Egg-freezing sojourn inspires a new movie
San Francisco filmmaker's personal work makes a splash at Sundance
It's taken San Francisco native Leah McKendrick some time to simply appreciate her success as the screenwriter, director and actor of “Scrambled,” the raucous film that marks her directorial debut, opening Friday, Feb. 2, in theaters.
During a candid Zoom interview while she was on her first-ever press junket, McKendrick revealed it's not so easy to embrace the positive reaction to her film. But she's trying, really trying, to get more comfortable with the response to her hilarious and deeply personal comedy/drama focused on a perpetually single Los Angeles jewelry designer and bad date aficionado who has opted to freeze her eggs since time's indeed marching on.
When the film premiered at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in 2023, McKendrick felt overwhelmed before and after it screened.
“I was realizing now people are going to actually see this thing,” she says. “People are going to watch it. People are going to judge me. People are going to judge my film. And I did my best, you know, but that's not my job — everyone is entitled to their opinion. My job is to make the movie and put it out. But it was really hard. It was a really hard transition.”
And processing the audience's reactions to it, while dealing with the “emotional hangover” from making the film, and putting herself front and center in it, proved challenging.
“When people were coming up and saying lovely things, there was a part of me that struggled to receive it,” she said. “I think it's impostor syndrome … . Nobody really tells you how hard it is to receive the positivity. It's very overwhelming, and I had a hard time with it. I felt very emotional. But it was beautiful. And I'm trying to enjoy this process. But I will say, to be that naked, to receive support, to receive women telling you that they relate to you. It's almost… I could just start crying and never stop crying.”
The film is rooted in McKendrick's own truth, when in 2021 after a breakup and a realization that time was a factor, she decided to freeze her eggs. McKendrick was 34 at the time and went through the regimen of injecting hormones into her stomach while isolating during the pandemic.
It brought to the fore a cluster of issues — about being a woman and being hounded by the sense that she was a failure, a chord that gets expressed well in the film. So “while bloated and self-loathing on my couch,” as she states in production notes, she decided to write “Scrambled” and cast herself in the lead.
“Scrambled” marked the second time McKendrick had a film she worked on get showcased at SXSW. The previous time came about when she starred and wrote “M.F.A.,” a 2017 thriller about a rape survivor turning into a vigilante for other women. In addition to those films, McKendrick is also well-known for the web series “Destroy the Alpha Gammas” amongst other digital series work, and has written screenplays for a romantic comedy “Voicemails for Isabelle” and a “Grease” sequel, “Summer Lovin'”
McKendrick decided to cast herself as Nellie in “Scrambled” for a number of reasons, including that the screenplay requires the actor who plays her to appear in a series of hilarious, ribald sexual encounters once Nellie revisits and hooks up with previous men in her life. They're some of the funniest moments in the film and earn the film its R rating, and feature nudity.
“I wanted (the sex scenes) to feel raw and messy and honest and authentic and gritty and unglamorous,” she said. “I think also that was part of the reason why I demanded to star in it myself … . I knew that I could handle it because it would be all at my own hand” since she was the one calling the shots and determining how those scenes were going to be shot.
Even though “Scrambled” addresses a pertinent but rarely discussed topic concerning women and fertility — something Hollywood doesn't deal with frequently — it didn't dissuade McKendrick.
“I wouldn't take no for an answer,” she said. “I did it coming from a pretty dark place of having nothing to lose at this point, and I will make it myself for $5 of my own money. So as far as I'm concerned, I already greenlit myself. That was how I approached it. I'll make it for nothing if I have to. And I have enough friends in this business that I'll get it made. And miracles happened.”
McKendrick was well aware that the story pitch for this “Scrambled” likely would have generated a thumbs down from major studio heads.
“I feel like if I had gone around asking for permission, I would have most definitely been told no. And I think that that's the sexism of the industry. I think that's just the reality of this industry…I was not in a position where everyone's throwing green lights at me, you know. So I have to greenlight myself, and that might mean doing it real scrappy, real independent, real small.”
She calls it a miracle that Megamix Production and LionsGate agreed to climb aboard.
“To be totally honest, the only thing that I can think of is that I said `I'm making it with or without you.' And they said: `we'll make it with you.' We had entities dissuading me from starring and dissuading me from directing, but I just wouldn't have that.”
Not bad for an artist who yad a whole different plan for her career.
“I wanted to be a pop singer like Britney Spears,” she says. “That was always the original plan. I was like, `I'm not gonna go to college, I'm gonna go to L.A. and I'm gonna be like Britney.' My parents were like `Oh God, this is terrifying. Please just go to college.' So I thought: `OK, well, I'll go to college until I get my record deal.'”
While at Chapman University in Orange, she got involved in theater and recorded and performed in Hollywood on nights and weekends. She admits she was a bit of a rebel and balked at the suggestion that she appear in “really lame scenes in our acting for film class.” Her professor turned the tables on her and told her to write something better. So she did. But never abandoned hope about being like Britney.
For now, though, those Britney pop star dreams will have to remain on hold. Kendrick's been busy writing a legacy sequel to the 1997 horror hit “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and working on a reboot of 1989's “Troop Beverly Hills.”