From the WGAw website --
http://www.wga.org/Written by Julio Martinez
[This is part of a longer article that is worth a read if you're into indy film and/or Hollywood's alleged diversity :o]
"I came to Hollywood in 1995 for all the same reasons any actress from Chicago comes out here, and it wasn't to write a screenplay about my life," says Nia Vardalos. She quickly clicks off her life history. "Born in Winnipeg, where I spent my early childhood. Did a lot of musical theater as a child and later moved to Toronto, where I went to theater school. Then got into Second City in Toronto. I worked there until 1990, migrated to Chicago, and worked at Second City there. I met my husband, Ian, who was also an actor at Second City, married him in '93. By '95 we decided to make the big move west."
It turns out that Hollywood wasn't quite ready for Nia Vardalos to be a star of film, television, or anything else. "When I came to L.A., I was told very quickly there was no work for me," she recalls. "One agent was brutally honest. She said I wasn't a slim blond, and I wasn't a noticeable ethnicity like Italian or Latino. There was no way she could sell Greek."
Rather then slink out of town, Vardalos made the decision to embrace her heritage. "I decided that if I was going to be the only Greek woman in town, I was damn well going to let everyone know I was here. That's when I decided to put together a one-woman show and do these family stories that I had been telling at parties for years."
In 1998 Vardalos got on stage at the Globe Playhouse in West Hollywood and just started talking about her large, boisterous family, centered on her courtship and eventual marriage to Ian. "I wrote about an hour's worth of material and called it My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I remember going to a Greek Orthodox church and handing out fliers. The Greeks came, and the show kept selling out. I knew I hadn't embarrassed Greeks in any way because they would come back to the show with their non-Greek friends and neighbors."
The press caught up with her show. The affirmative reviews she received finally brought the entertainment industry sniffing around. Rolling her eyes upward, she recalls the experience of dealing with a series of independent producers who all claimed to have first-work deals with major studios. "I can distill all their pitches down to this: 'This is how I'll sell it. I am going to change it to Italian/Hispanic. We are going to get Marisa Tomei/J. Lo to play you. No, you're not in it.' Then they would usually say they were going to get some screenwriter with a very WASP name to write the screenplay."
Vardalos sat in office after office, listening and thinking, Wait a minute. Why would I let some Anglo-Saxon who was probably an only child write my Greek movie? "And I knew I had to be in it. So I told them that I would like to try to write this myself. They laughed in my face. They couldn't understand why I wouldn't just sell them the story and let a real writer take over. I then asked the ultimate dumb question: 'Don't you want to do something new?' They just stared at me in disbelief. They told me I was not going to get a better offer, and I guess I was too naïve to believe them. At that point the agent who was representing me dumped me.
"The last thing my agent said was, 'Don't you understand? This is the way things get done.' Being a neophyte worked in my favor. I consider myself a fearless idiot, and I believe that is a plus in Hollywood. If I had really known how difficult it was in this town to even get a script read, let alone made into a film, it would have clouded my resolve. The less you know about the odds the better your chances are."
Vardalos made the decision to script her own screenplay anyway. "After I finished it, I just put it in a drawer, continued to do my show at the Globe, and waited." Fortune smiled on her in the guise of another Greek woman named Rita Wilson, who came to see the play, loved it, and told her husband, Tom Hanks, about the show. Vardalos and Wilson then met, wherein Vardalos readily gave her the screenplay.
"Things just happened so fast after that," Vardalos recalls. "The very next evening Tom Hanks came to see the play. The next day, he called me up on the phone and said, 'We're going to make your movie.' Well, I took a deep breath and said, 'I would like to play the lead role.' He said, 'Yes, I know.' When I got off the phone, I remember thinking, I just hope he's not a drinker."
