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For a woman who has written the screenplays for two major movies appearing within a month of each other, Susannah Grant sounds remarkably modest. "I've had good luck," says the young screenwriter of her current successes: the critically praised, blockbuster hit "Erin Brockovich," starring Julia Roberts, and the soon-to-be- released "28 Days" with Sandra Bullock.
"Erin" and "28 Days" share certain traits: Both combine drama and comedy in surprising ways, both feature breakout roles for their charismatic stars, and both are about strong, if flawed female protagonists--the kind of characters women rarely get to play in big studio movies.
Sprawling in an easy chair in her hillside Pacific Palisades home, Grant often punctuates her remarks with a merry chuckle, but she turns serious when she views her work in the context of female screenwriters. The Writers Guild estimates that during the past decade women wrote only about 17% of all the screenplays produced. It's a shortage accentuated by an acute lack of women in top management positions (though women head three of Hollywood's seven major film companies) and relatively few female directors and producers.
But the biggest hurdle of all, say Grant and other female writers, is a bottom-line-oriented industry that views "chick flicks" as the kiss of death at the box office. Grant is the first to recognize that her success makes her the exception to the rule among Hollywood's female writers, which she attributes to a mixture of making shrewd choices, being "uncannily fortunate" and having an "accessible voice."
"I'm very passionate about writing things that will appeal to women as well as men, because there are so many things that are told specifically from a male perspective for a male perspective," Grant says. "A lot of times women don't feel real to me in movies. They don't feel like people I know. I've just felt my own worldview has not been represented."
In only eight years, the thirtysomething Grant has written episodes of the Fox TV series "Party of Five," for which she won a Golden Globe, as well as worked on four feature films: 1995's "Pocahontas" (she was one of three credited writers); 1998's "Ever After" (an updated Cinderella story co-written with director Andy Tennant); and now "Erin Brockovich" and "28...