Author Chandler Baker’s Film Adaptation of ‘Oh. What. Fun’ Hits Streaming This Week
Chandler Baker shares about her first page-to-screen adaptation, a star-studded cast and how Sarasota will always be her home.
Chandler Baker might have spent most of the last 20 years living in Austin, Texas, but Florida will always have her heart.
The author’s love for the Sunshine State is so deep that, even on her website, Baker calls Sarasota her favorite city in the world. “Sarasota is really beautiful. Florida is really beautiful. I feel very drawn to really large bodies of water. I just find them incredibly relaxing and inspiring,” Baker tells Flamingo just ahead of the release of the Amazon MGM Studios adaptation of her holiday short story, “Oh. What. Fun.” It also probably helps that her parents still live in Sarasota and she’s at the likes of Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium, the Ringling Museum of Art and Manasota Beach with her own family two to three times a year.
“The Whisper Network,” “Cutting Teeth” and “The Husbands” writer credits her upbringing in Florida with shaping her creative voice. In particular, Baker believes joining the rowing team in high school gave her a sense of confidence and determination that she still turns to when writing her best-selling books.
But while “Oh. What. Fun.” continues Baker’s trend of breaking down gender norms and probing the pressure women put on themselves, even she admits that it is much lighter than the work that made her one of the most in-demand writers in America. “I write a lot of dark material. I write a lot of murder mysteries and horror. But even ‘Oh. What. Fun’ is still about the expectations we put on mothers and that mothers put on themselves.”
In “Oh. What. Fun.,” Claire Clauster (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been working tirelessly to create a perfect Christmas for her family every year for decades. When her children and grandchildren (Felicity Jones, Jason Schwartzman, Chloe Grace Moretez, Dominic Sessa) descend on her house again for the holidays, Claire puts extra pressure on herself to deliver. But when the family leaves her behind while going to an event one afternoon, Claire realizes they don’t appreciate the effort she has been putting in. So she runs away and goes on her own adventure, leaving the rest of the family to try and salvage Christmas.
Baker actually wrote “Oh. What. Fun.” as a “break from (her) darker fare for fun.” While writing about an overworked mother who becomes convinced her neighbors are turning their husbands into mindless robots in “The Husbands,” Baker noted that the stressors over the division of labor in modern marriages really come to the forefront during the holidays. Since there was no room to depict such a character in “The Husbands,” Baker decided the tale of a harried mother at this time of year was worthy of its own story.
“I had this idea for a mom basically getting ‘Home Alone’d.’ I had a very loose concept of what it was going to be,” Baker explains. “I wanted to capture this unique Christmas spirit, where the family makes fun of themselves and their own traditions.” Once she settled on the structure of the elder siblings telling the story of what happened to their mother, Claire, Baker knew she had the right approach and was able to write up the 47-page-long short story in just a few weeks.
As soon as the story was announced on Publishers Marketplace, Tribeca Productions’ producer Keelin Ryan saw the potential in “Oh. What. Fun.” She teamed Baker up with Michael Showalter, the filmmaker behind “The Big Sick,” “The Lovebirds” and “The Eyes Of Tammy Faye.”
“He instantly got it intuitively. We ended up writing the script together. We got Michelle (Pfeiffer) interested and then we sold it to Amazon in January. By February, we were in pre-production,” Baker says. Even now, looking at how smooth the production process has been compared to her other projects, as well as the vast amount of talent involved in the film, Baker calls “Oh. What. Fun.’s” journey to cinematic release “surreal.”
“I never in a million years thought that I’d be talking about such a heavy-hitter caliber of cast. Getting Felicity (Jones)and Eva Longoria and just everyone. So many people have embraced this project in a way that I certainly never saw coming when I wrote it,” Baker says. She is especially humbled by the talent, dedication and contributions of the crew, admitting that she was inspired by how everyone from the production designers to the wardrobe team and director of photography tirelessly came together to make her script a reality.
Even Baker can’t help but laugh that this is the first adaptation of her work to actually be released. Ever since Reese Witherspoon selected “The Whisper Network” for her hugely popular book club back in 2019, a number of Baker’s books have been bought to be turned into either a movie or television show. These have included the aforementioned murder mystery, as well as the novel “The Husbands” and the short stories “Big Bad” and “Discretion.” With Hollywood being Hollywood, most of these projects have become stuck in various stages of development hell as studios try to make sure that they’re in the perfect condition for production. The Writers Guild of America and the American actors’ union strikes in 2023, as well as COVID-19, also didn’t help.
Despite her recent screenwriting success, though, Baker’s favorite place to be is still “at her desk alone, writing.” That’s been the case ever since her AP Literature teacher, Dr. Schleifer at Pine View School in Osprey, encouraged Baker to write. While she continued to be a huge reader as she went to the University of Pennsylvania and then the University Of Texas School of Law, Baker never considered it to be a legitimate career choice.
That was especially true during her junior year in Pennsylvania, when she finally bit the bullet and made her first attempt at writing a novel, an effort that she now calls “very, very bad.” After putting her ambitions to one side for several years, it wasn’t until she was working professionally as a lawyer that she began to put additional thought into how she could actually get her work published. Inspired by the books of Gail Foreman, John Green, Lauren Oliver and Jay Asher, Baker dove into the Young Adult genre. “I wrote books for teens that had some middling success. But I wanted to write more about my personal experiences, being a working corporate mom and put my opinions in there. That’s when I started writing ‘Whisper Network.’ That’s the book that really broke out for me, and I found my market,” Baker says.
As she readies herself for future screenplay glory—with Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning signed up to start shooting “Discretion” in 2026—Baker’s approach and ambitions remain the same. “I just want to be creative in multiple mediums. Whether it’s books, films or TV. I just want to keep getting stories that are hopefully sharp and clever over the finishing line. That’s what is really fun for me.”
