered her because of its implication that women are men’s property.

Jones also wrote a speech for Moore’s character in the last scene in which she tells Redford that she’s going to go back to her husband. This scene, “in which she makes her own choices,” was cut and turned into a scene “where he heroically talks to her and she has not one line,” Jones says.

Female writers hope that the success of women-driven films like “Erin Brockovich” will not only shift the industry’s approach to the bottom line but maybe even change attitudes in the world at large.

As “Erin’s” executive producer Carla Santos Shamberg puts it: “Women should be able to go out and slay the dragon and men should be allowed to stay at home.”

*

Laugh Trek

To “28 Days” director Betty Thomas, “There is no such thing as too funny.” Page 88