Whoa! Women Can Write?!?!?

The recently released movie The House Bunny is the latest in a string of comedies by screenwriting team Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith. Reviews are mixed, mostly skewed toward the negative. One even accuses it of being a scene-for-scene rip-off of Revenge of the Nerds. But the Nerds movies are cult classics. Why can't its female counterpart share the same honors?

Granted, I haven't seen The House Bunny, so it might actually suck. But the premise sounds fairly brilliant. A Playboy Bunny (Anna Faris) is kicked out of the mansion. With nowhere to go, Faris' character is adopted by the sisters of the misfit sorority Zeta Alpha Zeta. As the House Bunny, Faris gives the sisters lessons in her expertise: makeup and men. The sisters, presumably, show their Bunny that there is life beyond being objectified.

Interesting. Having watched my fair share of episodes of The Girls Next Door, I often wondered about the fates of the Bunnies. I'm, of course, particularly curious about Hef's girlfriends, Kendra and Bridget. The show depicts some of them branching off into other ventures: Kendra dips her toes into property management, all while torturing me with that laugh of hers, and Bridget...wasn't she going to be a reporter or something? Well, they both have to find jobs because Holly's main goal in life is to get all of these other hoes to step off so that she can produce tiny Hefs.

Uh, anyway. Lutz and Smith also wrote 10 Things I Hate About You, Legally Blonde, Ella Enchanted, and She's The Man. While probably none of these of these flicks will find their way onto any of AFI's Top 100 lists, they were all solid comedies that focused on the female lead characters coming into their own.

The team's execution isn't without its flaws, of course. Even besides their adaptation of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew with 10 Things and Twelfth Night with She's the Man, their movies all end with the female lead getting her man...truly the only real happy ending, right?

But we endure PLENTY of the male-dominated vacuousness of Hollywood, and Lutz and Smith have proven themselves to be at least much deeper. Why can't they enjoy the same amount of success?

NY Times