Movies from the Heart—10 Things I Hate About You

The “teen movie” has been a tradition ever since movies grew up and decided to include younger people in the audience demographic. Sure, older films gave us the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy films, and kids and teens loved them. But think about it, they were comedies that would appeal to every member of the family.

As movies aged, though, teens were targeted—as they had allowances and spending money and could use that on Saturdays at the movies. Some of the early films of Mickey Rooney, and soon Judy Garland, were aimed right at the teen bracket.

And 10 Things I Hate About You, by Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith, falls right into that category.

Take a look at a trailer for the film.

Did the story seem vaguely familiar? Well, it should. It’s Shakespeare. Seriously, you might ask. After all, it didn’t sound anything like Shakespeare! But think about it. The story is simple: a girl isn’t allowed to date until her older sister starts dating. The father makes this pronouncement because he, and everyone else in the family, knows the older sister has zero interest in dating. In fact, she’s made it known that she will never date as she find boys not just ridiculous but stupid and totally not worth her time.

The Shakespeare play the writers followed—loosely—is The Taming of the Shrew. They just transferred the idea of a girl not being allowed to be married until her older sister was married to the dating scene. Clever—and appealing. The movie did very well at the box office. [It also had an early performance of the great Heath Ledger and is worth watching for that alone.]

I wanted to focus on this film as an example of a well-written romantic comedy, but also as an example of how you can use a classic story to tell your own story. Shakespeare, and other classic authors, are ripe for mining. And remember, public domain material is free for the using. How do you know if something’s in the public domain? Well, generally speaking, anything before 1928 is in the public domain as U.S. copyright only allows an author to copyright his/her work for 95 years. Other countries might vary, but not that much. So something as old as Shakespeare? Go for it.

Hey, let’s stay with Shakespeare. A great writing exercise would be to take one of the bard’s plays and fashion an idea for a screenplay about it. In fact, why not fashion a few ideas—maybe you’ll like one of them so much you’ll want to write it!

Next week we’ll look at a romantic film geared to older audiences—in fact, much older audiences—Something’s Gotta Give.

Copyright © Diane Lake

16Feb25

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