New In Town was an old idea for screenwriter Kenneth Rance. But Renee Zellweger was the “new” part. He admits he’d had Halle Berry in mind for the role since an encounter in a Minneapolis bar 16 years earlier.

“I was born and raised in Minneapolis, and after college I was at a nightclub and saw this very attractive woman dancing like there was no tomorrow. I bought her a drink and said, ‘Where you from?’”

The African-American woman turned out to be a young business exec from North Carolina, living in the real-life town of New Ulm. “She said, ‘There was an opportunity to be promoted at work, and it involved this kind of suicide assignment, not realizing I was going to be the only black woman in this town of 13,500.’

“The loneliness of being in that town, I thought, that’s a movie!”

Co-writer C. Jay Cox (Sweet Home Alabama), who inherited the script, said, “It was a fish-out-of-water story, but so little of what made the script work was about race, about this woman being in the whitest town in America. Very little of it had to be changed, from the idea was that it was written with Halle Berry in mind, I was surprised at how little of it needed to be changed for Renee.

“It was a story about people and our assumptions of city versus small town, and how they function in our lives.”

The subplot about parent corporations cutting back on the livelihoods of people far away also became more relevant with the recent economic meltdown. “It’s interesting,” says Cox, “We’re going through a real crisis. Without getting too heavy in a romantic comedy, real people are struggling for a living, and closing down plants. It is not about numbers and bottom lines. These things affect real people in real ways.”

Comments are closed.