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Win a Date with Tad Hamilton

Rosalee Futch (Kate Bosworth) is a grocery clerk living in rural West Virginia. But even a small-town girl can have big dreams, and Rosalee’s is to someday...somehow...meet her big-screen idol Tad Hamilton (Josh Duhamel - interviewed below).

The ‘somehow’ arrives in the form of a contest—the grand prize: a date with Tad Hamilton - and the ‘someday’ is now...Rosalee wins, much to the chagrin of her best friend and co-worker Pete (Topher Grace), who is deeply, hopelessly - and secretly - in love with Rosalee.

The ‘Win a Date’ contest was cooked up by Tad’s agent, Richard Levy (Nathan Lane), and his manager, also named Richard Levy (Sean Hayes), to clean up Tad’s bad-boy image. Someone should have told them to be careful what you wish for.

When Tad meets Rosalee and gets a taste of what he’s been missing in the ‘real world,’ he decides he wants seconds and moves to West Virginia, turning Rosalee’s dream come true into a nightmare for Richard Levy, Richard Levy and, most of all, Pete.

Australian native Robert Luketic, who made his feature film directorial debut with the smash hit comedy Reece Witherspoon vehicle, Legally Blonde, directed Win a Date With Tad Hamilton from an original screenplay by Victor Levin (TV’s The Larry Sanders Show and Mad About You).

Young or old, male or female, everyone has had an idol - an unattainable special someone, on the big screen or in the big leagues - whom they admire and dream of actually meeting someday. Imagine if you actually met your idol and the tables were turned - you became the object of his or her desire. You might find that what you thought was beyond your wildest dreams might not be a dream come true after all. That scenario is what drew husband-and-wife producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher to Win a Date With Tad Hamilton.

Idol Worship

Douglas Wick says, “My favourite romantic comedies are about longing, about wanting something or someone you can’t have. From the first moment we read an early draft of Win a Date With Tad Hamilton, we felt it captured that beautifully with Rosalee, a girl working in a small-town supermarket, and her big-screen idol, Tad Hamilton, seemingly out of reach. Another thing I was drawn to was that it played wonderfully off that Hollywood image people have and the star struck world in which we live. People worship the movie stars they see on the screen, but if they ever got to meet their idol, they might think very differently.”

“The script was so charming and intelligent and had so much wit,” Lucy Fisher adds. “Romantic comedies work best when you think you know where you’re heading, yet you’re surprised along the way, and this script did that for us. Of course, the charm of the script is definitely due to the writer, Victor Levin.”

“Victor Levin created characters who are so three-dimensional, they just popped off the page,” says Wick.

Screenwriter Victor Levin reveals that he wrote the character of Tad to be the kind of movie star that, as the cliché goes, “women want and men want to be,” so even he could relate to Rosalee’s idol worship. “Tad Hamilton is who I long to be. He is successful, talented and a decent person. He has a marvellous way of dancing through life with a minimum of pain and a maximum of happiness. I think I can say that his days are the envy of all of us,” Levin says, although he is quick to add that, despite Tad’s star status, “the theme of this movie is that everybody is a somebody. Whether you come from a small town or the highest stratum of society, at the end of the day, the playing field is a little more level than we may think.”

With a script in hand, the producers turned to finding a director. Topping their short list was Robert Luketic, who had scored a box office hit with his debut feature film, Legally Blonde. “We have three daughters, and I think we’ve seen Legally Blonde maybe 2,000 times,” Fisher laughs. “We immediately thought of the wildly talented Robert Luketic.”

The producers note that, the success of Luketic’s first feature notwithstanding, it was not the only deciding factor. Fisher offers, “We saw a short film he did called ‘Titsiana Booberini’ about, strangely enough, a checkout girl in a supermarket. We thought it was incredibly innovative and original and had a lot of flair. So we agreed this would be a very good match.”

Wick agrees, “His short film had such a great sense of style and was so colourful. What we wanted for ‘Tad Hamilton’ was to create characters who were emotionally true, but in a slightly heightened, joyful universe…a little bit brighter than normal. From the first moment that Robert came in, adding his own touches to the story, he created that slightly more colourful, more lively, more humorous world that became the perfect backdrop for our fantasy.”

Robert Luketic says that, on the heels of the success of Legally Blonde, he had been sent a lot of scripts, “but this one I just couldn’t put down. There was something about it that was very memorable, very real. It had a unique voice that was beckoning to me. I had wanted to choose a film in which I was once again able to fall in love with the characters, and I found that in Win a Date With Tad Hamilton. I fell in love with Tad Hamilton and Rosalee Futch. In fact, I fell in love with all the characters.”

The first of the characters to be cast was Rosalee Futch, the Piggly Wiggly grocery clerk from Fraziers Bottom, West Virginia, who wins a trip to Hollywood and a date with the man of her dreams, Tad Hamilton. Wick notes, “The role of Rosalee was critical because the story is primarily from her point of view. What was tricky about her casting was that you had to have someone who could be believable as a supermarket checkout girl, but when she dresses up, you understand how someone like Tad Hamilton—who’s seen every beautiful girl in the world—would follow her home. It was hard to get all that working together.”

Blue Crush

“We searched high and wide for our Rosalee,” Luketic attests. “You don’t come across all the qualities we were looking for in too many individuals.”
The filmmakers ultimately found the right combination in Kate Bosworth, the star of the surfing hit Blue Crush, who won the role of Rosalee over dozens of other hopefuls.

Luketic says, “The big surprise in Kate’s audition was that not only could she portray the charm and innocence we needed, she was also very funny. Within 30 seconds of her starting her audition, it was, ‘Here’s Rosalee.’ In fact, it was unanimous.”

“She was mesmerizing,” Fisher recalls. “We were smitten right away. The studio fell in love, we fell in love, and Robert fell in love.”

For Kate Bosworth, the feeling was mutual. “One of the reasons I wanted to do this movie so badly was because Robert Luketic was directing it. As we saw in Legally Blonde, he helps create these female characters who are so quirky and sweet and wonderful, and still intelligent and true to themselves. That’s what I loved about the part of Rosalee. She is so sweet and innocent and naïve, but in the best way. She doesn’t mask her emotions. She can be kind of goofy and spazzy and I’m the same way. I’m not the sort of person who tries to act cool all the time; I like to embrace my inner dork, so it was fun to portray that.”

A rising star in her own right, Bosworth also loved that the story bridged two worlds with which she is very familiar. “It shows the normal world that most of us live in and the completely surreal Hollywood life,” she remarks. “When they collide, it makes for both magic and disasters. But it also shows that you can find love anywhere. If you win a date with a movie star, it’s possible that love can be found.”

The casting of movie star Tad Hamilton was the topic of much discussion and debate for the filmmakers. “There were several ways we could have gone for Tad, ranging from the big, established movie star to an unknown,” Luketic comments. “I think the decision we made to go with a relative unknown was the best one.”

Josh Duhamel, who landed the role of superstar Tad Hamilton, was actually well known to fans of the daytime drama All My Children for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Leo du Pres, and broke out this year in the hit primetime series Las Vegas. The title role in Win a Date With Tad Hamilton marks his big-screen debut, and Douglas Wick remarks that it is easy to imagine him as a major movie star. “Josh Duhamel has one thing you can’t fake: screen presence. He fills the screen. He is also a really good actor with a great, subtle comic timing. We wanted a guy with the swagger of a movie star, but who could at the same time make a tiny bit of fun of himself, and Josh brought all that to the part. He really created the character for us.”

If the filmmakers had any doubts about their decision to cast Duhamel, they were put to rest the first time the actor came in for a wardrobe fitting. Fisher remembers, “His first day trying on costumes, we had a bevy of onlookers going out of their way to gawk at him every time he moved between fittings. That’s when we really knew we were in good shape.”

Narcissistic

Luketic adds that Duhamel’s appeal goes beyond good looks. “He has this constant energy that makes everyone who meets him fall in love with him, which is important when you’re presenting him as the biggest movie star in the world. We all fell in love with Josh. I couldn’t imagine anyone else being Tad Hamilton.”

Duhamel counters that when we are introduced to Tad Hamilton, he isn’t what one would describe as lovable. “Tad starts off as a self-absorbed, narcissistic movie star who is totally out of control. Now he has to do something to change his bad-boy image and get back to being the ‘boy next door.’ He doesn’t want to do it. He’s got better things to do—girls to see, money to spend, booze to drink...” he laughs. “But then he meets Rosalee and becomes completely charmed by her. She is not jaded—unlike the people he is used to hanging out with—and, ultimately, he really falls for her.”

Duhamel observes, “The interesting thing is, I think at one point Tad really was the boy next door, but he’s been fed all this attention and, over time, the attention and celebrity is something he’s become accustomed to. But beyond all that, he has a good heart, so he sees Rosalee as someone he can use to make him a better person.”

If there is one person who is the most sceptical about Tad Hamilton using Rosalee to become a better person, it is Rosalee’s lifelong friend Pete Monash. Despite being a devoted friend, Pete has his reasons for not wanting Rosalee to end up with the man of her dreams: he has been in love with her for years, although he has never let on.

Topher Grace, who stars as Pete, explains, “They have such a strong friendship, that it would break Pete’s heart if she said ‘no,’ and they couldn’t even be friends after that. What’s really great about the guy is he loves her so much, he is willing to forego having a romantic relationship just to be in her life. But this date with Tad Hamilton brings his true feelings to the surface.”

Connecticut

Coincidentally, Grace and Kate Bosworth had lived in the same small town in Connecticut as children and attended the same elementary school, which added a real-life facet to their onscreen friendship. Bosworth offers, “Pete is Rosalee’s friend whom she has known all her life. He knows her better than anybody and she him, which makes for a very solid and safe relationship. I could see him thinking that one day they would end up together, but then, totally unexpectedly, Tad comes into her life and sweeps her off her feet, which puts a wrench in Pete’s plans.”

The role of Pete presented its own casting challenge: Pete is the manager of a Piggly Wiggly in Fraziers Bottom, West Virginia. Yet the audience has to buy him as viable competition for the fabulously rich, famous and handsome Tad Hamilton.

Wick acknowledges, “We had to introduce Pete to the audience as a guy managing a grocery store going up against one of the best-looking and biggest movie stars in the world and has a credible chance of winning. When we tested Topher, he was accessible and charming with a great inner strength. We thought, ‘Here is a guy we believe could steal Rosalee away from Tad Hamilton.’”

“Topher has a classic ‘Everyman’ quality,” adds Fisher. Luketic had been a fan of Grace’s from his work on the series That ‘70s Show, as well as in the award-winning film Traffic. The director states, “After seeing his performance in Traffic, I kept a mental note that one day I’d work with him. His work is incredibly intense and smart and real—all the qualities I was looking for in Pete. He auditioned for us, and Pete was born.”

Love Triangle

No love triangle would be complete without some challenge between the two suitors vying for Rosalee’s affections, and the combination of Topher Grace and Josh Duhamel presented Luketic with an opportunity for some physical comedy. “In a physical sense, they are polar opposites of each other, which provides for some very funny situations. Josh is this tall ‘hunk-a-rama’ man, and then you have Topher who is in the more slim, handsome department...sorry, Topher,” he laughs.

Far from being offended, Grace asserts that Pete’s one-on-one match with Tad is one of his favourite sequences in the movie. “There is clearly a lot of friction in this triangle, even though they’re not admitting it, especially Pete. At a certain point, they meet in a kind of competition, and you’ve got that testosterone…you know, that mano y mano thing. That’s my favourite part of the movie, especially that wood-chopping scene,” Grace says, referring to Pete’s miscalculated attempt to contest Tad’s farming skills.

Pete may be none too thrilled about Tad Hamilton turning up in Fraziers Bottom, but Rosalee’s other best friend, Cathy, is elated. Another huge Tad Hamilton fan, Cathy had been content to live vicariously through her friend’s dream date, but when Tad shows up at the Piggly Wiggly where they work together, Cathy is ecstatic actually to meet the dream.

Cathy is played by Ginnifer Goodwin, who affirms that her character harbours no jealousy over her friend’s sudden fairy-tale life. “Rosalee and Cathy have been best friends since childhood, so Cathy is genuinely happy for her. Cathy believes in living life to the fullest, so she sees this whole thing as a great opportunity for love and adventure. She is just having fun living in this fantasy come true and is 100 percent supportive of whatever her friend decides.”

Luketic calls Goodwin “a complete scene stealer. She plays the best friend to Rosalee who is definitely the racier of the two. Ginnifer came in to read and charmed the pants off us. It was once again the notion of casting opposites. They complement each other so well—the beautiful blonde, Kate Bosworth, and the vivacious, sexy brunette, Ginnifer Goodwin, who was wonderful in the role of Cathy.”

Henry Futch

Tad’s arrival in West Virginia also has a profound effect on Rosalee’s dad, Henry Futch, played by Gary Cole. “Henry is quite taken with Tad Hamilton, just like everybody else,” Cole says. “He is intent on impressing him with his knowledge of ‘the business.’ I think he fancies himself to be somewhat of an insider, even though he’s about as outside as you could get.”

Luketic remarks, “The great thing about Gary is that he has, in fact, been a successful actor in Hollywood for so many years. But when he plays this down-home, folksy dad who enjoys rubbing elbows with this big star, he makes it believable and very funny at the same time.”

Like any star of his magnitude, Tad Hamilton has handlers, consisting of his agent, Richard Levy, and his manager, also named Richard Levy. Screenwriter Victor Levin says that he chose the same name for both as one of script’s few Hollywood inside jokes, because “in Hollywood, it’s as common a name as John Smith.” He delineated them by designating Tad’s high-powered agent as 'Richard Levy the Driven,' and Tad’s opportunistic manager as 'Richard Levy the Shameless.'

“Richard Levy the Driven is exactly that,” Levin expounds. “His primary concern is making money for his client—and thereby himself—and, for Heaven’s sake, avoiding bad publicity. Whereas Richard Levy the Shameless is all about the perks: the money, the power, the private jets and all of the other pleasure-seeking accoutrements of this loony industry.”

It was the two Richard Levys who conjured up the 'Win a Date' contest, never imagining how their plan could backfire. But when Tad leaves the trappings of stardom for a simpler life with Rosalee, Richard Levy and Richard Levy aren’t about to let their bread and butter be churned up on a West Virginia farm.

In what the filmmakers considered a casting coup, award-winning actors Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes star respectively as Richard Levy the Driven, and Richard Levy the Shameless.

“Nathan Lane is the consummate comic actor,” Fisher states. “He can take any line, any situation, and roll it around in his brain, and it will come out 40 times funnier than you could possibly imagine.”
Saying that he found the script to be “extremely well-written and genuinely funny,” Nathan Lane adds, “For me, playing an agent is a no-brainer because I’ve played so many show-business types. I’ve played actors, I’ve played a producer...But if you could tell me the difference between an agent and a manager, I would write you a check right now,” he jokes. “My Richard Levy is more of a parental figure than the other Richard Levy, who enjoys the perks of show business, but sometimes forgets the business aspect of it. But in a crisis they do think alike because their shared livelihood is Tad Hamilton.”

“Now Tad had an agent, but someone of his stature had to have a manager, too,” Wick states. “We had to have an actor who could hold his own with Nathan Lane, which cancels out about three quarters of your list. We were all fans of Sean Hayes, and when he came in, he impressed us even more with his own point of view on the manager. We rewrote the part based on many of his ideas about the manager being basically a Tad wannabe who envies and emulates everything about Tad, right down to his shoes.”

“My Richard Levy pretty much wants to be Tad Hamilton and have all the benefits Tad has as a star,” Sean Hayes observes. “He fixes his hair like him, he tries to dress like him...He even takes clothes from Tad’s closet.”

Gifted Comedian

Everyone was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Lane and Hayes, no one more so than Robert Luketic. “One of the greatest joys of my career so far has been working with Nathan Lane and Sean Hayes, whom I consider to be two of the most gifted comedians in the country,” he states. “They don’t just fill the screen, they engulf it. They are geniuses; they can turn a word or a simple gesture into the most hilarious thing ever. You know you are in the presence of professionals when they come in. We had them for an all-too-brief two weeks on this production, but they brought such energy to the set that there was an incredible sense of sadness when they did their final shot.

The film was shot entirely in and around Los Angeles, which meant finding several West Coast stand-ins for Fraziers Bottom, West Virginia. One of the primary locations was the Piggly Wiggly grocery store where Rosalee, Pete and Cathy all work. Unfortunately, Piggly Wiggly is a chain that exists only in the south-eastern United States, so production designer Missy Stewart and her team set about converting a vacant 14,000 square-foot former supermarket in Van Nuys, California, into a Piggly Wiggly branch, which, Stewart says, “was a lot of work. There was not an empty square inch.

"We stocked the shelves with dry goods, but we couldn’t have refrigerator units because of the noise, so the dairy case, the frozen food case, and the meat and seafood cases had fake food made by our art department. We used everything from carpet to Styrofoam peanuts, which sounds pretty unappetizing, but looked great from a distance.”

To complete the look, the Piggly Wiggly Corporation provided signage and other paraphernalia that would be familiar to anyone east of the Mississippi, including a giant Mr. Pig. In fact, the imitation Piggly Wiggly proved a little too convincing to the dozens of people—perhaps transplanted southerners, thinking the 'Pig' had finally made his way west, or just shoppers checking out the new supermarket—who came with grocery lists in hand to fill their carts. Lucy Fisher recalls, “When we tried to explain that it was a movie set, they still tried to push their way in. Everything looked so bright and shiny and delicious, but it was all fake. Still there seemed no way to convince the neighbours that it was not a real market.”

Piggly Wiggly

While keeping with the traditional red and white palette of the Piggly Wiggly chain, costume designer Catherine Adair, with the company’s permission, completely redesigned the employee uniforms. “We did a red and white, slightly retro-looking tunic dress, polyester, of course. The idea was for it to be worn over the girls’ own clothing, so you could still get a sense of their individual tastes and personalities underneath the rather standard uniforms.”

For both the production and costume designers, the challenge was to establish distinct looks for the contrasting lifestyles of West Virginia and Hollywood, without making the former look too quaint or the latter too surreal. Adair says, “The reality today is that everybody can get online; everybody watches television or looks through magazines, so it was about creating two separate worlds that were different without West Virginia looking like something out of a period film.”

The California location stand-ins for West Virginia included the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro, California, an Art Deco theatre, which served as the perfect small-town movie house for Tad and Rosalee to take in a movie. One part of the theatre’s set dressing was especially enjoyed by Josh Duhamel, who got a kick out of seeing himself 'starring' in the collection of Tad Hamilton movie posters on display. “They looked so real. I could take them to any casting office and say, ‘Yeah, I did all these movies. See? I’ve got the posters to prove it. It just added to the fun of pretending I’m a movie star. It was like living a dream come true.”

A ranch in Thousand Oaks, north of Los Angeles, doubled for Tad Hamilton’s West Virginia farm. Joe Jost’s, in Long Beach, one of the oldest taverns in the West, became the Lil’ Dickens pub where Rosalee, Pete and Cathy like to unwind after work. Tending bar at the Lil’ Dickens is Angelica, played by Kathryn Hahn, who has an enormous—and obvious—crush on Pete.

Adair and Stewart did get to indulge their most lavish tastes in designing the lifestyle of the rich and famous Tad Hamilton. “Once you are finished looking through all the latest periodicals, you hit Rodeo Drive and have great fun seeing what everyone who is anyone is wearing this season. And Josh made it even more of a delight. You couldn’t ask for anybody easier or more gorgeous to dress,” Adair states.

“I also loved the closet in Tad’s house, which turned out like a little temple to retail,” Stewart adds.

In Los Angeles, Westwood’s ultra-hip W Hotel served as the backdrop for Tad Hamilton’s poolside lunch with the Richard Levys. It is also the hotel where Rosalee stays in Los Angeles and where she first meets the man of her dreams, Tad Hamilton.

Douglas Wick offers, “There are so many people around the world who are looking at a screen or a magazine and thinking, ‘If only I could have that person.’ And what this story does in a very humorous way is say, ‘Okay, you’re going to get that person.’ But, sometimes, only by getting what was out of reach can you appreciate what’s right next to you.”

“Win a Date With Tad Hamilton is a movie about realizing your dreams,” Luketic concludes. “It’s a celebration of romance and all the mysteries that it holds, whether you’re a huge Hollywood star or work in a supermarket in some small town. But at the end of the day, it’s a movie about love, and, without wanting to sound too cliché, as far as I know, it still makes the world go around."

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! is produced by Oscar winner Douglas Wick (Gladiator, Stuart Little) and former Vice Chairman of Sony’s Columbia Tri-Star Motion Picture Group Lucy Fisher (Peter Pan). William S. Beasley (The Tuxedo, The Mexican) and Gail Lyon (Stuart Little, Peter Pan) are the executive producers.

Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! is out on DVD now.

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