Movies: Hopeful romantic

'It's harder and harder to make a well-done romantic comedy these days because the conventions have been so played out," says screenwriter Dana Fox. "Audiences know exactly what's coming and they know from the beginning of the movie that everything's going to be OK and there will be high jinks that will get you from the beginning to the end, and eventually all the misunderstandings will be worked out and everyone will be in love."

With two produced features -- including "What Happens in Vegas," opening Friday -- and "about a million" for-hire rewrites, Fox knows whereof she speaks. In a recent phone conversation from her Los Angeles home she outlined the humor of miscommunication from Shakespeare to "Swingers," and declared that a romcom that feels more like a comedy than a romantic comedy -- thus drawing more men into theaters -- is "the Holy Grail" of the genre.

A graduate of Stanford University and the University of Southern California's movie production program, Fox, 31, began her screenwriting career after "a long five-year stretch of paying my dues" as an assistant to writers with duties that included fetching coffee and "picking up dog poop."

Fox fell under the spell of movies as "a baby" in Rochester, N.Y., eager to see every film that came to the local theater, even the ones with subtitles when she was too young to read them.

She began with the ambition of being an actress ("a disaster"), then redirected her goal to producing ("because that's like the boss"). When she realized that producers rely on the talent, she shifted to screenwriting. She wrote her debut, 2005's "The Wedding Date," in stolen moments between pet cleanup chores and "in elevators." The film, starring Dermot Mulroney as a male escort hired by Debra Messing to accompany her to her younger sister's wedding, was a modest success, but Fox's writing impressed Roger Ebert and established her as a notable new talent with a flair for what she calls "bawdy guy stuff."

Often producers try to widen the appeal of a female-centric film by hiring a male writer to add slapstick and gross-out humor in a rewrite known as "a guy pass."

"You have a guy getting whacked on the back of the head and punched in the junk a couple times, and you sort of appeal to a broader demographic," Fox said.

Shaped by stars, and real life

"What Happens in Vegas" stars Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in a male-driven comic romance that sneaks the touchy-feely stuff past the guys. The story follows Jack and Joy through an impulsive wedding, an equally swift breakup, a greed-inspired reconciliation (they win a $3 million jackpot) and a tempestuous court-ordered six-month waiting period before they can divorce.

Fox said she tailored the script for the stars, incorporating their ideas about the roles. Kutcher suggested that the man-boy Jack should have some self-sabotaging habits, patterned after the actor's own adolescent behavior.

"He talked about ... how he was so desperate not to disappoint his father that sometimes he would screw up ahead of time just to disappoint on his own terms," she recalled. Diaz offered insights into worker-bee Joy as a person so eager to please that she no longer knew how to make herself happy. "Their ideas really deepened the characters," Fox said.

Fox's life imitated her art throughout the production. She pitched the idea with her then-boyfriend, who is the producer of the movie.

"There was a little tiny part of me very, very deep down that thought, 'I don't know if it's a good idea to do a breakup movie with my boyfriend.' But that was a very, very quiet voice, and when he broke up with me, I was finishing writing the script and I had to write these romantic, wonderful proclamations of love through torrents of tears and goobers and crying.

"It's probably never good luck to make a movie about breaking up with someone who you are with. It's funny, because it kind of ended up becoming my life as I was doing it. Like the characters, as tough as it was, it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. And sometimes it takes getting everything taken away from you for you to really put yourself back together the way that you should be for real, as opposed to the person you are trying to be for someone else."

Currently, she is working with Vince Vaughn on a movie about a guy who becomes a doula, "which is basically like a hippie midwife with no medical training," she explained. "I feel like I'm the luckiest person on earth that I get to come up with these things and then watch them get made. In this case I felt so lucky to be able to hand the baby off to a group of people who I really thought weren't going to give it hard-core drugs but were probably going to send it to college and treat it really well."

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186