Women’s wit withheld

I wanted to thank Carina Chocano for her article on the lack of meaty, nuanced and, most accurately, “human” comedy roles/characters for women [“Where Have All the Funny Girls Gone?” Oct. 21]. My writing partner and I specialize in female-driven comedy screenplays, mostly of the R-rated variety. While we have gotten endless laughs from the “powers that be” in Hollywood, at the end of the day we keep hearing the following responses:

A) If we thought we could market female-driven comedy, we’d be all over this script, but women just don’t go to the movies enough. Let’s find something else we can work on together.

B) Our company just doesn’t really do female-driven comedy. What else do you have?

C) “The Sweetest Thing” just wasn’t very good and didn’t do that well in the box office.

All of these comments infuriate me as well as the slew of other female writers I know in the business. We all know tons of women that go to the movies no matter what the “marketing experts” say. Maybe if the studios put out a few quality movies once in a while rather than “Robotronman Part 7008,” women would go a lot more often. As to the moneymaking concern, there’s also the point that many of these comedies that would feature today’s brilliant but underexposed female comedy actresses would cost peanuts to make since the actresses can’t command very high salaries at this point. Surely, these cheap (by Hollywood standards) movies would recoup their costs and then some.

Finally, to address the “Sweetest Thing” comment, this movie, which I agree was pretty bad and not very funny at all, was released in 2002, five years ago! Why is it that this one movie serves as a constant albatross that hangs around all of our necks? How many stinkers with male lead characters (that have lost money) have come out in the past five years?

Thank you, Carina, for raising another voice to help give these female-driven movies, these writers, these actresses, these roles a chance to live.

Noelle Stehman

Santa Monica