Feature: Aline Brosh McKenna
Last Sunday’s New York Times magazine had an expansive feature on screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, Morning Glory). Here’s how it begins:
If Aline Brosh McKenna were to write a script about her life, it might open with McKenna, wavy-haired and underdressed, hopefully showing her work to a series of unsmiling magazine editors in New York. Discouraged but not defeated, she eventually screws up her resolve and decides to take a course in screenwriting. Cut to a classroom where student after student offers high-flown ideas for films that will never be made, until at last McKenna speaks: “I want to make a caper comedy about two girls, and one falls in love with someone she thinks is a criminal who turns out to be an F.B.I. agent.”
Silence. The teacher smiles.
Now comes the Cinderella success story, a whirlwind transformation from struggling freelancer to Hollywood insider. Along the way, there will be a guy who seems like the right guy but isn’t, another guy who actually is, plus some moments when we see McKenna, desolate and anxious, waiting to hear back from an all-powerful producer. In the end, we will find McKenna triumphant (and now smooth of hair!) in her Hollywood office, tapping away at her Mac, surrounded by photos of her husband and children, as well as mementos from the various studio films that have made her one of the most successful screenwriters working today. Hanging on one wall is an illustration of Meryl Streep, chic and haughty, in “The Devil Wears Prada”; near it, there’s a photograph of Harrison Ford, who starred in her film “Morning Glory,” kissing McKenna on the top of her head. In a hallway is a poster for “27 Dresses,” with the face of Katherine Heigl replaced by that of a close friend who inspired the film. In huge letters up top, the poster advertises: “From the writer of ‘Devil Wears Prada.’ ” For screenwriters, that kind of credit is about as close to a Hollywood ending as it gets.
“She’s branded,” said the film producer Lucy Barzun Donnelly. “The way ‘Merchant and Ivory’ makes you think of high-necked blouses and English manor houses, her name is a shorthand for any smart, funny movie about women that feels kind of modern.”
One interesting aspect of the article is a thread that goes at how to bring new life to the sometimes stale rom-com subgenre:
It’s not that McKenna has never written a straight romantic comedy: “27 Dresses” is the story of a young woman who is forever a bridesmaid until she meets the right guy; her job (she is an executive assistant to the wrong guy) is purely incidental. But in the many years she spent working on that script, McKenna came to realize that writing a straight romantic comedy — or at least writing an interesting straight romantic comedy — is very, very hard. “Thin people who want to be in love and their concerns about their love life — that’s not a very dynamic want,” McKenna said over lunch near her Hollywood office. “There’s that, and then there’s the nuclear briefcase. There’s a spectrum of urgency, and wanting to find someone is a not-very-directed goal. Whereas, ‘I need to get through this year and then get promoted,’ or ‘If we don’t get the ratings up the show will close down’ — there’s an urgency.”
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McKenna’s solution to romantic-comedy fatigue is not to ironize the genre or make fun of its characters’ (and therefore its audience’s) quests for fulfillment, but to give them what they want: a great guy and a great job, a happy family and professional success. In “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” Pierce Brosnan may seem like a straightforward object of desire; in fact, as McKenna sees it, his character is especially seductive in that he alone recognizes the heroine’s talent. “He embodies the work recognition she hasn’t gotten until then,” McKenna said.
I see this frequently in working with young writers where they focus almost all their attention on the Protagonist-Attractor dynamic when almost all successful movies in this subgenre, the romance is a subplot. There is always something bigger going on that constitutes the Plotline: In Prada, it’s the Protagonist trying to succeed in the world of fashion. In Sleepless in Seattle, it’s about two people attempting to reconcile complicated circumstances in their personal lives. In Pretty Woman, it’s the arrangement Lewis (Gere) has with Vivian (Roberts) as his escort to social events tied to his business dealings. This gives the writer something on which to hang the romance, the key emotional subplot woven into the Plotline. With McKenna, the article suggests that thematically, it’s the Blackberry, representing career, work, success.
For more of the McKenna feature, go here.