MONDO EXTRAS

That's so awesome!
It is so awesome! The thing is -- are you interested in this Romy and Michele stuff?

Oh, yeah! Absolutely!
The movie was in development for five years, and when I first said that I wanted Lisa Kudrow and Christie Mellor to play "Romy" and "Michele," and the studio sort of said, "Yeah, yeah." And this was before Clueless, this was before Titanic, this was before the studios believed that the teenage-girl audience mattered at all. They really felt like you couldn't have girls starring in movies, and certainly not a comedy, and you just couldn't do it. So they didn't make the movie, and they didn't make the movie, and then Lisa got on Friends. She wasn't even on Friends when this started. She'd sorta done a couple of guest spots on Mad About You, and finally, I go into the studio, and I said, "Look, Lisa Kudrow was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, People, and Rolling Stone in the same week. Now can she star in the movie?" Then they really started taking it seriously, because now they had a big star attached to the movie. And it shifted the balance of power. And then, you know, Mira was nominated for an Oscar and decided that this was the movie that she wanted to do. It's just, you know, one of those things that worked out. But you can imagine my frustration level over five years. I was fired off it one year. I mean, not technically. I refused to do what they asked me to do because, well, it was just lame.

Did they ask you to alter the script or something?
No, they just gave me notes that I didn't understand and that I thought were just really bad, so I left the project. And then when they gave it back to me, by then Lisa was a big star, and I told them that I didn't want to use any of that other script and then I got to go back to my previous draft. But that was, like, a whole year! I mean, I was doing a lot of other stuff but it's still hard.