The Sweetest Thing

I'm writing this as a warning to other writers. I got ripped off and it involves, "The Sweetest Thing." First, I am a produced screenwriter. I wrote "Leprechaun in the Hood," for Trimark Pictures less than 1 year after I started writing. I never particularly wanted to write screenplays, but I bet a friend I could sell something in less than a year - and I did. I have never taken Hollywood seriously. I wrote a teen comedy and shopped it around ("I Saw, I Conquered, I Came") in the mid-2000s. I registered it with the WGA, and I can stand by what I am writing. I never got any traction but it went to several contests, something I rarely did. The Sweetest Thing came out in 2002. In about 2010, I saw this movie for the first time. There's a scene about midway through where a character is having sex with her boyfriend while he wears an animal costume. That got my attention because that was straight out of a script I wrote. At the end of this movie is the iconic scene where a couple get each other's genitalia piercings stuck and end up calling the fire department. Again, right out of my script. After seeing two scenes I had written in my script play out exactly as this movie portrays (sex in an animal costume of all things, and the couple getting their piercings stuck together), well, let's just say I'm very suspicious as to how they ended up in this writer's (Nancy Pimental) draft. I also know that Directors and "Script Doctors" borrow and steal from other scripts they read, so I won't go as far to say that the writer directly stole it from me... but the incidence of having two scenes from one script I wrote end up in someone's movie... makes me very suspicious. So if you're a writer, don't be as worried about your script being stolen - worry more that scenes get stolen. And remember that Hollywood is nothing more than High School with money... As far as this movie...I give it a "C-."