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September 28, 2001/Tishri 11, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 3
Screenwriter tells her own 'Princess' story
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
The Los Angeles Jewish Journal
"I feel like the princess living the fairy tale," says Gina Wendkos, screenwriter of the Disney film, "The Princess Diaries," which is currently playing in local theaters.
Wendkos' second produced screenplay, based on Meg Cabot's novel, tells of an awkward teenager rescued from obscurity when she learns she's a princess.
Five years ago, Wendkos was sorely in need of rescuing. The fortysomething writer had just been fired from a CBS show ("I'd made, like, a zillion mistakes," she says) and her self-esteem was at "a real cockroachy level." So she quit writing for two years. "I was going to go to law school, and I hated lawyers," confides the former painter, playwright and performance artist. "How self-loathing was that?"
Enter her knight in shining armor, who proved to be mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer. He needed a screenwriter to adapt an article written by a female bartender at the rowdy New York club Coyote Ugly. He figured Wendkos was perfect because in her 20s she'd worked every kind of bar job except stripping. The petite, black-haired scribe promptly flew off to Manhattan to hang out at the real club, where sexy female bartenders triumphantly danced atop the bar each night.
The film "Coyote Ugly" helped her land the "Princess Diaries" gig, which Wendkos found square but charming. "I totally identified with the main character," she says. "In high school, I was also unpopular. I wished I was invisible."
Instead, her poor, bohemian Jewish family stuck out like a sore thumb in her rich Jewish neighborhood in Miami. All the other kids' fathers were doctors and bankers; hers eked out a living painting portraits of guests at a luxurious hotel. The other kids got to have bar or bar mitzvahs; Wendkos' Jewish mom suggested she check out the free church services next door. "I used to beg my parents not to drive me to school," she recalls. "One year they had, like, a hearse."
In her early 20s, Wendkos still felt like a misfit, especially while waitressing at a mob bar where she was expected to dance with customers at $10 a pop. She felt hardly as empowered as her characters from "Coyote Ugly": "All the customers tried to get fresh," she recalls. "I felt like chattel." Wendkos got fired when her boyfriend unexpectedly arrived at the club, saw her dancing and threw a fit.
It wasn't until she was 27 that she landed her first writing job - penning blurbs for a phone sex line - and discovered she had a talent for dialogue. Wendkos graduated to working the graveyard phone sex shift, where often "It was just me and a stranger talking about loneliness at 4 a.m.," she says.
The writer is still intrigued by the arena of the sex worker, which returns often in her work. "It's the only place where women have more power and make more money than men," she says. Some critics deplored the strut-your-stuff sexuality in "Coyote Ugly," but Wendkos calls it "stiletto feminism" - "Using sexuality for the power it is."
She's now developing a dramatic TV series, "Extreme Behavior," about high-priced call girls (the Jewish one, Liz, is a former medical student). As research, she hung out with $5,000- an-hour hookers, buying them champagne and expensive dinners ("I felt like such a guy," she says). She learned how they spent their days (shopping at Prada, getting $300 haircuts) and nights (one Gucci-clad hooker specialized in diapering men).
The writer won't pass judgement on her "Extreme" characters, who will possess the same moral outlook as the real call girls. "They view women who marry rich men they don't love as the real whores," Wendkos says.
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