Elizabeth Banks On Writing A Raunchy, Female-Centric Comedy Before There Was 'Bridesmaids'

In her recent interview with New York Magazine, Elizabeth Banks says she’s ready to take a break from the male-centric gross-out comedies she’s known for: “I’ve been doing a lot of playing with the boys, and I’m sort of over it.” She reflects back on the female-centric comedy she wrote over eight years ago called What About Barb?. The screenplay was about a bride who has her crazy relative Barb forced into being her Maid of Honor, and included a crass bathroom scene among two ladies that was ultimately nixed:

There was a scatological scene in the ladies’ room in the script, but “the studio execs were like, ‘People don’t want to see girls doing that.’ And I was like, ‘I’m writing from experience! You go to a club and you have to wait in a huge line, so people double up. And, yes, you think you’re only going to take a little pee, but sometimes some poops come out.'” It never got made. Says Banks, “We never got the pooping scene as right as they got it in Bridesmaids.“