Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)

Young or old, male or female, everyone has had an idol—an unattainable special someone, on the big screen or in the big leagues—whom they admire and dream of actually meeting someday. Imagine if you actually met your idol and the tables were turned—you became the object of his or her desire. You might find that what you thought was beyond your wildest dreams might not be a dream come true after all. That scenario is what drew husband-and-wife producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher to “Win a Date With Tad Hamilton.”

Douglas Wick says, “My favorite romantic comedies are about longing, about wanting something or someone you can’t have. From the first moment we read an early draft of ‘Win a Date With Tad Hamilton,’ we felt it captured that beautifully with Rosalee, a girl working in a small-town supermarket, and her big-screen idol, Tad Hamilton, seemingly out of reach. Another thing I was drawn to was that it played wonderfully off that Hollywood image people have and the starstruck world in which we live. People worship the movie stars they see on the screen, but if they ever got to meet their idol, they might think very differently.”

“The script was so charming and intelligent and had so much wit,” Lucy Fisher adds. “Romantic comedies work best when you think you know where you’re heading, yet you’re surprised along the way, and this script did that for us. Of course, the charm of the script is definitely due to the writer, Victor Levin.”

“Victor Levin created characters who are so three-dimensional, they just popped off the page,” says Wick.

Screenwriter Victor Levin reveals that he wrote the character of Tad to be the kind of movie star that, as the cliché goes, “women want and men want to be,” so even he could relate to Rosalee’s idol worship. “Tad Hamilton is who I long to be. He is successful, talented and a decent person. He has a marvelous way of dancing through life with a minimum of pain and a maximum of happiness. I think I can say that his days are the envy of all of us,” Levin says, although he is quick to add that, despite Tad’s star status, “the theme of this movie is that everybody is a somebody. Whether you come from a small town or the highest stratum of society, at the end of the day, the playing field is a little more level than we may think.”

With a script in hand, the producers turned to finding a director. Topping their short list was Robert Luketic, who had scored a box office hit with his debut feature film, “Legally Blonde.” “We have three daughters, and I think we’ve seen ‘Legally Blonde’ maybe 2,000 times,” Fisher laughs. “We immediately thought of the wildly talented Robert Luketic.”

The producers note that, the success of Luketic’s first feature notwithstanding, it was not the only deciding factor. Fisher offers, “We saw a short film he did called ‘Titsiana Booberini’ about, strangely enough, a checkout girl in a supermarket. We thought it was incredibly innovative and original and had a lot of flair. So we agreed this would be a very good match.”

---

Pages: [1] 2 3 4