I wanted to take a look today at a very prolific screenwriter and producer who is behind so many favorite TV shows and movies of the past decade. She is not really a director, but she certainly is a maker. For today's Female Filmmakers, let's look at Liz Meriwether.
Liz is good at what she does. She has provocative pitches and she was known for having titles that got people to read her scripts. For example, she wrote the film No Strings Attached, but the original title that was on the cover page was Fuckbuddies. That's a good way to get people's attention! A sexy Natalie Portman is another.
Let's go back to the beginning. She was born in Miami and raised in Detroit where she was a very smart and studious young woman. That ended up paying off because she went to Yale University to study English and theater. She began writing original plays and one of her plays even had a young Emma Stone in the cast when it was put up in Los Angeles. Meriwether has often said that she is so grateful to have had Emma Stone in her play right at the beginning of Stone's career as if helped out her career immensely.
Meriwether developed a play called Sluts in LA. Again with these tantalizing titles! She turned this raunchy comedy into a TV pilot that was actually filmed for Fox. While the pilot did not get picked up, she had the industry's attention. Her debut No Strings Attached came next and its success told Fox that Meriwether was worth trusting. Directed by Ivan Reitman, this film made Meriwether an official force to be reckoned with.
She developed a brand new show for Fox that was based on her own experience bouncing around Craigslist apartments in Los Angeles in her twenties. This show would become wildly successful! It was New Girl with Zooey Deschanel! The sitcom was on the air for about five years and featured Zooey and the girls in their bras quite a bit.
From there she wrote the show Bless This Mess which starred Lake Bell, an actress whom she has worked with in nearly every single thing that she has written. We can see why - Lake Bell is hilarious and beautiful. While she does not go nude in any of Liz's projects, she does manage to get down to her skivvies in every single one.
Liz Meriwether is part of a girl gang of sorts. She, Lorene Scafaria, Dana Fox, and Diablo Cody are known in the industry as the Fempire, a group of edgy female screenwriters that was coined in 2012. What good company to be in! Scafaria wrote and directed Hustlers, Cody is responsible for Juno and Young Adult, and Dana Fox wrote The Wedding Date and Cruella. These are powerful writers!
Most recently, she adapted the popular podcast and documentary The Dropout into a series starring Amanda Seyfried as the controversial tech conwoman Elizabeth Holmes. The series is streaming on Hulu, but Seyfriend has not dropped out of her clothes on the series so far.
There is not a lot of explicit nudity in any of Liz's projects despite all of them circling around sex. I have hope for more from Meriwether as her profile just increases with everything she touches. She is very well respected as a creator, despite not having any nudity in her scripts. That said, Portman shows her peach in No Strings Attached AND she has a nip slip in a scene. It appears that there is no bra attached in this sexy scene:
