Making it doable, she made ‘Easy’

A longtime journalist and critic in New York’s and Los Angeles’ art worlds, Jane Weinstock eventually made a few short films, which led naturally to writing her first feature script. Which led, as things often do, to many long years of trying to find financing.

“One day I realized, ‘I don’t have to spend the rest of my life trying to make this movie,’ ” she says of that first script, a thriller about an architect and a plastic surgeon. “I could do something else. I wanted to do something very doable, in terms of not costing too much, and just simpler. I was always interested in romantic comedy and rarely liked the way it was done, so I thought, ‘That’s what I’ll do.’ ”

Finishing that script in early 2002, she was determined to begin shooting as soon as possible, even if it meant mortgaging her house. (To get her money’s worth, it also provided multiple locations.) Concerning the loves and lives of a circle of young people in Los Angeles, “Easy” focuses on a “jerk magnet,” played with winsome sass by Marguerite Moreau, who names newly created consumer products.

“When writing a character, I often start with what he or she does,” says Weinstock. “That’s very defining for me. At the very beginning I had some ideas about the character, but I needed to know what she did. I was having dinner with a friend who told me about a friend of his who names products for a living. I had studied semiotics, which is about how names are attached to things, and I immediately thought, ‘That’s fantastic.’

“It had all kinds of comic potential and it could be someone who is looking for her own identity while giving identities to all these things. So I called this namer, a friend of a friend, and she said, ‘Well, I’m writing a script about a namer.’ So she was totally unforthcoming.”

For Weinstock, the hardest part of writing “Easy” was simply to avoid the conventional pitfalls of workaday romantic comedies, to make a movie she herself would be interested in seeing. The movie is due out Nov. 26. “I wanted to be unpredictable and have characters with depth,” she explains. “And in an attempt not to be stereotypical I was like, it’s a movie about L.A. and I don’t want to have a beach, I don’t want any people in the movie business and don’t want anyone to be blond.”