11 Celebs Who Directed, Produced, Or Wrote Movies That Honestly Made Me Say "Wait, What???" Out Loud
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1.Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker directed the 2004 teen rom-com First Daughter starring Katie Holmes as the daughter of the president of the United States who goes off to college and falls in love with a fellow student (not to be confused with Mandy Moore's Chasing Liberty).
The movie has an 8% on Rotten Tomatoes, but a much higher score in my heart.
2.Shonda Rhimes, who famously brought us shows like Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, wrote the script for Britney Spears's 2002 classic coming of age movie Crossroads.
In an interview with Broadly in 2016, Shonda spoke about working with Britney and writing the film. "I was much more interested in the young woman that I met than the image that people had of her," she said. "She was a person, and I don't think anyone at the time was looking at her — because it's such a misogynistic society — as a person. The idea that we could portray her as a three-dimensional young woman was interesting to me. To have mean-girled her and turned her into a caricature would have been a mistake."
3.Whitney Houston produced The Princess Diaries and The Princess Diaries 2: A Royal Engagement (and another fun fact, Shonda Rhimes also wrote the screenplay for the sequel). Whitney actually had a lot of input on the movies and even serenaded director Garry Marshall on his birthday on set.
"She's a really cool person," Anne Hathaway said in an interview on set with ET. "She definitely knows who she is."
4.Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson executive produced Mamma Mia! and its sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Tom actually once revealed that he'd auditioned for a role in the first film, but was ultimately turned down because of his singing voice.
5.Tom and Rita also previously had produced My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), and the story is pretty amazing. Rita happened to see a small ad in the LA Times for Nia Vardalos's one-woman show of the same name. She went and loved it so much that she brought Tom back the next week, and the rest was history.
“The one-woman show was very, very close to what the screenplay was," Rita told the Hollywood Reporter. "And the screenplay that we filmed was pretty much the screenplay that I was handed. None of the studios would finance us. They wanted to replace Nia. They were like, 'We need somebody with a name.' And I kept thinking, 'But she’s the writer. This is her story. The story’s enough.'" Of course, Tom and Rita also produced the much later sequels of the film as well.
6.Robert De Niro has a producer credit on the 2005 Rent movie adaptation. While he hasn't spoken about it, he did reportedly buy the rights to the movie in 1996.
7.M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director known for his films with shocking twists like The Sixth Sense honestly has a real plot twist of his own — he ghost wrote and did a script polish for the 1998 teen rom-com She's All That.
8.And in other M. Night Shyamalan news, he also cowrote Stuart Little. But he says that the family-friendly film actually makes sense among his repertoire. "That same year [that Sixth Sense came out] I wrote Stuart Little," he told Movies.com. "That combination is pretty accurate. The breadth of that and my interest in that, the family-oriented nature of that story — somewhere between there is where a lot of my movies fall."
9.Leonard Nimoy, who famously portrayed Spock in Star Trek, also had success as a filmmaker. He actually directed the hit family comedy Three Men and a Baby, which was his biggest directorial success.
"He’s the guy who wants to make you great," Steve Guttenberg, who starred in the film, wrote in the Hollywood Reporter after Nimoy's death in 2015. "His plan was to make us a family. He was always encouraging us to go out to dinner together. He was manipulating the experience with a heart."
10.I. Marlene King, who is most known for being the showrunner and creator of Pretty Little Liars wrote the script for the 1995 classic Now and Then.
"Mothers are now sending me notes saying they’re showing it to their daughters," she told EW about the film. "I feel like its become this timeless movie, and unfortunately, more movies like this aren’t out there, so people I think have latched on to Now and Then as an example of what we were just talking about: positive girl friendships. And I think it’s become this iconic movie, and that’s awesome!"
11.Finally, Leonardo DiCaprio produced the horror film Orphan. In fact, he's the reason that newcomer Isabelle Fuhrman landed the breakout role of Esther in the film.
"A lot of people don’t know that Leo is the reason I was cast in the original Orphan," Isabelle told Entertainment Tonight. "Because I’d never worked on anything before, it was kind of one of the first couple of big auditions that I had, and they were looking for someone with blonde hair and blue eyes, and so a lot of people didn’t actually watch my tape. But Leo watched my tape when he was out on location filming, and he called the studio and said, 'It's Isabelle or I’m taking the movie someplace else.'"
