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It's a very beautiful and touching story. I wouldn't want to mess up with it other than developing a nemesis, maybe the most popular girl that decides to start the joke and hopefully ends up learning a lesson. A trickster friend that switches sides, sometimes helps her, sometimes hinder. That being said it would be interesting to know when you have to buy the "life rights" of a story or when you change it so much than it isn't necessary.

But we want some brainstorming, right? This kind of reminds me of the tale of Cinderella, sans wicked stepmother and sisters, and shoe-test. So maybe to make something slightly more original we should keep the basic story and mix a little with the way it's told. how about a musical using only rap songs. Or another genre not frequently used in musicals.

It's a sweet little story, especially b/c it's true, but it's the basic Cinderella story that's been done in movies so much. I had been thinking about this for a while, in part because of the remake of Carrie... Maybe there's some deficit in the FMC that she doesn't see in herself or doesn't feel the need to repair because she's ostracized. It's not like a "no one sees how special you are" type of BS fantasy, anything like that is a two-way street, she has these positive qualities to herself but has to work to bring them out, and once she does that, more people start seeing that. Or maybe she was a bully way back when, she pushed everyone away, and now she's lonely and miserable and wants friends again. Maybe it's a healing process. Maybe it's a guy. It's NEVER a guy in these movies, and you could easily fall into this sort of metrosexual trap, but so many of the bullying victims I hear about are boys and we never really see that represented the same way in movies. "He's All That."

Oh yeah, you were asking about that the other day, I'm actually curious too.

I mean, the story could easily fall into the trap of basically a film version of that old show "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy," you know, handsome man makeover type thing (where the term "metrosexual" comes from) instead of being a whole self-improvement type story, which would be more interesting.

You could go after the life rights. Or you can do what Hollywood often does: Fictionalize a version of the story.