Kirsten Smith (writer)

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For the New Zealand track and field athlete, see Kirsten Smith (athlete).
Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith
Kirsten Smith (writer).jpg
Smith in 2011
Born (1970-08-12) August 12, 1970 (age 51)
Port Ludlow, Washington, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
OccupationScreenwriter
Novelist
Websitekiwilovesyou.com

Kirsten "Kiwi" Smith (born August 12, 1970) is an American screenwriter and novelist whose credits include Legally Blonde and Ella Enchanted. She has written most of her screenplays with her screenwriter partner Karen McCullah. Most of the scripts seem to follow the girl power movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Early life[]

Smith grew up in San Pedro, Los Angeles, on a sailboat without TV, and spent much of her childhood writing.[1] After her family moved to Port Ludlow, Washington, she worked at as a clerk at a video store before moving to Los Angeles in 1988 to attend Occidental College.[1] There, she studied English and Film.[citation needed] While in college, she often submitted poems to local magazines, and after graduation, she received a scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont and was a resident writer at MacDowell, after which she realized she could only advance her poetry career by getting a MFA and going into academia.[1] She then decided to screenwrite for a living to support her poetry.[1]

While in college, Smith got an internship at CineTel Films, an independent film company; after she began working for CineTel reading scripts and writing coverage for them.[1] This led to a full-time job there as a Director of Development in 1995, and then she began pursuing screenwriting in earnest.[citation needed] One of the scripts she happened to read and cover was written by Karen McCullah, an aspiring writer living in Denver, Colorado. The two women formed a friendship over the phone, and when McCullah came to Los Angeles, they met in person, and began writing their first script on cocktail napkins that night.[2] That script never sold, but it inspired the women to write together again, and they embarked on a teen comedy called 10 Things I Hate About You, a twist on William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew partially inspired by the recent teen comedy Clueless.[2]

Screenwriting career[]

Smith got her official start as a screenwriter in 1997 by selling 10 Things I Hate About You as a spec screenplay. Shortly thereafter, the movie was green-lit, starring then-unknowns Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles, and it was shot in Tacoma, Washington, near Smith's hometown. In the writing process for 10 Things, Smith was eager to add feminism and post-feminism from her women's studies classes into the movie's context and had wanted more of a riot grrrl sound for the soundtrack.[1]

Smith went on to co-write Legally Blonde, which was nominated for two Golden Globes. Costing only $18M to produce, the movie was a surprise hit, grossing $20M in its opening weekend in July 2001, and going on to make over $140M worldwide. It also spawned a sequel and a successful Broadway musical, which was a based on Smith and Lutz’s screenplay.

Smith followed that with Ella Enchanted, starring Anne Hathaway, and She's the Man, a DreamWorks update of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, starring Amanda Bynes.

In 2008 she wrote and directed a short film,[3] The Spleenectomy, which starred Anna Faris and was financed and produced by Glamour magazine. She also co-wrote and executive produced The House Bunny, starring Anna Faris, and produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions. It grossed just shy of $50M domestically. Her latest credit is The Ugly Truth, directed by Legally Blonde collaborator Robert Luketic and starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler.

Her first film as a non-writing producer, Whip It!, starred Elliot Page and was directed by Drew Barrymore, and she also produced American Virgin in 2009, starring Jenna Dewan and Rob Schneider.

Having published more than 40 poems in various literary magazines in the 1990s, Smith published her first novel-in-verse, The Geography of Girlhood, in 2006. The coming-of-age story of a teenage girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest, it contains a smattering of the poems Smith wrote and published in her early twenties.

Credits[]

Novels[]

  • The Geography of Girlhood (2006) – ISBN 978-0-316-01735-0
  • Trinkets (2013) – ISBN 978-0316457620
  • Misfit City: Volume One (2018) – ISBN 978-1-68415-027-4
  • Misfit City: Volume Two (2018) – ISBN 978-1-68415-172-1

Films[]

Television[]

Screenplays (unproduced)[]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Tierney, Finster (2017-01-22). "Meet the Riot Grrrl Poet Behind 'Legally Blonde' and Other Classic Rom-coms". Vice. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Taylor, Hayley (2020-09-11). "Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah: The Screenwriting Duo You Should Know About". Blue Bear Magazine. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  3. ^ http://www.glamalert.com/reelmoments/#Scene_4 Archived 2007-11-10 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ "Kirsten Smith's Biography". Retrieved 2007-02-22.

External links[]

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