NOT SO "FAST" FOR "THE EX"

For most of its pre-screen life, The Ex, which stars Jason Bateman, Zach Braff and Amanda Peet and which opened Friday, May 11, was known as Fast Track. That's what the script (from the team of David Guion and Michael Handelman) was called; that's what the production was known as when director Jesse Peretz and his team were shooting in New York a year and a half ago; that was its title in the editing room, and in the marketing suites of the Weinstein Company. Until January.

"The movie almost came out a couple of months ago," reports Peretz, on the phone a few weeks back. "The Weinsteins changed their plans at the last minute, realizing that the idea of how they were marketing the movie wasn’t really true to what the movie really was. It was sort of stuck around this idea, with the original title being Fast Track, of it being this workplace comedy."

And while much of it is that -- Braff's character going to work for his father-in-law (Charles Grodin) in a New Age-y ad agency, and being sabotaged left and right by an exec played by Arrested Development's Bateman -- the crux of Peretz's comedy is the relationship between Braff and Peet, a couple with a baby, and Bateman, her former flame, still carrying a torch, madly.

"We weren’t doing ourselves justice, because it’s really much more of a kind of nasty love triangle comedy," says Peretz. "And also, we realized it would probably be a better draw in terms of getting people to actually come see the movie. So we decided to pull the plug on what was going to be a January release and give ourselves enough time to re-set up the movie, marketing it for what it really is. Hence the name change and everything. It was frustrating -- I was anxious to see it come out -- but in retrospect I'm glad."