What do you get when you plop an up-and-coming corporate executive in a couple hundred tons of snow in a small town in the middle of Minnesota? For one, you get an incredibly cold woman. But as screenwriter Kenneth Rance immediately recognized when he bought a drink for a beautiful out-of-towner he met on a Minneapolis dance floor many years ago, what you also get is an intriguing story.

"At that moment, I knew her story was a movie," says Rance of the evening he spent talking with the woman. Over 15 years later, that story about a woman hailing from the upper echelons of corporate America and uncertainly trying to find her footing in the small town where she has been sent to restructure the town's local plant has in fact come to the big screen. And several weeks before its release, the writers and stars of New in Town sat down at press conference in Los Angeles to talk about the movie, their experience making it, and how its story is one that really connects to us today.

Inspired by the true story of the woman Rance met many years ago, New in Town is a romantic comedy about one city girl, the small town she finds herself stuck in, and the common ground on which they eventually meet. In the title role is Reneè Zellwegger as Lucy, a corporate executive from Miami completely unprepared for both the weather and the culture in the small town of New Ulm, Minnesota. Waltzing in to play her romantic counterpart is Harry Connick, Jr. as Ted, a man's man, a single father, and the union representative unwilling to give Lucy even an inch. There to ensure Lucy's efforts are even further complicated is the town plant's gruff foreman Stu, played by J.K. Simmons. And stepping perfectly into the role of New Ulm's one woman welcoming committee, matchmaker, and mascot is Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Blanche.

In the beginning, Rance's original script called for an African American woman in the title role, but when the decision was made to change the ethnicity of the character and bring Zellweger on board, says Rance, the transition was very easy. "I never set out to write a screenplay about race; it was always a secondary factor."

"One of the things that I was really thrilled about was that it's basically a fish-out-of-water story, but so little of what made the script work was about race, about this woman sort of being in the whitest town in America," adds screenwriter C. Jay Cox who joined the team to continue development of Rance's original screenplay."I was surprised at how little of it really needed to be changed, that basically it was a story about people and sort of our assumptions about city versus small town, about beliefs and the way that they function in our lives. It's sort of this romance between Lucy, and not just Ted, but this town."

While Zellweger may not be a traveling corporate executive, with her job as an actor transporting her to one new location after the next, the "new in town" experience is one she herself has gotten to know well.

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