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Date Movie
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 Date Movie Production NotesThe twisted minds of two of the six writers of Scary Movie – Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg – skewer the romantic comedy genre in Date Movie, a film for people who love Date Movies and people who hate them. The filmmakers’ goal, in their own words: “We wanted to create a romance that women will respond to and a balls-out comedy for the men in the audience.”
Seltzer and Friedberg tell the story of hopeless romantic Julia Jones, who has finally met the man of her dreams, the very British Grant Funkyerdoder. But before they can have their Big Fat Greek Wedding, they’ll have to Meet the Parents; hook-up withThe Wedding Planner, and contend with Grant’s friend Andy – a spectacularly beautiful woman who wants to put an end to her Best Friend’s Wedding.
For years, there have been comedies that poked fun at sports films, spy flicks and scary movies. But where, wondered Friedberg and Seltzer, was the romance? The duo sold their first “spoof” screenplay, Spy Hard, just out of college, and a few years later they contributed to the screenplay for the box-office smash Scary Movie. Now, they’ve set their sights on the romantic comedy genre. “We watched a lot of romantic comedies and thought it would be a genre we could have some fun with,” says Aaron Seltzer.
Friedberg lays out Date Movie’s classic template: “Homely girl next door becomes beautiful, meets a guy, brings him home, parents hate the guy and they go through all the required obstacles.” As Seltzer tells it, “We selected memorable scenes from different romantic comedies and from that we created a story on which we could hang lots of spoofing.”
Their central character is Julia Jones. The moniker is a play on the names of superstar Julia Roberts and fictional character Bridget Jones, and it represents a blend of actor and character that audiences love to watch fall in love. Julia is the heart of Date Movie. “The one thing we know about Julia is that no matter how hard you try to keep her down, you can’t crush her spirit,” says Seltzer. “She believes in true love, and that’s the thing you hang your hat on.”
The filmmakers were determined to weave their myriad gags into a believable story. “Part of the challenge was making Date Movie as broad and silly as possible, because that’s where the comedy lives in a project like this,” explains producer Paul Schiff. “But at the same time, Aaron and Jason made the characters real, relatable and grounded so that you grow attached to them. They navigated a tricky balance between broad comedy and playing it straight.”
The filmmakers were careful to create those real moments. Says Friedberg, “We wanted audiences to be invested in the characters and become involved in the love story.”
But, as the filmmakers are quick to admit, the “funny” always came first. “We’re spoofing a laundry list of romantic comedies, movies of all shapes and sizes that are just ripe, fun targets for spoofing,” says Paul Schiff. “Date Movie presents romantic comedy conventions that audiences will really appreciate us skewering.”
The box-office smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding provided significant fodder for spoofing. In the 2002 film, Nia Vardalos’ traditional Greek parents insist that she marry a Greek. Similarly, Date Movie’s Julia Jones’ family provides major obstacles to her finding “Mr. Right.” Julia’s parents insist that she marry someone within their culture – no easy task because the Jones family takes multi-culturalism to a new level: Julia’s father is African-American, her mother is Indian, and her sister is Japanese. It’s impossible for Julia to please them all.
While Julia’s father wants her to marry his hand-picked suitor, she holds on to the ideal of true love. She finds it with Grant Funkyerdoder, whom the filmmakers named in honor of real-life actor Hugh Grant and fictional Meet the Fockers / Meet the Parents protagonist Greg Focker. The filmmakers also drew from Meet the Fockers by introducing the very British Grant Funkyerdoder’s American parents, Bernie and Roz – a riff on the characters played by Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand in Meet the Fockers.
Before Julia finds true love with Grant, she consults a date doctor, Hitch, a nod to the 2005 comedy hit starring Will Smith. Hitch in turn hooks her up with a makeover that melds the popular reality shows “Pimp My Ride” and “Extreme Makeover.” Here, the writers take the standard homely-girl-becomes-attractive plot point, and turn it insideout. Julia is not someone who needs only to pluck her eyebrows, or lose the hooker getup to become the swan she really is. At 300 pounds, Julia needs a little bit more than that- and she gets it. “We just took the makeover process beyond the extreme,” explains Friedberg, “creating an exaggeration of the makeover montages from some poplar romantic comedies.”
Date Movie mined My Best Friend’s Wedding, for the stunning other woman / ex-fiancé character, Andy, played in this film by Sophie Monk. (In MBFW, Cameron Diaz played the archetypal ex-fiancé role.)
Friedberg and Seltzer also have fun with some of the genre’s sillier conventions, like the “slow-motion entrance.” Says Seltzer: “There are all those movies that have a scene in which a woman emerges from a pool in slow motion, and no one ever makes reference to the strangeness of that reduced speed. So, in Date Movie, we have our character wield a jack hammer, eat bananas and jump on a trampoline – everything that would be great to see a gorgeous woman do in slow motion. It’s sort of our ode to Phoebe Cates’ slow-motion pool scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
With the script completed, the filmmakers set about casting the eight principal characters and 50 speaking parts. The first step was finding their Julia Jones, a character they wrote with Alyson Hannigan in mind.
“Sometimes it helps writers to think of an actor and write in their voice, whether you end up casting them or not,” says Friedberg. “From the very beginning we saw Alyson Hannigan as Julia Jones, because Alyson is so sweet – women like her and guys want to marry her.”
When Seltzer and Friedberg approached Hannigan, she agreed to join the project. “I had never read a spoof comedy script before,” she notes, “but Date Movie was a great introduction to the genre. It was outrageous and fun. But it also had a lot of heart to it, which is what really appealed to me.”
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Carmen Electra in a parody of King Kong in Date Movie.
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