I started writing this list when I was thinking of offbeat weird mainstream films that may have passed people by to recommend.
Then I realised a lot of them share the trait I love a lot about films - a great back story, behind the scenes story or weird IMDb trivia section.
As I heard Tom Hanks say recently on Desert Island Discs - films often only last in creation for 45-90 days. But their legacy has a hold on us - and often I think it’s in these trivia sections and glimpses behind the scenes that we see that. It’s something so hard to put into writing but that which can come through from lore, rumour and mythologising.
In this series I’m going to look at a few of my favourites. I love nothing more than waiting until the credits come up and switching to IMDb, or Variety, or YouTube, and realising there was so much more going on in those 90 days than what I’ve just seen. And so many people have had that feeling, and head to those pages too. I think you can TELL when a film will have a great trivia section; that impression of an epic unfolding in front of your eyes. I watched West Side Story and Synecdoche, New York, in quick succession last year and both of those films are teaming with that feeling.
Maybe all good films have potentially fun trivia sections and no one has uploaded them yet. You can also have a bad film with a great trivia section (Point Break, I’m looking at you!).
This isn’t usually the type of knowledge that goes on to Wikipedia or the history books - maybe traces. Normally you have to dig a little further. And that’s why I love it; it’s more in between the lines that you’ll feel the other reality come across. As humans, we get this. Words don’t often do enough - “you had to be there”, right? I still like to read as much as I can and imagine I was.
The good behind the scenes accounts tell stories you’d want to make into a film of itself. A film within a film. Like Call Me By Your Name, Beasts of the Southern Wild, or even more fitting, Synecdoche, New York.
BOOKSMART, 2019
I’m going to start with Booksmart because it is so much FUN. The story behind the film isn’t that wild. In all honesty it was the first one that seemed manageable to achieve today. And maybe that’s because it’s a classic overlooked-story-finding-its-way-to-the-spotlight tale.
This film spent a long time not being anything. Then, by cinematic magic, it became this thing. It’s been written in some form since 2009 - bandied around Hollywood for almost a decade. And yet it feel so fresh - so of this time.
I watched this film on a plane and laughed my head off. It’s everything I would want from a film packed into 105 minutes of glorious (sometimes haphazard, always compassionate) coming of age comedy.
Something I love about Booksmart is that NO ONE is cool. Everyone is lame. That’s how secondary school and sixth form felt to me, all the time.
The second time I watched it was the day before my birthday with one of my best friends Amelie, who bought me a ticket to Prince Charles Cinema’s Galentine’s screening of it. We laughed a lot and took the tube home together recounting all the details we’d each missed the previous times we watched it.
By all accounts, people had a lot of fun making this film.
There’s a great interview with Olivia Wilde where she talks about making sure everyone was “off book” for filming, meaning they couldn’t bring their script to set and had to know their lines inside out and back again, so they could experiment and play around more. The interviewer, Ali Plumb, says he feels like Wilde is having a lot of fun with the film in making it - shots like the single steady cam shot from the start of Amy and Molly’s argument and the dance fantasy. I love her answer, when she says:
“I’m directing a movie, I may never get the chance again, I’m going to have fun with this medium. I’m going to use these tools… magical realism is part of this art form. Take advantage of it. It’s a reason to gather people in a dark room and allow them to be hypnotised into this state of wonder.”
There’s also a wonderful interview with Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever where you get a glimpse of their best friend chemistry. Wilde persuaded them to live together while shooting the film, and they ended up being roommates for 10 weeks. OH MY GOD I LOVE ON-SCREEN BEST FRIEND CHEMISTRY. Let’s discuss that another day too. When it’s not quite right, interviews like this feel self-indulgent. When it’s right, I could watch it for hours.
Now, Booksmart doesn’t have an especially eccentric trivia section, but by everything else I’ve read, I think behind the scenes on this film would have been incredible. Which is why I’ve featured it. Feldstein and Dever’s ad-libbed compliment-a-thons are a reason to love this film. So are every single other actor stealing every scene.
From reading the IMDb trivia section and Wikipedia, we know this script bounced around a lot of places before it came to Wilde. The right hands at the right time were finally able to turn it into the film we now watch as Booksmart.
That made me think a lot about what this script would be without incredible acting, ad-lib, chemistry, camera work, inventive shots and Lisa Kudrow. I can see why people overlooked it. And I love that someone didn’t.
Watch the film, read the trivia, or do it all backwards. Enjoy.