Brittany Murphy's 'Little Black Book'

Aug. 6, 2004 -- The miracles of modern technology have made everything easier, even snooping on the ones we love, and Brittany Murphy admits she's guilty of that crime.

"I was at an ex-boyfriend's house once, looking for a vacuum cleaner," she says. "I ended up opening up a closet that I'd never opened and it was a shrine to all of his ex-girlfriends."

Murphy, 26, goes significantly further than that in her new movie, Little Black Book, scouring her boyfriend's password-protected little black book to look up his old girlfriends to find out why those relationships didn't work out.

As romantic comedies go, Little Black Book is rife with dark humor, and her character, daytime talk show producer Stacy Holt, could easily be called a psycho girlfriend who gets what's coming to her.

"Stacy's a good person. She's a smart person. She's a cool girl," Murphy says. "She just takes it too far."

A lot will depend on Murphy's on-screen appeal. After a breakthrough performance in Clueless nearly a decade ago, she's proven she can handle over-the-top characters, as the mental patient in the Michael Douglas thriller Don't Say a Word and as Eminem's girlfriend in 8 Mile.

Her recent stabs at comedy, however, in Uptown Girls and Just Married, have earned mixed results. Still, the $4 million she received for this new film, represents her biggest payday yet.

Little Black Book also features Holly Hunter, who, as Stacy's senior producer, puts a new spin on her popular performance as the neurotic newshound in Broadcast News.

Ron Livingston, best known from Sex and the City as the insecure writer who broke up with Carrie Bradshaw via Post-it note, brings an element of the hit HBO show to the film as Murphy's commitment-phobic boyfriend.

Kathy Bates rounds out the cast as the talk show host eager to exploit any sort of dysfunctional human into a ratings boost.