Thirteen - 14-year-old writer?

[Mister_Rik]

I just watched the 2003 movie Thirteen, and noticed that one of the main actresses, Nikki Reed, was also credited as co-writer of the movie. Nikki Reed was born in 1988, making her fifteen years old when the movie came out.

Assuming that this movie took at least a couple years to write and produce, Nikki Reed would have been Thirteen herself at the beginning of the project. Due to the nature of the movie, I find it kind of hard to believe that a 13-year-old girl could write something like this, unless she was a literature prodigy of some sort.

So, I’m left guessing that Miss Reed’s contributions as “co-writer” were probably along the lines of helping to come up with realistic, age-approriate dialogue. In other words, making sure that the 13-year-old characters actually talked like 13-year-olds, something the other, 40-something, co-writer may not have been able to do convincingly.

Does anybody have more information about this? Because if Nikki Reed was an honest-to-goodness, story-developing writer for this movie, I’m pretty damned impressed.

[monica]

I believe I heard somewhere that the movie was based off of her life experiences.

[mack]

From Fox Searchlight

“I started off by wanting to know what girls really talk about,” comments Hardwicke, “and when Nikki started opening up it became a lot more interesting, and daring, than any teen plot we could imagine. I began to add to her story my own observations of her mom, who, like the character Mel, is a hairdresser, and issues that I talked to her parents about and all this stuff combined into something I had never anticipated. As we would write scenes, Nikki and I would act them out, and right away I knew there was something very alive and powerful in the story that was unfolding.”

and from the telegraph:

The script was written in less than a week at the behest of Catherine Hardwicke, an ex-girlfriend of Reed’s father, who had, after they split up, become friendly with Reed’s mother, a hairdresser who, like the mother played by Holly Hunter in Thirteen, works from home. Hardwicke, who had known Reed since she was two, heard she was in trouble - taking drugs, cutting herself, running around with older men - and so she sought to distract her by suggesting they write a dumb teen comedy, an American Pie clone. But the intensity of her experiences made writing a light-hearted script an impossibility, and so the dumb comedy became Thirteen. The two of them buzzed through 30 pages a day, and on the sixth day they had a finished script.

Asked about the mechanics of writing together, Reed recalls, 'Most of the lines came from me, structure and perspective came from Catherine.

I think she was 14 when it was shot and 15 when it came out.

[DeadlyAccurate]

I have a novel somewhere around here that was written by a boy at around 13 or 14. I’ll see if I can find it later, but it was published by an imprint of one of the big publishing houses. So it certainly isn’t impossible, even if this wasn’t the case for this particular story.

[orbitingio]

This was the worst “kids lives are screwed up these days” movie I have ever seen, and god knows I’m a fan of that subgenre (most recent viewing: Acts of Worship).

That it was written by someone who is young is not surprising at all.

If you want to see something truly impressive, check out some of the stuff that Harmony Korine wrote when he was very young (yeah, he’s an overrated artsy hack, blah blah blah, I still love him).