The Quad

Issue date: 10/6/08 Section: Entertainment

When authors Rachel Cohn and David Levithan decided to collaborate on the novel "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," about two teenagers who meet and fall in love over the course of a single night in the New York City underground music scene, they took turns writing alternate chapters, Cohn wrote Norah's and Levithan wrote Nick's.

The stunt lent such authenticity and depth to the characters' voices that when aspiring screenwriter Lorene Scafaria read the novel, she says, "I remember closing the book and weeping a little bit. I read it all in one go, and it literally put you inside the heads of two teenagers for five hours."

Although Scafaria didn't have any produced screenplays to her credit, she had written several scripts good enough to convince the production company that owned the film rights to the book to let her take a shot at adapting the story for the screen. "The authors ultimately had the final say, so I was tickled they picked me," said Scafaria, who while writing the script drew on her own background growing up in New Jersey, "living under the shadow of New York City and taking the train for an hour into the city, hoping for one of those nights that can only happen in Manhattan."

By the time Scafaria had finished her second draft, the movie's producers had signed on director Peter Sollett, whose debut film, 2002's "Raising Victor Vargas," also centered on teenaged romance in New York's Lower East Side.

Sollett had been trying to get his sophomore project past the script stage, but he couldn't secure funding. "I felt I needed to get involved with other things so my career didn't get lost in development hell," Sollett says. "And when I read Lorene's script, I was totally surprised, because it felt like something I wished I had written. It even felt a little autobiographical. It seemed very obvious to me that I NEEDED to make that film."

Sollett and Scafaria started collaborating on the script, brainstorming to come up with characters and situations to surround their two lead characters, who would be played by Michael Cera ("Juno," TV's "Arrested Development") and Kat Dennings ("The 40-Year-Old Virgin," TV's" E.R.")

"Peter is great at capturing the authenticity of characters," Scafaria says. "The fact that he's a guy and I'm a girl hopefully mirrored what the authors of the book experienced. We came up with more ridiculous ways of getting the characters into trouble."

"I credit Peter with a lot of the humor in the movie. He may speak softly and intelligently, but he's got a really dirty mind."

Continued...

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