Odette Yustman as mean girl Joanna in 'You Again.'
On a sweltering afternoon near the end of August '09, a lucky bride to be threw an uber-extravagant wedding shower in Pasadena's Langham Huntington Hotel & Spa. It's the kind of place where there's always a bowl of shiny red apples at the reception desk and the surrounding neighborhood is outrageously affluent. Kristen Bell, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sigourney Weaver and Fandango were among the special guests. It wasn't a real wedding shower; it merely served as the set for Disney's forthcoming comedy, You Again, opening Sept. 24.
Former high school rivals revisit the past when Marni (Bell) finds out her brother is engaged to her arch nemesis Joanna (Odette Yustman). Although Marni is now a successful PR pro, she still vividly remembers her awkward teen years back when she was constantly humiliated by Joanna. Marni's mom (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Joanna's aunt (Sigourney Weaver) parallel the same relationship as both families re-unite for the bride to be.
It's a tricky balance to find the right actors who can pull off cat fights and mean-girl antics while keeping it funny and light, but the chemistry amongst these leading ladies, including Betty White, provides just that. If the film is anything like the goofiness that occurred on set, we should be in for another round of likeable, Freaky Friday-esque wackiness.
Sea of Love
The set is covered in bright lights and extravagant décor, mimicking the ocean floor. Shimmering blue waves, coral and tropical fish decorations surround the room. An aroma of frosting and sugar wafts through the surroundings. Men dressed up like well-groomed pirates are wandering around, which is all perfectly normal after finding out Joanna has themed her wedding festivities a "sea of love." (She and her fiancée Will met at the beach.) They even have shell head phones…to hear the ocean waves, of course. Joanna's aunt has evidently gone overboard with wedding preparations, but for her, money isn't an issue…
In the scene they're filming, Odette Yustman's character is flanked by two high school friends, both pregnant cheerleaders. On the other side keeping her distance stands Kristen Bell with Curtis and White. Kristin Chenoweth, who plays Joanna's top-notch wedding planner Georgia, waltzes out to make an announcement. At a petite height of 4'11, she still has no problem commanding people's attention with her powerhouse voice: "Make a hole!" she sings. They gather around as she enthuses, "Mermaids, I give you, swimming all the way from Charm City Cakes, Chef Duff!"
Lo and behold, the acclaimed Ace of Cakes Chef Duff Goldman (who plays himself) comes out wheeling a four-tiered cake—for merely the wedding shower, mind you—and says, "What Georgia King wants, Georgia King gets." Georgia then squeals to the ecstatic bride to be, "If you think this is amazing, wait 'til you see what he's cooking up for your wedding!"
Cake Creator
After the shoot, I took a closer look at the cake, over-decorated with sea shells, starfish, glitter-doused Hawaiian flowers, protruding palm trees and doves. Blue tulle, shaped like ocean waves, and brown crystal sugar, looking like sand, surround the base. Atop the creation is the bride and groom in a clamshell, Botticelli style. "We had to skirt that line between gaudy and tasteful, and I think we did it. We would never decorate something this crazy," Chef Duff says, referring to his real-life bakery. He's still in his gray, double breasted chef jacket that he wore in the scene, dressed down with green Pumas. This is the guy that literally makes mouths water...but it's not without great effort.
After spending time on the phone with the production crew and then preparing the cake in his Baltimore-based bakery, he had one of his employees drive the cake all the way to L.A. He flew in, saw the set, and realized the cake didn't quite match with the color scheme. "Everything was blue and sparkly, and the cake itself was very tropical, but very warm. A lot of reds, yellows, some oranges, and I was like, 'Uh-oh.' But sometimes, you have to improvise," he says. So, the day before the shoot, he spent 10 hours re-decorating and building the cake, even borrowing some of the set's decorations for it.
Director Andy Fickman had tested other cakes for the scene, but wasn't satisfied with that "grocery store, two football fields on there, white sheet cake look...we said, 'what we want is a Chef Duff Ace of Cakes,'" he said. But that little comment in passing quickly led to some investigating, and in the next couple of weeks, they were on the phone with Chef Duff, pitching the idea and booking the event.
When Duff finally arrived on set, the actors eagerly welcomed him with star-struck enthusiasm. "It's almost like I got attacked by an eagle falling out of the sky!" he says. Yustman admitted she might've freaked him out with her 14 hugs. Weaver's introduction to him was three words: "I love cake." And Curtis, who's a big fan of his show, kept the sarcasm thick with dismissals on how she didn't know how to turn on the TV, and had no idea who he was. "They were goofing around with me the whole time. Jamie Lee has just really made it so comfortable."
Curtis keeps up that jovial, playful mood between takes, encouraging her co-stars to jiggle what little arm fat they have. During down time, she zips around with shopping bags buying gifts for friends, and she's had quite the influence on the others. Oren Aviv, Disney's production chief at the time, gave credit to Curtis for suggesting the cast share trailers. "Everybody took pay cuts to do the movie because they liked the script so much, so she said, 'Why are we wasting energy and money when we could just double up?'" With production being a short, 35-day shoot, in an effort to go green, they did.
Curtis Gives Her Gift
In the next scene filmed that day, Yustman is surrounded by her friends, opening her shower gifts. Curtis enters the scene and presents her gift – a scrapbook of her son's precious growing-up moments. They then proceed, in sappy, mother-daughter-to-be bonding fashion, to flip through and coo over its contents: a lock of his hair from his first hair cut, his first pair of "big boy" underwear, his first tooth… etc. "Welcome to our family!" says a teary-eyed Curtis. Yustman tells all her friends: "Do I have the best new mom or what?"
Their sentimental moment is short-lived, however, as Weaver walks in and steals the spotlight. "OK, ladies!" she interrupts. "My turn. Attention! And follow me!" She beckons and adds French flourishes before leaving the room. Everyone files out, whispering about what her next surprise will be, and Curtis is left sitting alone before she finally sets down the already forgotten scrapbook and decides to follow.
The Divas
After the scene, Sigourney Weaver gives us a little background on her character's French embellishments. "It's kind of sweet that someone would constantly throw in not exactly perfect French to seem worldly, especially if she's coming home to her old hometown…" she explains. Her own high school experience had its awkward moments. In her tweens, she towered over her classmates at 5'11. "I was this tall when I was 11, which was a scary way to start! So the first thing I did when I got to high school was disappoint everybody who thought I might be a major basketball star…and I went right into modern dance."
Weaver continued to dance at Yale School of Drama, which actually helped with the samba she had to learn for her role. There was also a little pole dancing. "I did not learn that at Yale, although it would've been useful," she quips. "We had two weeks of rehearsal where people just learned how to dance together, which is a wonderful way of putting together an ensemble."
In a sizzle reel Fickman showed us, we watched some of that dance rehearsal footage. Betty White's dancing partner was a boy who comically mouths "Help me!"
White, our current favorite It Girl, plays Curtis' mom, and is now 88—and still delivering classic one-liners in rom-coms and Funny or Die vids. She's actually known Weaver for a long time. White worked with Sigourney's father, Pat Weaver, who started the Today and The Tonight Show. When asked if there's anyone she'd like to work with now, she immediately responds, "Robert Redford...I've taken his name in vain so many times. I'd be embarrassed, but whatever suits you, Robert Redford, suits me."
White says she's had a wonderful, first time working with Curtis. On the set, Kristen Bell, Curtis and White are trying to straighten out details on their scene. "Just do whatever you need to do," Curtis tells Bell. "It's not my first rodeo, you know what I'm sayin'?" White chimes in: "It used to be my farm until she came along!"
When Bell comes by for a chat, she's covered in make-up with fake ant bites, and could pass for a Proactiv spokesperson. Her character Marni has been chased by a dog and falls down on an ant hill. "Everyone has had these types of days," she says. "Marni just has them more often than other people, and the hair and makeup is definitely a little bit more intense than I anticipated. I'm covered in lard." For her high school scenes, too, she was actually fitted for braces.
Yustman plays Bell's bully, but says she definitely wasn't a mean girl herself in high school. "I was voted friendliest student," she says. Now that she's graduated from filming horror thrillers, Yustman's looking forward to more roles in the rom-com genre. "After doing The Unborn, I just want to make people laugh, relax on set and have a good time…and who better to do it with than our director and this brilliant cast?"
Fickman agrees the ensemble has been quite a dream. "I think, as a director, they're all muses," he says. "You're only as good as the material and the people that you're working with." He's always cognizant, too, of the honor he's had to work with Weaver and Curtis. "It's very difficult to look over and see Sigourney and not be like, 'I am working with Ripley.' And then you see Jamie, and you're like, 'Laurie Strode and Ripley are gonna go at it.'"
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