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All roads for the stiletto-sharp, newly 25-year-old teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You lead back to a Los Angeles production company called CineTel Films specializing in cheap direct-to-video projects like Poison Ivy II: Lily (1996) and the Ghoulies series. It was the mid-’90s, and as part of her job as the company’s director of development, Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith regularly had to rifle through stacks of query letters sent in by hungry screenwriters. She was struck so much by one from a Denver, Colorado-based writer named Karen McCullah that she requested to read some of her scripts. She loved what she read, and after she called McCullah to say as much, the pair clicked, eventually meeting for drinks in L.A.

It was the start of a beautiful friendship, and also of a creative partnership that would stay put indefinitely. Smith and McCullah are responsible not just for 10 Things, the first official film they wrote together, but several other movies that, for many, are personal touchstones: Legally Blonde (2001), Ella Enchanted (2004), She’s the Man (2006), and The House Bunny (2008) among them. Unsurprisingly for meant-to-be creative partners, Smith and McCullah’s first “date” was not unproductive. They scribbled on cocktail napkins a draft of a script for a woman-led action comedy in the Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) vein whose completed version would not attract interest.

Read the full feature at South Sound.