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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
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Interview by: Alysa Salzberg
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, writing a movie has to be a pretty big challenge, right? On this point, Fey finally agrees. Compared to writing quick comedy sketches, creating a whole screenplay can be rough. “It’s so much slower,” she groans. “Everything takes so long, and then you just keep talking about the same story for so long and I sort of would feel like, ‘Ugh, why are we still talking about this?’, ‘cause I’m used to like” – Here Fey’s voice takes on the staccato pace of a drill sergeant -- “write it, is it good, bad, throw it out, keep it, I don’t care, move on, next week, start over.” 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 ...
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