Arin Inge

Mean Girls (2004) with a primarily POC-focused and punk subculture-infused cast taking place in college instead of high school and more of a drama-leaning dramedy than a straight comedy.

LOGLINE: When a dull young woman is broken up with following a near-death experience the summer before her freshman year of college, she takes the change of scenery, her new lease on life, and her acceptance into a new, eccentric friend group as an opportunity to reinvent herself, but soon comes to realize that her new friends are getting her into increasingly troublesome situations.

If you had the chance to reinvent yourself, would you take it?

Amalia Harper is at a crossroads in her life: following a near-death experience and tough breakup, she wants to take full advantage of a fresh start that college would give her. It turns out her new roommate, Jazz, is the perfect vehicle for this. Being different from Amalia in every conceivable way, Amalia allows Jazz to transform her into something new, something different, something exciting like Jazz. The excitement soon falls away when Amalia realizes Jazz, having taken on Amalia as a project of sorts, can be domineering and incredibly mean, with Jazz’s friends capitulating to her whims and enabling her shoplifting romps, alcohol binges, and an illicit affair. Still, this is what Amalia wanted: to be different, changed…but does she want it that bad?

After Amalia tries to distance herself from Jazz, she asks her for one big favor: breaking and entering into a professor’s house to steal a sex tape of the two of them that Jazz was going to use as blackmail to get the professor to divorce his wife. The plan goes horribly wrong, and this is the final push Amalia needs to realize all of this, all of her efforts to try and become someone she isn’t, wasn’t worth it.

Amalia will show a great deal of passivity in her own story, and while she does at times give pushback to Jazz’s demands, those efforts are feeble and are quickly shot down by Jazz. There are times where she will simply go along with whatever comes her way, but eventually, she will learn to deal with this passivity.

Jazz’s friendly cool-girl demeanor is an invention to conceal her true nature: mean, controlling, domineering, stubborn. It’s clear she takes some amount of wicked joy in Amalia trusting her to re-mold her in Jazz’s image, even bestowing her with a new name relatively soon after making her acquaintance. Although she and Amalia eventually do form a bond, for Jazz, it’s maintained only so that Amalia can join the ranks of her sycophants and playthings. Jazz’s one overwhelming desire is for control, and when she starts to lose that control, the mask slips.

Plenty of coming-of-age films take place in middle or high school, but for many young adults, they only begin to form a sense of identity in college, which is why I chose to set this story in college instead. This story was partially inspired by my own desire to “reinvent” myself once I started college one state away and with a completely new set of people (I was the only one from my graduating class  to attend my college). Although I ultimately decided against something drastic like going by a new name, I wanted to explore what something like that could be like for a young woman.

Room (2015) and Prisoners (2013) minus the heavier thriller elements of Prisoners with a younger (high school aged), overall more female-focused cast, and set in 1978.

LOGLINE: Fed up with the ineffectual adults in her life, a teenaged girl takes matters into her own hands to find and rescue her kidnapped best friend who languishes in captivity, enlisting the help of other young women along the way.

What would you do to save a friend?

For Suzanne, the answer is simple: anything. When her best friend Meredith goes missing, she decides she must take matters into her own hands to find her, even putting herself in harm’s way, because it seems she is the only one determined to actually do something about the situation. While she is eventually successful, it is not without consequences.

This is a story where the power of sisterhood triumphs over all: along the way, Suzanne enlists the help of her classmate Jodie and Allen’s suspiciously young, battered wife Deidre to track down and save Meredith before she’s taken away forever. Although her strong will leads her into danger, without their help, Suzanne wouldn’t succeed.

Meredith, the character central to this story, isn’t just some damsel either – she tries her best to be free of Allen’s grasp, but her own traumas, namely, growing up in a neglectful single-parent home, and decisions that have to be made for self-preservation are preventing her from finding freedom on her own.

Allen, Meredith’s captor and high school history teacher, spent a year grooming her, eventually whisking her away under the pretense of their anniversary weekend but instead bringing her to a nearly secluded cabin in the woods to keep her under his thumb. His plans don’t have time to progress before Suzanne figures out where she is.

Jodie is a whip-smart classmate and friend of Suzanne’s who, upon realizing Meredith is absent from school, is determined to help Suzanne because she sees just how strong the bond between her and Meredith is.

Deidre, also a victim to Allen’s grooming, is initially reluctant to help Suzanne and Jodie, but after realizing the dire nature of the situation – as well as an opportunity to stop what happened to her from happening to someone else – finds the strength to finally defy Allen.

I chose to set this in the late 70s because not only were there less efforts in place to find and protect missing children (this takes place about four years before the disappearance and murder of Adam Walsh, which kick-started that widespread effort in the United States), this is also a time in history where women were realizing they have agency in their own lives and could make decisions for themselves, setting their own destinies. Suzanne is a product of this thinking, deciding that if those “in charge” (adults) won’t save Meredith, she’ll just have to do so herself.

After her old nanny abruptly quits they day she receives a hefty promotion, a wealthy wife decides to take in a young woman as an au pair to care for her three children, not knowing that this woman would end up undoing the fabric of her seemingly perfect family.

Jazz Jones always gets what she wants – until she doesn’t. In this case, what she wants is the affections of one of her classmates who, to her dismay, is already preoccupied with her roommate/frenemy who she can’t stand. With the help of her ride-or-dies, she schemes to sabotage their budding relationship, unexpectedly fostering a new, albeit illicit one, and has the whole thing blow up in her face.

When a newcomer moves into a community of stay at home moms, the queen bee of the neighborhood makes it her mission to put the naïve new mom in her place by any means necessary.