Tina Fey
Interview by: Alysa Salzberg AlysaSalzberg@TheCinemaSource.com
It’s a fact: America has a thing for mean girls. If the legendary status of films like Heathers and All About Eve prove it, most recently, the box office success of Mean Girls, starring Lindsay Lohan and written by SNL head writer (and “Weekend Update” co-anchor) Tina Fey, shows even more conclusively that this obsession is still, like, totally with us.
When you watch a movie that portrays oh-so-cruel young ladies oh so well, a part of you has got to wonder if the one who created these characters isn’t, maybe, a bit on the mean side herself. But Fey doesn’t seem to be mean as she sits down and explains (somewhat nervously, even) that this is her first time doing press for a movie.
This is only natural, since Mean Girls is Fey’s first foray into the world of film. As a TV writer/actress, was she worried her movie might not work?
Surprisingly, Fey felt more or less relaxed: “The thing that I think is I always have my job at SNL as a fall-back if this really goes down the crapper, so I was just mostly excited about it, and also the fact that I wasn’t trying to carry a movie myself, I wasn’t trying to star in the movie at all, made it easier because I felt like, ‘Oh, I’ll write this movie and I can use Tim [Meadows] and Amy [Poehler] and Ana [Gasteyer] and my friend Neil Flynn‘….I didn’t try to bear the burden myself.”
Nevertheless, besides her duty as writer, Fey does have a small role in the film, a role which originally was supposed to be bigger. But because she found Mean Girls‘ other characters more interesting, her own part, that of a math teacher, “just kept shrinking and shrinking,” until, she says, “now it’s a little raisin.”
Okay, pressure and size of her part aside,
Mean Girls brought another particular challenge with it, namely dealing with ever-changing teen culture. The unique, yet totally believable slang the girls use in the movie is even cooler when you find out the shocking truth: “I made up some [of the] slang,” Fey reveals, “because I thought, ‘I’m absolutely going to get it wrong…because in the six month it takes to shoot the movie,” most of it would have gone the way of Ugg boots.
When you think about it, though, dealing with language issues isn’t a completely new concept for Fey, who, as a TV writer, has her work constantly under the scrutiny of network censors. How does she feel writing for one of the country’s most popular comedy shows in these dark times of über-conservatism on the airwaves?
The comedienne tries to be fair about the whole thing: “On network TV think we should be able to work within the boundaries of language, you know, I think we should be able to do quality television without swearing, [but] I get a little nervous about it when it becomes more about censorship of ideas.”
On the event that sparked the spike in censorship in the first place, Fey is equally even-minded: “You can look at the Superbowl and say, ‘My gosh, what is the
She can chide MTV all she likes, but Fey clearly understands youth culture. What gave her the edge in portraying teen girls: the good, the bad, and the bitchy?
In addition to reading Rosalind Wiseman’s 2003 book, Queen Bees & Wannabes, about cliques and the social structure of teen girls in America (this book actually inspired Fey to write the movie), when Fey decided to pen Mean Girls, she spoke to some real adolescent females, and was surprised to find that, while some things have stayed the same since she herself was in school, nowadays “the sex is just amped up. I think there’s a post-Clinton situation going on where some stuff doesn’t count.”
So what was Tina herself like in high school?
“If you’ve seen the movie, I’d say I was actually closest to one of the Mathletes,” she explains, “even though I wasn’t a math genius….I was just sort of a really obedient A.P. student.”
So, then, was she cool?
“Within my own group of friends we thought we were pretty cool. But if you had a larger, bird’s eye view of the school,” she laughs, “we were not, in fact, very cool.”
Still, this doesn’t mean she didn’t have her moments of Mean Girl-ness: “I was definitely always kind of in the corner snarking off about anybody I thought was better-looking – which was pretty much everyone.”
Hmm…genuine self-deprecation isn’t part of the Mean Girl arsenal. So, if she’s not one of them, what intrigues this Nice Girl so much about her cruel counterparts that she’d make them the subject of a movie? And what makes us, the public, flock in droves to see these evil girls on screen?
“All these behaviors,” Fey replies, “not only do I think that they’re kind of funny, but I think
So, then, you could say that we’re drawn to watch girls being mean because it points to darker elements in all of our natures. Not that Fey doesn’t appreciate this: “I think that with the high school-aged girls there’s something in the ways that they do [cruel things to each other] that I find to be kind of ingenious and impressive.”
