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Giving up
Record labels move to lift the minimum-price rules that kept mom-and-pop stores in business.
By Eric Boehlert
[04/12/00]

Column
Songs that kill
In the dark comic world of "American Psycho," pop is an essential soundtrack to murder.
By Sarah Vowell
[04/12/00]

Movies
Small moments, big nights
Actor-director Stanley Tucci talks about his new film, "Joe Gould's Secret," his struggle with the Writers' Guild and the importance of ambiguity in art.
By Susan Perry
[04/11/00]

Music
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury ...
There stands before you a murderer -- the band that killed rock 'n' roll.
By Ira Robbins
[04/10/00]

Movie Review
"Return to Me"
David Duchovny and Minnie Driver star in a movie that almost seems like a godsend in this age of romantic-comedy schmaltz.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[04/07/00]

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In Hollywood terms, she is one now -- a successful and respected screenwriter who is about to make her leap into feature-film directing. But there's nothing princessy about her or her movies. In "Ever After," Barrymore's Cinderella throws like a boy: She gets Prince Charming's attention with a well-aimed fusillade of apples. As the title character in "Erin Brockovich," Roberts' working-class heroine is part Norma Rae and part Norma Jean, upsetting office peers as well as Ivy League types with her revealing clothes, sex talk and horse sense. In "28 Days," Bullock's alcoholic makes her biggest move toward recovery when she sheds the film world's version of Prince Charming, a glib, romantic Brit.

I started to ask if she'd call herself a feminist. Before I could finish Grant declared, "I have no discomfort with that word! You could call me a 'card-carrying feminist,' if there were a card to carry." On the phone from Los Angeles, Grant comes across loud and clear and free of pretension. Her feminism is an outgrowth of that rarity in creative folk: a healthy childhood. Growing up with her doctor father, schoolteacher mother, two sisters and a brother in Englewood, N.J., "gender judgments were a total nonissue. Whoever opened the door was the person who got there first." With two grandmothers who also worked, "the idea of me doing something useful with my day was just there. Looking back it sounds fairly matriarchal, but at the time I didn't know."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

Before entering Amherst, she went to Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. "From the outside, it does look like a lot of well-scrubbed preppy girls, but it wasn't humorless, and it was more radical than it looked. And it was the last time in my life that gender didn't play into anything. It was very 'girly,' very female, but it helped give you the sense that your gender didn't have to get in the way of anything."

After college, Grant spent four years in New York, trying to act and doing low-level journalistic jobs. (For a while, she was a fact checker at Rolling Stone.) But she eventually soured on acting, journalism and New York. "One night I woke up and was really depressed. I lived in this horrible little apartment on the first floor of a building, and it was really hot, so hot that I would leave the door open. I felt that if someone wanted to come in and kill me, I was too hot to care. And I was crying and right outside there was a homeless woman crying, and I felt as if I was in a horrible city where everyone was crying in the middle of night."

Like many East Coast discontents before her, she moved to San Francisco. There she landed a job at KPIX-TV that required two hours of work in an eight-hour day. "There's only so long you can talk on the phone," so she decided to use the rest of the time there to write a screenplay. "I would have more energy after working on a screenplay for four hours than I did before I started," Grant says. Admitted to the American Film Institute, she moved to Los Angeles and discovered a true mentor in screenwriting teacher Jerry Kass, who is now at Columbia. In 1992, she won the Nicholl Fellowship in screenwriting, awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Part of Grant's charm is that she knows how fortunate she is. "My best advice is: Get really lucky!" Winning the Nicholl "bumped my name up a few notches." Soon she was at work on "Party of Five" and "Pocahontas."

Writing an animated feature is no screenwriter's dream unless she is also one of the sketch artists or animators. But Grant considered it "a really good boot camp. No scene was rewritten fewer than 30 times. But it was a great exercise. I was getting paid, and getting a movie made -- though I don't think I'm temperamentally suited to do [a cartoon feature] more than once." The filmmakers worked closely with American Indian advisors; on the p.c. front "it fared a lot better than 'Aladdin.'" But some American Indian critics still scorned it for turning the adolescent girl into a babelicious screen siren. "Well, I would have made her boobs smaller," Grant admits. "But the guy who did it was a fantastic animator and did a wonderful job. I just would never have given her that bust size." Not that Grant has anything against big-busted beauties; she celebrates one in "Erin Brockovich."

Next page | Meeting the real-life Brockovich