M. Night Shyamalan is one of Hollywood’s most tragic figures. Heralded as a genius for the first half of his career (The Sixth Sense! Unbreakable! Signs!) he has since devolved into the punchline of a desperately unfunny joke. But wait! Could redemption be in the air for Mr. Shyamalan?
In an interview on May 29, M. Night Shyamalan confessed that he ghostwrote in his past and that he was too embarrassed to even say the name of the film …After the gentlest of prodding from the interviewer, who simply said “We’d love to hear about it,” Shyamalan replied: “I ghostwrote the movie She’s All That.”
Game changer. She’s All That, as you may remember, was an incredible 1999 Freddie Prince Jr. vehicle in which Rachel Leigh Cook plays a girl who hides her beauty behind glasses and a ponytail (yuck) and Freddie Prince Jr. plays himself. And it was written by M. Night Shyamalan, meaning this guy’s early career was on a whole different stratosphere than anyone imagined, making his recent downfall that much more baffling. And making us, in the paraphrased words of She’s All That‘s protagonist, just an audience, standing in front a director, asking what happened to him …