Mattel’s ‘Barbie’ Script Notes to Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach Asked: ‘Does a Mattel Executive Have to Be Shot’ During Beach Battle?
variety.comZack Sharf Digital News Director “Barbie” screenwriters Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach recently joined Tony Kushner (“Angels in America,” “Lincoln”) for a discussion about the record-breaking Warner Bros.
blockbuster and revealed one of the first notes Mattel gave them on the script: Please don’t have the Mattel exec stand-in characters be shot.
In the third act of “Barbie,” an all-out beach battle takes place between the warring Ken characters. It’s at this moment that Will Ferrell, playing the fictionalized CEO of Mattel, arrives in Barbieland along with his armada of nameless male Mattel execs.
At one point one of these execs gets shot with a fake arrow during the ensuing, bloodless mayhem. “There was a note when we first turned the script it,” Baumbach told Kusher. “On page 111: ‘Does a Mattel executive have to be shot?’ At the time we were like, that should just be on the ad!’ “But all the notes had a question mark at the end,” Gerwig added, stressing that Mattel really did give them the freedom to satirize the company as they sought fit. “It wasn’t like, ‘This has to happen.’ It was more, ‘But does he have to be?'” Gerwig said that Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz “really did give us a tremendous amount of trust and freedom.
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