cameron diaz movies
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Chapter 2 - Vegas Is 24-Hour City
 From the first roll of the dice, the odds were good that What Happens in Vegas would quickly land in front of the cameras. On the strength of a winning pitch by screenwriter Dana Fox and producer Michael Aguilar, the studio immediately commissioned a script and the comedy was off and running.
Recalls Aguilar, "We sold the pitch in the spring, Dana delivered the first draft in the fall, Cameron [Diaz] and Ashton [Kutcher] soon became attached based on that draft, and we were shooting the following summer. By Hollywood standards, that's pretty much warp speed."
According to Dana Fox, What Happens in Vegas was actually an amalgam of several movie ideas she'd been working on. "I'm really interested in stories about finding love or getting to know someone through dysfunction or adversity. I first came up with this story about two people who strangely get to know each other while divorcing. Around that time, I kept hearing the phrase 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' and thought, if it wasn't already taken, it would make a great title for a film.
"Then, out of nowhere, Britney Spears goes and gets married in Las Vegas. And, it's like, yeah--one of the things you can do in Vegas is get married on a whim, sometimes even to a total stranger. Of course, the other thing you can do there is win a ton of money. And then it hit me: what if both of those things happened on the same night?" And, thus, What Happens in Vegas was born.
Cameron Diaz thinks the film's title evokes quite the vivid scenario. "Vegas is a 24-hour city," she says, "you can't tell what time it is, you don't know how much money you've spent, how much you've drunk, how much you've slept, and so on. There's kind of a built in safety net, though--because anything is possible in Vegas, you're given the permission to basically do anything there that you'd probably never do anyplace else at any other time in your life."
"It's really like a free pass to be your wildest, craziest, funniest self," declares Ashton Kutcher, "because no one's supposed to ever find out what you do there."
Diaz and Kutcher were both excited by the chance to bring the film's kicky "what if" scenario to life. "I loved the script's 'grass is always greener' theme," confirms Diaz. "People in relationships often think their single friends are the lucky ones, while the singles just want to be in a relationship. In life, it's ultimately about finding your own happiness. It's not enough to be happy just because you're in a relationship; first you need to be happy with yourself. That's something I think my character Joy learns the hard way."
"Jack and Joy are kind of flip sides of the same coin," Kutcher asserts. "They're both relationship challenged, even though Jack's pretty relaxed about it all while Joy's more uptight. Romantically, they've both been looking for the wrong thing, which is probably what draws them to each other to begin with--even if they are really, really hammered at the time."
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