The Princess Diaries Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Whether you like it or not, the success of Sex and the City has breathed new life into the so-called 'chick flick' landscape (heck, it even gave The Women another shot at the multiplex). So get ready for more 'Ya-Ya Sisterhood' on the big screen, because Hollywood is finally starting to figure out that women like to go to the movies. Next up, according to Variety, is Lauren Weisberger's novel Chasing Harry Winston for Universal and Mandalay Pictures. You might recognize Weisberger as the author of the best-selling novel, The Devil Wears Prada, and Winston is her latest book to spend some time on the NYT's best-seller list.

Winston "revolves around three young women who each vow to change their entire lives for the better in the course of the next year" -- and you can probably guess how each of them is going to 'change' their lives. One glance at the cover art gives this gal a quick education in what this book probably has in store for its readers. Gina Wendkos (The Princess Diaries) has already been signed to write the script, and Andy Tennant will direct.

The addition of Tennant is probably where the last of any desire I might have had to watch this movie disappears all together. Call me judgmental if you must, but Tennant was the director behind films like Sweet Home Alabama, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Fools Gold; so I doubt this film is going to deviate from form. Plus, if you are anything like me (and I know there has to be some of you out there) this current crop of 'movies for girls' is starting to get a little insulting. I like shopping as much as the next girl, but there is more to our gender than marriage-mania and rampant consumerism; isn't there?

If you were going to make a movie that's part The Princess Diaries and part The Devil Wears Prada, you'd have to cast Anne Hathaway in the lead. Well, hopefully HarperCollins knows enough about movies to understand that obviousness, because the News Corp-owned publishing company is officially in the film biz. Well, Sharp Entertainment, a banner headed by producer Jeff Sharp (Boys Don't Cry) and housed at HarperCollins, is anyway. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sharp has announced its inaugural slate of projects. This includes a movie about the private lives of astronauts based on Jay Barbree's memoir Live from Cape Canaveral -- described as The Right Stuff meets Almost Famous -- and a movie described as "a next-generation Nashville" (hmm, we'll see). Publisher's Weekly also reported recently that Sharp at HarperCollins will be adapting Eli Gottlieb's new thriller Now You See Him.

The Princess meets Prada movie is another in the pipeline. Based on the Queen of Babble series (Queen of Babble, Queen of Babble in the Big City, the upcoming Queen of Babble Gets Hitched), which is written by Princess Diaries author Meg Cabot, the movie will follow a "fashion-obsessed" American girl who travels to London to spend time with her British boyfriend. But he isn't the guy she thought he was and so she heads over to France and falls for someone new. Unlike Cabot's Princess books, the Babble series is more grown-up. In fact, the Publisher's Weekly review (via Amazon) of the first book points out there's some "blunt dialogue about oral sex." Again, if HarperCollins knows anything about movies, it will be sure to do away with most of that stuff in order to make this movie at least PG-13, for the kids, or if it plans to make the Babble books into a trilogy.

If there are any struggling wanna-be directors out there reading Cinematical, then this post is for you. Yet another person with no feature directing experience has been hired by a major film studio, in this case Columbia Pictures, to direct a feature film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, first-time feature helmer Mark Teitelman has been hired by the studio to helm its teen comedy Big Man on Campus. The film, produced by Hal Lieberman and written by Gina Wendkos, concerns the struggle between several high school students, some beautiful and some smart, as they seek to define what it means to be 'popular' in today's school environment.

Actually, its not like Teitelman has never directed anything before this. He's done some commercials and teasers for Monday Night Football, so he's not a complete stranger to the director's chair. Plus, the film's writer actually has some credits, including The Princess Diaries and Coyote Ugly, so at least the screenplay may have something going for it. So, before I go ahead and condemn this project before it really gets going, I think I'll just wait and see how it develops.

Take the hiring of this director in one of two ways -- either it gives you hope that first-timers will keep getting hired and so, therefore, someday you might get your shot -- or, this just confirms what I sometimes suspect, that studio executives have no clue what they're doing and will keep giving directing gigs to pretty much anyone. Either way, it might help you in the long run. At the moment, there's no word on casting or a start date for the film.