I go to movies with my girlfriends,” says Lindsay Lohan, 17, the star of Mean Girls and Freaky Friday. “I’m a girls’ girl. I’ve always been more into hanging in groups than being with a guy alone. My sister is, like, 10, and all of her friends love seeing this stuff too. It is fun for them — they get the laughs, though I don’t think they really look at what the movie is about yet.”
There is a new consumer force abroad in movie land.
Marketing men call them “tweens” or “aspiring teenagers”. They are girls aged between 8 and 14 with money to spend. According to a 2002 Mintel report, the UK’s 4m 11- to 14- year-olds spend £26m a week; by 2007, the buying power of the 29m American children aged between 8 and 14 will be $43.5 billion a year. That is a lot of movie tickets and DVD sales. They love the Olsen twins, and Hilary and Amanda. They really love Lindsay. She’s one of them.
Hollywood wisdom once decreed that while girls will watch a movie starring a leading boy, boys won’t watch one with a girl lead. In the past few years, that has been decisively reversed. Sleeper hits such as The Princess Diaries and Freaky Friday have shown that girls are happy to go to the cinema just with other girls, and peer pressure means they go in gangs. “Suddenly, it really doesn’t matter that much if the boys are going to come or not,” says Jane Startz, producer of the tween hit Ella Enchanted, “because there is such a faithful following for some of these girl projects.”
Teen girl movies are a studio executive’s dream. Cheap to make, with few special effects and inexpensive ensemble casts and locations, they can be advertised to a niche market with a potentially huge payoff. Mean Girls, which cost a mere $17m, has already grossed more than $70m in America and could double that overseas. The film’s screenwriter, Tina Fey, puts much of that success down to Lohan.
“Lindsay has a big fan base. There is a generation of kids who have watched her in The Parent Trap a thousand times on DVD. They are best friends with her. Girls are a fickle audience who can turn at any time, but there is something intrinsically likeable about Lindsay. She is real and regular, but tough; beautiful, but in a way other girls can handle. She doesn’t set them into a fury.”
Lohan’s Irish heritage has given her an understated beauty, auburn hair, green eyes. She is not tall, but is curvy, and she exudes presence. She can act, too. In Freaky Friday, Lohan managed the tricky physical feat of pretending to be a middle-aged woman trapped in a teenage body. “She is perfectly at ease in front of the camera and capable of great vulnerability,” says Fey. “There are a lot of little movie starlets out there at the moment and, of them, she is the most legitimately gifted actress.”
For anyone lacking a tweenage daughter, Lohan and her contemporaries — Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, 18 today; Amanda Bynes, 18; Mandy Moore, 20; Hilary Duff, 16 — scarcely figure on the celebrity radar screen. While Michael J Fox was 24 when he starred in Back to the Future, these new girl icons have made it before they are old enough to vote and, in the process, have turned the teen movie on its head. Twenty years ago, Molly Ringwald was the only teenager who could carry a movie, but starting with Clueless in 1995, and given impetus by the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, today’s protagonists are smart, in-control girls. Boys are relegated to the position of confused non-combatant or obscure object of desire, oblivious to the machinations and power plays raging about, and because of, them.
While the teen movie in 2004 has evolved a long way from Porky’s, most of them are not exactly top quality and are aimed squarely at milking the pocket-money crowd. Most of the stars are plucked from cable or television shows, so they are already familiar faces. The Olsen twins have commandeered the preteen market in America, though not in the UK, with excruciating straight-to-video films that shrewd marketing parlayed into a $300m clothing line. Recent teen favourites such as Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (where even Lohan’s spirited performance couldn’t rescue the dire script) employ paint-by-numbers plots and cardboard characters.
If in doubt, Disney remakes old hits, hires Lohan or adapts a Meg Cabot story. As popular with young American girls as Jacqueline Wilson, but with Barbara Cartland’s grasp on reality, Cabot writes fairy-tale romances about ordinary girls who become involuntary celebrities. The Princess Diaries took more than $100m at the box office in 2001 (its sequel is due in October), while All-American Girl, starring Lohan’s flatmate, the television star Raven, is released this summer.
“Girls, especially, get served up a lot of swill,” says Fey, whose day job is lead writer for the satirical television series Saturday Night Live. “And they are expected to like it.” Mean Girls is an altogether smarter and darker take on the genre. Fey’s script is based on Queen Bees & Wannabes, Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction study of teen-girl behaviour. Although the story is fictional — Cady Heron (Lohan), raised in Africa by her zoologist parents, discovers that to survive in the high-school jungle, she has to be as mean as the dominant clique, the Plastics — the incidents and characters are based on real behaviour. Anyone with a teenage daughter will find it disturbingly familiar.
“I had a certain obligation to make sure that the under- lying message of the movie would be in keeping with Rosalind’s book,” says Fey, who also plays a daffy maths teacher in the film. “The message is that girls are often their own worst enemy, and if they could learn to lay off each other, things would be a lot easier. When you are in the middle of it at that age, and so vicious about each other, you are so consumed that you can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Although Mean Girls has been likened to the classic Heathers, it is nowhere near as dark. It is funny and well acted, and the adults, mainly played by Saturday Night Live cast members, are, for once, excellent. It delivers a message without lashings of goo, but the plot conforms to type: Cady gets the pretty boy and there is a happy ending. To keep the all important PG-13 rating (the equivalent of a UK 12A) required compromises. “Right from the beginning, Paramount said, ‘We want the ads to be clean, we want to advertise on (the children’s channel) Nickelodeon,’” says Fey. “At the last minute, we had to lose a few jokes — including one about hot dogs — and you can’t show drug use. The good thing is that if a 10-year-old comes to the movie, anything that’s too dirty will probably fly over their head.”
