If Knocked Up started the pregnancy movie trend, and Juno made it official, then Baby Mama is the film that will keep the ball rolling. Written and directed by SNL alum Michael McCullers, the movie features two of America's finest comediennes — Tina Fey and Amy Poehler — as a successful businesswoman who wants to be a mother, and the working-class surrogate she hires to have the baby. The film, which also features Sigourney Weaver and Steve Martin, contains dead-on jabs at modern parents ("Rumi and Chayenne," calls a mother to her kids in a city playground, "come play with Wingspan and Banjo!"), cushioned in a surprisingly sweet story about female friendship. Babble joined a group of online journalists as Tina and Amy sat in front of us, "Weekend Update"-style, to field questions about pregnancy, MILFs and baby names. — Gwynne Watkins
Can you talk about the first time you met and what you thought of each other? Was your chemistry instant, or has it evolved over the years?
Amy: I was like, I finally found the woman I want to marry.
Tina: And then I had to break it to her that that's not legal.
Amy: We met in 1993 in Chicago. I had heard about Tina "on the streets" before I met her. We were both new improvisers who had moved from where we were going to college to study improv, and we performed together on an improv team named after a bad porn movie called Inside Vladimir.
Tina: Gay porn movie.
Amy: Gay porn movie. Not necessarily bad.
Tina: No, excellent.
Amy: Just gay. So we were the two women on that improv team and that's where we met. So we knew each other when we were big-eyebrowed, poor and badly dressed.
Tina: I think we have always had a mutual respect for each other. We both took improv super-seriously at the time. And we still kind of do.
Amy: And at that time, there was a lot of really fertile talent coming out of Chicago. I know that [Stephen] Colbert, [Steve] Carell, Amy Sedaris, all these people were performing —
"We knew each other when we were big-eyebrowed, poor and badly dressed. — Amy
Tina: They were on the main stage when we were students.
Amy: And Rachel Dratch, Horatio Sanz and Adam McKay were all coming up at the same time.
The scenes with the lamaze classes and the birthing rooms were really accurate. Were you lurking in various birthing places to nail down the details?
Tina: We had some experts on set, who were these wonderful, very earthy women. This woman came up to me and said, "Are you thinking of having another child?" And I was like, "No." And she was like, "You should consider a water birth."
Amy: The same woman was telling pregnant people in their ninth month —
Tina: A lot of the other women in the class were very, very pregnant —
Amy: And she was explaining nice ways to make love. And women were like, "No." And the guys were taking notes.
Tina: But by the end of it, I did want to have a water birth.
Amy: You don't need to have a baby to have a water birth.
©2008 Gwynne Watkins and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Babble editor Gwynne Watkins is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has appeared both online and in print. She is a consulting editor at Nerve.com, as well as a playwright and a lyricist. Her most recent show, the children's musical Space Pirates, premiered in May. |
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