“Who’s Ashton Kutcher’s new girlfriend?”

We’ve all seen these types of magazine titles: reporters trying to link a celebrity to another celebrity or the celebrities’ coworker.

But what you never hear is who those people actually are, unless it’s another celebrity. Well, one of them is a Country Day alumna.

Imagine how surprised Autumn Wilner-Heard, ‘00, was when a picture of her back (just standing) was printed in a magazine with an article that falsely suggested that she was dating her boss, actor Ashton Kutcher. However, she is his employee and they are simply friends.

Wilner-Heard is the vice president of Feature Film Development for Katalyst Films and Television, the production company that Kutcher co-founded with a friend.

Specifically, she has been working in the CNN building in Hollywood for three years now and loves it.

When asked about Kutcher’s role in Katalyst Films, she said that he was very involved and hands on, working with his company and employees on ideas and actual production.

According to Heard, “he works as many hours as anyone else, if not more” and welcomes input from everyone.

Wilner-Heard helps come up with movie ideas, taking a very generic idea and working with writers to give the potential films a story line, setting, and characters. “It starts with a lot of research. I read between 20-30 scripts per week,” she said.

Once an idea has been formed and has its basic plot, the pre-production team pitches it to film companies. These companies include Warner Brothers, Sony, Paramount, Disney, Universal Studios, DreamWorks, Fox and News Line.

Wilner-Heard said that the pitch to the film companies is purely oral. By the time she and the rest of the pre-production team are selling the idea, they’ve pretty much developed the first, second, and third acts of the movie.

She also just sold her first film pitch to Fox Film, an action movie called “The Engineer” about an ordinary man put in an extraordinary situation. Kutcher will play an aeronautics engineer in Japan for business who gets caught in the middle of a CIA sting operation.

“It felt like I could finally breathe. After working on it for 10 or 11 months it was very gratifying [to be finished],” she said. After spending the last 11 months forming a plot, picking the best script, finding a studio to sell the movie to, and helping with casting, Wilner-Heard is helping with the script as well as developing a few other ideas.

Wilner-Heard said that Country Day did not directly prepare her for her career, but did help her in other ways.

“I got really comfortable talking to people who were older than me,” she said. “So now I don’t have any problem telling [older] people I work with exactly what I think when they ask me.”

She also states that although “high-profile” is a relative term, lots of people in the industry know that they have to go through her to get to Kutcher.

Wilner-Heard also said that although Kutcher’s her boss, they’re very good friends, and do things such as go out for coffee and talk.

Although she is now reasonably experienced in this business, this is not what she was originally planning.

She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in psychology, and has a cousin who used to be a producer. She interned with him her senior year of college and “once I was in the industry, I was hooked,” she said.

Although she is not “Ashton’s New Girlfriend,” Wilner-Heard is deep in the business and having a great time.