Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith
The “Legally Blonde” screenwriter reflects on her hit movies and Hollywood career.
By Lindzi Scharf
Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith is the big sister you’ve always wanted — or wished you could have been. Alongside her longtime writing partner, Karen McCullah, the bubbly, sassy-as-fuck screenwriter is responsible for many of your favorite feel-good films, including “The House Bunny,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” and “Legally Blonde.”
In the words of Elle Woods: “What? Like it’s hard?”
Well, yes, actually.
Smith and McCullah were one of only a few female writing duos in the late nineties, but they managed to make a major impact with the creation of female-empowering characters like the iconic Woods, brought to life by Reese Witherspoon in 2001.
With viewers discovering and rediscovering their movies every few years courtesy of streaming services, sequels, spinoffs, and even a Broadway show, Smith is well aware of the impact she’s had on multiple generations of women.
“I’m freaking pumped to be their nostalgia queen,” says Smith, stretched out on a chaise lounge chair in the Los Feliz home she shares with her fiancé, Kurt Lustgarten, and their on-again, off-again roommate, Sara Cline. “Seeing all these young women respond to our work and this multigenerational empowerment amongst women means a lot to me. Older women gave me the secret keys to the kingdom and I want to give the younger women those keys. It’s super nourishing and fortifying because I don’t have children but I have these characters, these movies, and I have these relationships with younger women who are inspired and excited and that fills me with a lot of pride.”
Smith says she loves cultivating close relationships with young female writers. “I’m always available to talk to them about their writing,” she says. “I love creative people and I want to help, and I love being able to nurture in any way that I can. I feel nurtured, too, by it.” She says her background in the entertainment business contributed to her can-help attitude. “I worked in development as my first job,” she explains. “I was always reading screenplays and interacting with writers, so it felt natural to me to want to keep doing that even though I was working as a writer myself. I still had that sense of enthusiasm when I discovered a great writer and wanted to figure out how to help them.”
Which is exactly how she met McCullah twenty-five years ago.
THE MEET-CUTE
“She sent me a query letter,” Smith says. “It had little loglines of the scripts that she had written. I wrote her a note back saying I wanted to read one of her scripts. It was great, so I said, ‘I’d like to read another, please.’ And then I called her and said, ‘Maybe we should meet for drinks if you’re ever in L.A.’ She came to L.A. [from Denver, where she was living] and we started writing a script the night that we met on cocktail napkins.”
The project was a female action movie, Smith says, “because we were like, ‘Long Kiss Goodnight is going be a huge hit and everyone is going to want more female action.’ It wasn’t and no one wanted our script.”
But things took off from there.
Smith and McCullah’s second script, “10 Things I Hate About You,” was inspired by the success of Amy Heckerling’s 1995 teen comedy “Clueless,” an adaption of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
“We wanted to write a teen movie that’s based on a classic,” Smith explains. “After an exhaustive Cliff Notes search, we finally stumbled on ‘The Taming of the Shrew.’ I give ourselves a little credit for finding IP that’s available and free and turning it into a teen movie.”
The romantic teen comedy hit theatres in 1999 and made stars out of Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles while making $53.5 million worldwide.
Next came 2001’s “Legally Blonde” with Witherspoon. “Reese made perfect sense,” Smith says. “She’d just done ‘Election’ and she was on the creative rise. She was funny. She was good at drama. She was smart. She’d gone to Stanford.”
Despite the writing team’s previous success, Smith says the studio had a modest outlook toward the film’s prospects. “Nobody had expectations around it,” she says. “So we got to make the movie that we wanted and we were trusted. The producing team, the director, and all of us were trusted to shoot the script that we wrote.”
The now-iconic film far exceeded expectations, earning $125 million worldwide. “The tracking said we were supposed to open at number three,” she says. “We were supposed to make $12 million and then the movie opened and it made $20 million and it was at number one. It was a shocking thing.”
While Smith and McCullah didn’t write the film’s 2003 sequel, they did complete a script for the forthcoming third installment, which is slated for release in May 2022. “We have written a draft of it and it’s in development now, so we’ll see what happens,” Smith shares. “I sure hope it gets made because I can’t wait to see more Elle.”
HOLLYWOOD HIGHLIGHTS
Smith also has fond memories of working with Anna Faris on “The House Bunny.” The women bonded during the script’s development process and the actress has since become a dear friend. “We were told, ‘Maybe she’s not a person that could sell a pitch. Maybe you guys shouldn’t be developing something for her,’” Smith remembers. “We were like, ‘We love her. She’s going to be a star. So we’re going to fucking do it.’ That’s been the guiding principle: ‘What do we like? What do we want to see? Who do I want to empower and lift up? Who do I want to see on the big screen?’ and then following that bliss and working really hard until you can achieve it.”
Smith has had a front row seat to watching stars rise — from Ledger in “10 Things” to Channing Tatum in Smith’s 2006 comedy “She’s the Man.” She also knew Katy Perry way back when and says it was great “getting to know her when she was a singer/songwriter playing at the Hotel Café.” Smith says she’s enjoyed “seeing her rise and seeing the way she continues to treat all of her friends from that era. She keeps everybody close.”
With over twenty-five years under her belt, Smith says she had no idea when she first started out in the industry that she’d be in the position she is today. “It’s been a wild journey,” she says. “We went into it excited and naïve and writing the movies that we wanted to see and gunning for it and sneaking into parties and running around and just trying to get things going. I still have that hustle and love of the culture of Hollywood and love of actors and film, the art form. Whenever I get down, I’m kind of like, ‘But I still love all these things.’ Sometimes I’m like, ‘I want to leave Los Angeles,’ but every time I think that then something exciting happens and I get sucked back in, you know?”
IN A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
Smith acknowledges that the behind-the-scenes climate in Hollywood has shifted considerably since she and McCullah first entered the industry. Once upon a time, the women found themselves in rooms that were primarily run by men. Looking back, she admits, “We were a little oblivious and brazen.” Although Smith does recall one uncomfortable moment. “We went in for a pitch and one executive was like, ‘What’s that smell? Somebody smells good in this room.’ I said, ‘I think it’s my body butter,’ and he was like, ‘Did you butter your buns?’ I was like, ‘Now we’ll start the pitch.’”
However, Smith mostly has fond memories of those early years. “We were celebrating our femaleness and our girly-ness,” she says. “We were right post-girl power. I was a big fan of the Riot Grrrl movement and indie rock and so I feel like we had this rebellious girl-power punk ethos that was like, ‘Let’s just go for it and let’s be silly and crazy.’”
She credits entering the industry at the right moment. “There was a new appetite at that time for teen female films,” she says. “They were starting to be made as we were entering [the business]. It felt like we were in the right place at the right time for stories and comedies about young women.”
THE CHALLENGES
But trends and tastes change, as Smith eventually found. “The mid-2000s to the late 2000s were brutal for the kind of movies that I write,” she says. “There was such a focus on franchise fare and big blockbusters. I felt like there was a real contraction and we were kind of just scraping by — like barely hanging on — because the whole studio female-driven comedy was going the way of the dodo.”
Smith and McCullah forged ahead. “We always had scrappy hustler vibes,” she says, so they got crafty. Sometimes, Smith says, that meant “meeting some random financier who turned out to be a complete con artist and meeting people at parties who were saying, ‘I want to pay you to write a script,’ and going down all those [roads] — taking everything seriously even if it was not a real opportunity.”
Smith says industry trends are shifting once more and things appear to be on the upswing for female-centric projects. “I feel excited by where we are now as women,” she says. “There’s support to do female-driven content — it’s real and it’s exciting. … It feels like the young adult and teen comedy is being explored in television or with the streamers. I am sensing there’s a little bit more of an appetite for YA.”
LOCKDOWN LIFE
During the pandemic, Smith and McCullah collaborated remotely. “We didn’t see each other,” she says. “We worked on the phone. We worked on FaceTime and we sent stuff back and forth.”
The duo used to work out of McCullah’s house by her pool. “But we haven’t done that in a long time,” Smith says. “I don’t know if we’re going to pick back up where we left off or if we’re just going to remain remote. We started as long-distance writing partners when we met. So who knows?”
Because Smith has mostly worked from home, she was able to continue doing so during the pandemic and managed to keep fairly busy. “Everyone was suddenly like, ‘Uh oh. We can’t make anything, so let’s talk about what we’re going to oversee and build our slate to be,’” she says. “We hustled hard and got quite a few jobs. One of my highlights was pitching to Julie Andrews over Zoom because we’re doing a reimagining of the [1979] movie ‘10,’ which her late husband, Blake Edwards, directed. She’s the rights holder, so we had to get her approval. She said yes. It was surreal and wonderful.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be greenlit, she says.
THE BUSINESS OF WRITING
“It’s mysterious,” Smith says of the process of getting a movie made. “You complete your steps and then you never know. Either they’re going to move forward or they’re not moving forward. So it’s a little bit like, ‘Okay. I’ve completed this and done [my job].’”
Smith handles rejection with a similar matter-of-fact manner. “It’s just part of the job,” she says. “But I think I also love working in a partnership as a screenwriter because you can play hot potato with who is more devastated or who’s more like, ‘We’re getting this made!’ I’m usually like, ‘Don’t jinx anything. Don’t say that.’ But then if somebody is really wounded by some bad news, then I can be the cheerleader. So you can balance out the emotional rollercoaster a little bit.”
Even so, she says, “I try to remain pretty undaunted. I also was a poet before I became a screenwriter in college, so I had an obsessive thing where I was submitting poems all the time with a SASE — self-addressed stamped envelope — tucked in. I had a filing system where I had a hundred poems out to literary magazines at all times. It was so much rejection, constant rejection, but there would be one glimmer of success.”
GROWING UP
Smith had a fairly unorthodox early childhood. “I grew up on a sailboat in San Pedro, California,” she says. “I was an only child, so my parents decided to build the boat in the boatyard. So we lived on a 32-foot sailboat. We lived on it half in the boatyard and then half in the water in the marina. I didn’t have TV, so I was reading a lot and that formed my love of storytelling and writing. I wasn’t around other kids until I was six, when I went to school.”
While Smith spent some of her childhood in the Los Angeles area, the entertainment industry might as well have been a world away. “After living on the boat, we moved to Oregon and then Washington state, where I went to junior high and high school,” she says, “but I had this feeling that L.A. was my home. I thought, ‘Maybe one day I’ll get to go back there,’ and then I started working at a video store and I got really into movies. So that was my thing, ‘Maybe if I go to college in Los Angeles, I can eventually work and be near this movie business that inspires me so much.’ Essentially, I’m a hardcore fangirl.”
As for the name “Kiwi,” it stems from a childhood nickname that she resurrected for professional purposes, she says: “My mom used to put kiwi fruits in my lunch and I didn’t know what they were.” She said, ‘They’re kiwis and you’re my little kiwi.’ Some of my high school friends picked it up and then a few years into my writing career, I started going by that name and bringing it back because Kirsten is hard to pronounce. Smith is a boring last name. I wanted something memorable, so I resurrected my childhood name.”
WHAT’S NEXT
While Smith’s Netflix series “Trinkets” wrapped last year, she has several films in development and is toying with the idea of embracing grittier fare. “It was fun with ‘Trinkets’ because I got to do something a little more dramatic and edgy and indie,” she says. “Getting into a grittier side of the complex female experience is something I want to explore more of.”
While she’s directed a few short films starring Faris, she’s not sure if she’ll head any further down that path. “I think I lost my fever for it a little bit,” she says, “which is sad because I feel that I’m running counter to what the movement is, which is ‘Let’s have more female directors,’ but I don’t know if that’s in my future.”
Smith does know that she hopes to create another series. “I’d love to make a small personal project that’s a little grittier,” she says. “I don’t have that thing in mind, but this is good motivation for me to make sure I’ve got the five-year plan on lock.” She slips into a funny jaded New York accent. “Because otherwise the time slips by and then it’s over…”
HOW SHE LIVES…
“We’ve had a lot of crazy, wild parties in this house with a lot of fun people,” Smith says. “It’s a home that people are like, ‘I’ve been to a party at your house before.’ People have met here and gotten married and had babies.”
WHAT’S UP, DOC?
“When I saw this movie, I became in love with her character because she was free and crazy and she walked across the street not noticing that cars were crashing into each other behind her,” Smith says. “I just like that it celebrated a female force of nature in that screwball comedy way.”
BODY BUTTER
“One of my very favorite things is this discontinued Alba Botanica body butter,” she says, explaining she’s stocked up on it over the years. “I only have twenty left. It smells so good. I want them to reboot it. I have to buy it from nether regions like Amazon U.K. I got the last 20 tubs. I’m devastated. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
HER SHOE CLOSET
“This is my shoe closet,” Smith says, then pauses. “This is supposed to be a nursery, so instead of a baby, I have shoes.” She laughs. “When I bought the house in 2009, my friend who is a screenwriter Shauna Cross helped me design all of these rooms. She’s an amazing designer and screenwriter. She wrote ‘Whip It.’ That was a project that I helped her develop and produce, so I was kind of like a mentor to her and this was a present that she gave me. Like I helped her with her career and she helped me [decorate]. It was a super fun collaboration to be like, ‘Let’s be maximalist and vintage boho glammy about everything.’ The wallpaper is fun.”
SHOES, SHOES, SHOES
“I don’t know if I’m, like, hardcore obsessed with shoes,” she says, “but it seems like it, doesn’t it? I like wearing short dresses and then I like to have a little heel action going on.” She first fell in love with shoes when she was in high school. “I used to go to this nineties shoe store in Seattle, John Fluevog,” she explains.
HER SENSE OF STYLE
“I’ve always loved colorful, bold looks,” Smith says, clad in a look by Trina Turk with Sarah Flint heels. “When I’m working, I am wearing, like, a bikini with a muumuu — a schmatta if you will. A lot of times, we’re working over at [Karen’s] house by her pool. She loves to be outside and so do I. We love to sit in the sun and drink drinks.” She adds, “In the pandemic, I started wearing these FARM Rio colorful shirts and I would wear them with zero pants and would walk around the neighborhood. I would wear a swimsuit and a shirt and that was it for six months. And I think that’s legitimate. I don’t know if I need to really change that.”
HER FIRST PIECE
“This is by Aya Takano,” she says. “It was my first legitimate art purchase. I purchased it when I had enough money to actually make an investment in someone. It represents a moment I grew up a little bit, while also celebrating girlishness.”
L.A. LANDSCAPE
“I wrote a script with this wonderful writer Harper Dill,” she says. “She wrote the new Jennifer Lopez movie ‘Marry Me’ that’s coming out. Her husband is the artist Alec Egan, who does all these amazing L.A. landscapes. Keep an eye out for him. His stuff is really beautiful.”
HER DOG TRUDIE
“Trudie arrived in the pandemic,” she says. “I had a pit bull named Pippin who is fawn colored. Pippin passed away in January and so I saw some pictures of dogs online and Trudie looked like a little Chihuahua version of Pippin. So I went from pit bull to Chihuahua and it’s quite a change.”
FAMILY PHOTOS
“This is my sweet daddy,” Smith says, referencing a photo on her shelf. “He just passed away in December.” She takes us through a few of them. “This is Pippin, the pit bull who Trudie looks like. Do you see her resemblance? And then here’s my mom. This is Port Ludlow in Washington, which is where I spent my youth, and this is the ‘Legally Blonde’ premiere; Lynda Obst — an iconic mentor.”
PARTING STONE
“Michael Hebb is a leader in the death community,” Smith says holding a smooth stone that was once her father. “He told us about Parting Stone. They take remains and they turn them into these beautiful smooth stones, so then you can give them to friends that remember Mel. I keep them close because this is also the guest room where my parents would stay when they come to visit. So I want him to be all comfy in the room. I got to spend more time with my mom [after he passed]. Because we didn’t have to come back here for work, I got to stay up there for three months with her in Washington state.”
HER LOUNGE CHAIR
“This was one of my first major furniture purchases,” she says. “It was falling apart, so we recovered it this year. I looked at it this year during the pandemic and I thought, ‘That chair is raggedy ass.’ It’s time to spruce it up. Philosophically keeping those prized possession, but then giving them a little zhuzh.”
HER CD COLLECTION
“When I moved in here, this CD collection was a pride and joy,” Smith says. “These CD and DVD shelves were built to accommodate my media. This and this stereo cabinet, CD shelf, and DVD shelves were built to house them. When I would have parties in the mid-2000’s or late 2000’s, people would be like, ‘Oh my god. CDs — weird. Okay. Sort of sad and embarrassing.’ But now, it’s got like a cult factor to it. So I’m happy that I hung onto them.”
HER DVD COLLECTION
“My DVD collection is amazing,” she says, sharing a few of her personal favorite feel-good films. “I love ‘Two Weeks Notice,’ ‘Wildcats’ with Goldie Hawn, ‘Clueless,’ and John Hughes movies. ‘Dave’ is a really good movie. I really want to do a remake of that and have it be Denise instead of Dave, but I don’t know if that’s in the cards for me. I try to pitch it every year, so maybe one day they’ll bite.” Overall, Smith’s massive collection includes, she says, “a lot of fun, poppy movies with some dark female feminist indies.”
THE BREAKFAST CLUB
“They’re all in alphabetical order,” she says, explaining she used to work at a library in addition to a video store. “Those were my two high school jobs.” She also has a collection of VHS tapes upstairs but, “every time I put one into the player, they explode and burn.” As she picks up John Hughes’s 1985 drama “The Breakfast Club,” she notices, “Apparently, I’ve cued up important scenes on little post-its.” She laughs. “Why, I’m not sure! I think [it was probably] for research.”
GUITAR
“This was a guitar that my friend Michael Hacker gave to me around the release of ‘10 Things,’ she says, referencing a Fender Strat. “No, I don’t play, but I love indie rock and I love alternative female artists.”
HER OFFICE
“I just updated my office in the pandemic with Julia Chasman, a fabulous producer turned interior designer,” says Smith. “I think it looks really good. When everyone did all their gardening and interiors and all that other bougie shit, I was right there with them. It’s a room of inspiration.”
THE MAIN EVENT
“‘The Main Event’ was one of the first movies that I became unnaturally fixated on seeing in the movie theatre,” Smith says, referencing the 1979 romantic comedy starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. “I cut out advertisements in the newspaper from when they were full page down to when it got smaller and smaller. I had them plastered all over my wall. Something about this image of a lady boxer boxing a guy thrilled me. On my birthday, my parents were like, ‘We’re going to do some boring sounding thing,’ and then we rolled up and we were at the movie theatre and I thought, ‘We’re seeing “The Main Event”?’ I don’t remember loving it. It was just like, ‘I can’t believe I’m here. I’m watching it. It’s happening to me.’ But why was I obsessed with this movie? I don’t know. It’s very odd.”
FLASHDANCE
“‘Flashdance’ was another amazing experience in the theatre,” she says. “I was visiting my aunt in Hawaii when I saw it. I thought, ‘What?! I need to become a welder. I need to be a dancer.’ And I just liked that there was a curly haired [woman in it]. Now we know a biracial girl was at the center of the movie, but I felt as a curly haired girl kind of seen and represented by Barbra and Jennifer Beals on screen — as opposed to a sleek, perfect blonde, you know?”
COURTNEY LOVE
“Courtney Love is one of my heroes, so I have a little framed picture of her peppered in,” she says. “Courtney and Madonna were my [heroes]. I loved everything they stood for — being smart and hilarious and unfiltered and saying and doing inappropriate things and pissing people off and pissing off the media.”
PIPPIN
“Here’s Pippin,” she says, referencing an illustration. “Our friend Sasha Spielberg is an actor and musician and she does incredible dog portraits. So she did this of Pippin and she captured Pippin’s vulnerability so beautifully. Pippin had megaesophagus, so she had to be fed upright in a chair for like three years. This journey of having a special needs dog, it just makes you love your baby even more.”
HER EMMYS
“Last year our Netflix series ‘Trinkets’ won 2 Daytime Emmys for best YA series and best writing for a YA series," she says. "It was insane that this show got Emmys. I never thought about that as part of my career goals. So — thank you, Netflix. Thank you, Awesomeness.” That said, she recalls being in a writers meeting with the showrunner of “Trinkets” and saying to prospective staff writers, “We have big ambitions for this show. We’re going to win an Emmy for this show.” She laughs. “The showrunner looked at me and she was like, ‘I didn’t know that was the plan.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Why not? Let’s aim for the stars.’ Maybe I manifested it when I said that in the meeting.”
TRINKETS
“I wanted it to have an indie rock spirit,” Smith says. “We shot it in Portland, where it was set. I wanted it to be beautiful and I wanted it to be cool. It’s not like ‘Euphoria’ cool, but it’s a kinder, gentler, softer, sweeter take on that kind of dysfunction.”
HER POETRY
“I have my little shelf of all my published poems and that’s a big accomplishment for me,” she says. “These are all my poetry publications. Is this dorky?” She thumbs through the pages of “The Geography of Girlhood,” which she wrote in college, then picks up a copy of Mississippi Review. “These literary journals essentially make no money, so they’re banking on the writing being good inside of them, so if you get somebody to say, ‘You get to be in here,’ it’s a dream come true.”
She hopes to pick poetry back up. “That’s actually what I want to get more into,” she says. “I want to go to more artist colonies in the coming years, so I can try to get back in touch with that side of myself — like a more lyrical and vulnerable part of myself because I feel like sometimes the business of writing… I get carried away with all of the stuff that goes on with that and then I kind of lose track of the little fragile person within.”
MISFIT CITY
“We’re going to make ‘Misfit City’ into a series, I hope,” Smith says. “We’ve been pitching it with two amazing young writers at the helm over this past couple of months.” Of collaborating with her fiancé, Lustgarten, Smith teases, “I love collaborating with people, so it was like, ‘Guy who lives with me — why not?’ It eventually just happened. Plus it doesn’t hurt that he’s an absolutely incredible writer.”
THE MASK
“Kurt gave this to me when we were courting,” she says. “I haven’t worn it anywhere yet. But the night is young.”
ENGAGEMENT RINGS
Smith’s relationship advice? “Find a nice, margarita-making boyfriend who continues to propose and give you engagement rings even if you’re not really planning a wedding,” she jokes. “I’m just like, ‘Let’s just keep getting engaged.’” Lustgarten has proposed to her three times over their ten years together — and she still has all three rings, including a claddagh. She wears one of them daily. “We are [engaged], but we’ve moved beyond it because the question when you’re engaged is, ‘When are you going to get married?’ At this point, the answer is, ‘Let’s just keep the rings coming.’”
THE LADY LAIR: A STORY OF FRIENDSHIP
In addition to her fiancé, Smith spent quarantine with another longtime friend, sometime collaborator, and occasional roommate, Sara Cline, who moved to town from New York weeks before lockdown began.
“It’s like I get to have two wives,” Smith deadpans.
The three of them previously lived together for seven years before Cline moved to the East Coast. “When I moved into this house, Sara moved in with me and then Kurt moved from N.Y.,” she explains. “We were a trio and then eventually someone had to go. She went back to N.Y., but then she came back and then we all got to be together in the pandemic.”
She and Cline created the Lady Lair together during the pandemic. They use the space to hang out and bounce creative ideas off one another. Here’s a peek into an average day together as they explain the origins of the Lady Lair and their longtime friendship.
Smith: You were staying here in this room.
Cline: All of my hardcore N.Y. friends had just given up and moved to L.A. and I was working at this really intense job and I….
Smith: There’s going to be no short answers with Sara. She’s a sensual woman that luxuriates in language.
Cline: It always comes back around though. There’s always a point. I decided to move back to L.A. and it’s kind of a funny and endearing thing because I lived here with Kiwi for seven years before I moved to N.Y. and even though I’m sure there was a part of her that spent most of that time thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to live alone without a roommate in my own house?’ I know she missed me the second I left.
Smith: I did.
Cline: There was no shortage of invitations to come back and stay indefinitely. … It was kind of like coming back to Grey Gardens. There was no food in the fridge. The pillows were kind of falling apart.
Smith: And this was just an empty space with dog crates in it.
Cline: This was an empty, dirty, dusty space with dog crates and let’s be honest, a sofa that looked like Beetlejuice had turned into a sofa. It had a black and white cover. It was a horrible sofa. So that was here covered in a layer of dust. And then there was nothing else.
Smith: Sara was like, ‘If I’m going to reside here briefly, if I’m going to quarantine in this space, I need to make it gorgeous.’
Cline stayed with Smith and Lustgarten for the first four months of quarantine before finding a place of her own.
Cline: It was a special and creative time. … I put together a visual concept and I’m not a professional designer obviously.
Smith: But didn’t she do a great job?
Cline: It was a lot of brainstorming and moodboarding. It was so strange because having lived here for seven years, I barely remembered that this space existed. We never came out here. When I was staying here, I almost forgot that there was even a balcony off of the bedroom and when I finally realized, it was like, ‘This is grim.’ There’s also obviously another person in the house too. Your fiancé? Yeah. There’s a third person who occupies space and Kiwi didn’t have a proper Lady Lair. So we branded the project Los Balcones and we recently have retitled it the Lady Lair.
Smith: Each item was painstakingly curated.
Cline: These John Derian pillows are one of the things I love the most. The chair was an early find that she already owned.
Smith: She had a whole concept for what was going to go on over here and then I drug an old chair up from the garage that had this crazy ripped fabric and I’m like, ‘What if we put this chair in there?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, god. It’s disgusting. It’s got springs coming out of it.’
Cline: I was mortified.
Smith: Then we got to figuring out, ‘What if we did a fabric?’ I got obsessed with Timorous Beasties and we ordered a bunch of different swatches. I think it’s rad.
Cline: I’ve come to love it.
Smith: I think the sofa is the anchor of the whole thing though.
Cline: I found it on Wayfair. It was shockingly inexpensive for what it is.
Smith: Living like a goddess on a budget. If you want her to do any interior work, you just have her move into the house, stay there for 4-6 months, and then you’ll get a beautiful space.
Cline completed the space with items from Serena & Lily, Etsy, and eBay in addition to rugs from Ralph Lauren.
Cline: It’s just a fun hodgepodge, high-low practical space.
Smith: And a beautiful friendship story. We hosted all of our iconic parties together.
Cline: Our parties were epic and I had no idea how epic they were until they ended. They were kind of legendary. But in the time, we just thought we were having a good time and we kind of took for granted that maybe there weren’t that many fun… A lot of parties in Hollywood aren’t very fun. They’re the ones where you go and they’re so produced. There’s catering and an In-N-Out truck coming in at midnight. There’s something antiseptic about the whole experience. It’s almost like people throw too much money at those things — to where you arrive and you’re like — is this a party or a professional event? I think people walked in here and knew it was okay to spill a drink. It was okay to accidentally fall in the pool and it wasn’t like the end of your career in Hollywood. You could be loose and you could be yourself.
Smith: The epicenter of the party was this gigantic margarita machine my former assistant found on eBay and had it shipped from a restaurant in Ohio.
THE MEETING OF MINDS
Smith and Cline first met years ago in producer Marc Platt’s office while Smith was pitching “Legally Blonde.” Cline was working with the head of production.
Smith: I don’t even know if we exchanged numbers.
Cline: Of course we did because Kiwi’s thing is — she always picks someone at every company who looks young and naïve enough to be directly under her spell. {laughs} So she has a mole on the inside who will then slip her scripts and printouts and soda. It’s like, ‘I’m coming by. Would you mind just pulling some sodas out of the fridge for me so I can put them in my bag?’
They remained in touch and later collaborated on a screenplay called “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” that previously had Lindsay Lohan attached.
Smith: Sara is an amazing writer, and after working on ‘Freaky Friday,’ she developed a close friendship with Lindsay and they decided to do a script together where Lindsay would play a female DJ. Sara brought me in as the grownup — the really immature grownup — in the room.
Cline: I don’t think grownup in the room is an appropriate term. I think there were no grownups in that room.
Smith: And now we’re going to bring that script back.
Cline: I think it was a little ahead of its time. Some of the feedback we got was, ‘Nobody wants to see a movie about a female DJ.’
Smith: Especially an 18-year-old.
Cline: It was 2008.
Smith: This is what I was telling you about — where the bubble had popped on female-driven stuff and so people were actually passing by saying, ‘We don’t want movies about women doing blank. No one will want to see that. Who wants to see that?’ But it’s a gorgeous piece of writing.
Cline: We decided to revisit it.
Smith: We should give this to Olivia Rodrigo.
Cline: Who’s that?
Smith: Who’s Olivia Rodrigo?
Lustgarten enters with margaritas he whipped up.
Lustgarten: I’m just going to leave these here.
Cline: That’s really sweet. The best smile you’ll get is this smile right here.
Cline explains she initially wrote the script while running Heath Ledger’s artist collective the Masses in 2006.
Cline: I would spend all day doing that and then come home and sit on this chair for two hours every night and work on this script.
Smith: And we gave it to my agent and he was like, ‘This is great and we took it out.’ And it did not sell, so it’s been dormant for ten years and now she’s back.
It will not star Lohan.
Smith: No. Because the character is [still] 18. So it could be Olivia Rodrigo. I feel like there’s an incredible crop of young actors who are also in music. So let’s get it going! It’s never too late, right?
