Natalie Portman to produce teen comedy 'Booksmart'

By Sarah Sluis

Sometimes movie projects just get better and better. Natalie Portman has signed on to produce teen comedy Booksmart via her Handsomecharlie productions. The project first came to my attention because of co-screenwriter Sarah Haskins, who has distinguished herself on web-based Current TV through a short called "Target Women." The popular segment makes fun of advertising targeting women, noting the popularity of gray hooded sweatshirts among moms in yogurt commercials, for example, and the hilarious ways hair products, laundry cleaners, cars and Swiffer mops are marketed to women. More intriguingly, she has skewered chick flicks, dating advice, and wedding shows. While she's sold a script before (Lunch Lady, which has Amy Poehler attached as a cafeteria worker by day, secret agent by night), Booksmart seems to fit more with what Haskins has been doing on "Target Women." In the screenplay, two "booksmart" high school girls decide to get boyfriends in time for prom. While at first glance this sounds like a PG-13 version of American Pie, this seems like the perfect plot template for Haskins' skewering of stereotypes, including the fact that all teen movies seem to be hagiographies for Senior Prom (please don't make the prom scene the third act). What I'm looking forward to are scenes where the girls pore over dating books and women's magazines (subjects Haskins has already done segments on), and take the advice to literal, and hilarious, results. Portman, who will be producing along with Annette Savich, has a track record of choosing more challenging projects (she's never starred in a "typical" romantic comedy), and, of course, she took time from her acting career to attend Yale.

The problem with chick flicks (including, who knows, this one) is that they have become so tied to genre and ancient formulas that they can't even deliver on their main appeal: to provide a protagonist that can be reasonably substituted for oneself (a fact that Haskins jokes about in her "chick flicks" segment, photoshopping her head onto a number of movie posters). A movie about two smart, funny best friends who (hopefully) are well-adjusted and need to do more than take off their glasses to find a guy (She's All That) sounds like a step in the right direction. I'm a twentysomething person working in media in New York City (the standard chick-flick set-up) and even I find 99.9% of these set-ups detestable, something I continually bemoan on this site. Perhaps Haskins, with her eye towards stereotype and convention, will be able to provide a much-needed respite from the chick-flick rut in Hollywood.