'I think I wrote a better novel than I ever wrote a screenplay,' she says. Six months later, she emerged from hibernation with a first draft of what was to become her first novel. Soured on Tinseltown, Lutz vowed never to write a script again, instead holing up in a relative's 200-year-old house in upstate New York in the dead of winter in 2004. 'It's really hard to have something you worked that hard on be massacred,' she says. Lutz made the change, but was distraught that the story was no longer hers. The finale of the writing process was a fax from the producers demanding that a lead character die by being eaten by an alligator. 'We started to call the production 'the curse of Plan B.' ' Somewhere around rewrite number six, the producers decided to cut a secondary character on which a major plot point hung, and Lutz's story caved in on itself. 'Nothing went well,' she says of the process.

But to be my life's work? That felt so insane.' Her dream of writing a Hollywood movie had been realized, but Lutz was smarting from her bumpy road to the big screen. 'I enjoyed to an extent how funny and silly it was. 'I don't recommend anyone watching the version that is out right now,' she says. Following a West Coast premiere set for September 11, 2001, the movie had a week-long limited release after which with the exception of a few small film festivals it was rarely shown in the United States.īut that's OK, because Lutz herself gives two thumbs down to the final product. But it was more than a decade and 25 revisions later that the film, Plan B, starring Diane Keaton, Paul Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne, was actually made. An aspiring screenwriter, she began the script for a mob farce in 1991 at age 21, and quit her day job the moment Hollywood producers came calling. Lisa Lutz never anticipated writing a book.

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