I was going to do a different film this week, but it’s a very moving film, so to cut a long story short, I’ve put that on hold for now. Instead, if the fancy takes you, let’s head further into teen movie territory with a film we’ve all likely seen countless times...
10 Things I Hate About You, 1999
Last week I delved into the world of Booksmart, a high school film that breaks out of the constraints of its genre to be something entirely. Twenty years before it, we had 10 Things, which manages to pull off a similar trick. Both remain incredibly compassionate to teenagers - a feat not many genres (least of all the high school movie genre), pull off.
The popularity of this film means I definitely wouldn’t categorise it as ‘a weird mainstream film people may not have seen with an interesting behind the scenes story’ (I really am working to a niche here!). And yet, to avoid discussing a film simply because so many people like it doesn’t seem like any reason at all.
A few days ago I decided I’d write a few trivia links to things for a nice feel-good entry. I also wanted to try out writing about something I LOVE, because I find it very hard to do in a structured way. I set myself the task of trying to understand why this film became a cult classic, and why that love endures. With the backstory as my starting point, I ended up finding some brilliant reasons as to why we’re all (still) so attached. Let’s dig in!
What’s a Bogey Lowenstein?
The first time I watched 10 Things was in Year 6. The film was rented from Blockbuster and shown at a sleepover (that’s how we all saw it, right?). None of us had ever been to a house party or kissed anyone. We lived through films like this instead - and I used 10 Things as my litmus test for everyone I met. Are you a Bianca or a Kat? Do you fancy Patrick, Cameron or Joey “Eat Me” Donner? Would you get so trashed you would dance on a table at a house party? Would you help get your boyfriend out of detention? Would you be a feminist? Would you skip prom? I couldn’t wait to break curfew, go to gigs and even to have a close friend to discuss all this stuff with. Ages 11-14 pretty much suck all round - this film was our promise for better times to come.
What makes *this* film such a classic in a sea of mediocre high school movies?
Something I can’t get away from is how grounded each character is in the mise-en-scène. From the opening scene, where Barenaked Ladies’ One Week is interrupted by Kat Stratford’s car stereo blasting out Joan Jett’s Bad Reputation, we’re shown a relatable world to get lost in. Teenagers are always taking notes on how to be an adult. That’s why older siblings count so much. And this film, like Clueless, gave us so much to take notes on.
I started digging around the IMDb trivia page and read that director Gil Junger chose to spurn typical movie sets, and instead used a real school and a real home for all the filming.
Now, not using a set doesn’t exactly make this film exceptional, but it does ground the actors in a world teeming with references.
Clueless also used a real high school, and it reminded me that the first seasons of The Office (US version) were shot in a real office block. It would have been so much easier to build these sets in a lot somewhere in California. 10 Things is an exception, and it means we get a sense for a craft rarely shown in this often-derided, often-lazy genre.
Instead of relying on genre tropes and stereotypes, the cast and director pushed things further each time. A whistle-stop tour of How Extra This Film Is would show you Alison Janney pre-West Wing, going way OTT as a guidance counsellor barely hiding her ambitions as an erotic novel writer. One of our protagonists pays a marching band to serenade the object of his affections by singing Frankie Valli’s Cant Take My Eyes Off You. When you skip detention in this reality, forget heading to the corner shop to buy a Pot Noodle on your way home. Nope, you celebrate flashing your teacher earlier that day by going paddle-boating and paint balling. Or you can “call in a favour” to get Letters to Cleo to play at the prom. This is reality dialled up to 11, and every time there’s a chance to go an extra mile, this film takes it.
Do You Want This In Iambic Pentameter?
Padua High School is filmed at the Stadium High School in Tacoma, a half hour drive from Seattle and originally built as a French Renaissance-style luxury hotel, later becoming the first high school in the US to have a stadium.
As impossible as it is to conceive now, the film was originally going to be set in Los Angeles. By a twist of fate, when the location scouts saw pictures of the high school, they moved the entire film 1,000 miles north.
"The toughest part of this picture was moving up to Seattle with only six and a half weeks before we had to start shooting. We had already set the movie up once in Los Angeles and then we had to set it up again in the Northwest to accommodate this great school that we found," said executive producer Jeffrey Chernov in the film’s production notes, which are incredible to read if you’re also obsessed.
"Once we saw the photos that were sent to us from Stadium High School in Tacoma, Washington, we thought we'd shoot some exteriors there," said producer Andrew Lazar.
"But when we actually visited Stadium High School, we ended up realizing that we really needed to shoot all our locations there. We saw the water and the magic of this place-shooting in the Pacific Northwest is like a dream come true. The high school and the locations have really become a character in the movie.”
In case you weren’t around in the 90s, it’s pertinent to note that Shakespeare was having a strange resurgence for pretty much the whole decade (there’s a funny article here on the slew of adapatations).
The epitome of this came in 1996, when Baz Luhrmann managed to pull off the seemingly impossible and entwine star-crossed lovers with a grungy, glittery mid-90s aesthetic of Radiohead, The Cardigans, Verona Beach (a mix of Miami and Brazil, apparently), Catholic iconography and Prada Hawaiian shirts (great article about that here) for his adaptation of Romeo + Juliet. So indelible was this vision, that if you grew up with that film, you’ll know it’s kind of impossible to think about Romeo + Juliet without also thinking of fish tanks, angel wings and gas station shoot-outs.
Something on a parallel is achieved with 10 Things. Looking back now, Stadium High School and the impeccable costumes made by Kim Tillman (see her website for original sketches of Kat and Bianca’s prom dresses that were made for the film) create a new world within which The Taming of the Shrew could exist. Here, Shakespeare is remade in a post-grunge Seattle with a riott grrrrl vision, Jared Leto references, third-wave feminism and Fender Stratocasters. Upon finding their new Tacoma locations, the film’s makers must have known they’d found a new reality for this 400 year old play.
"Stadium High School is amazing," Julia Stiles said in the production notes. "It is so gothic looking. If we made the movie in Los Angeles, it could have looked just like twelve other movies."
From the first time I watched it, back at that sleepover, I was enthralled by this film. As the credits rolled up, I remember being told by my friend’s older sister that Letters to Cleo actually performed on top of the school, and that it wasn’t a green screen as you might expect. Back then you couldn’t just check the internet for that stuff - we waited for the credits to roll up and saw ‘Helicopter Pilot’ listed and thought it must be true. I later found out it had cost $500,000, via lead singer Kay Hanley’s vertigo-inducing account of what it was like to film this sequence. Speaking to the New York Times in 2019, Junger actually revealed they didn’t even have permission to shoot those helicopter scenes…
“Disney said they loved the work I was doing but couldn’t justify spending that much money for one shot. And then when the line producer said to me, “What did they say?” I don’t know what the hell it was, but some instinct in me said, “They said yes. Shoot it.”
And as for Hanley’s recollection of it? This is how she broke it down for the New York Times:
“We’re all arranged on top of this postage-stamp-sized roof with chicken wire the only thing protecting us from toppling to our deaths into the Puget Sound. The music starts playing [and] we start pretending we’re in a music video. We hear the whir of a chopper right above us, and then it dive-bombs us. We did two takes, and it was pretty much assumed that this shot wasn’t going to work, and Gil would never work in Hollywood again because he had just blown through half a million dollars doing this shot he was forbidden to do. And it ended up being a pretty iconic scene.”
10 Things takes the high stakes drama of a Shakespearian play and re-enacts it over senior year. Which is an accurate portrayal of what it feels like to be seventeen: crushes, grudges, lust, revenge, schemes dreamt up from ego, boredom, or both, sewn into real buildings, real chemistry. That, for me, is where the alchemy lies. Yes, the acting is brilliant, but aside from that, anyone that loves this film can tell you there’s magic elsewhere.
Where did you come from? Planet Loser?
1999 churned out a lot of high school movies - in the same year no less than 15 teen movies hit cinema screens, including American Pie, Election, Never Been Kissed, Cruel Intentions, Varsity Blues and Drive Me Crazy. For a guide of what a good-but-not-great film working with the same themes can achieve - She’s All That came out just a few weeks after 10 Things. Let’s not even go there.
“There was such a big teen movie explosion at the time. We were young writers who had never sold a script before, and it was very unusual you would get your first script made, let alone greenlit six months after it was optioned. It had this feeling all around of firsts,” screenplay co-writer Kirsten Smith told the New York Times.
And hey, it’s another film that nearly didn’t get made this way. Safer bets abound in the IMDb trivia notes - Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger were both total unknowns in the US at the time. Stiles was only 17, and this was Ledger’s first American film.
Kate Hudson and Katie Holmes were also in the running to play Kat Stratford, while Josh Hartnett and Ashton Kutcher were all considered for Patrick Verona. Can we just think for a moment about what this film would have been if Katie Holmes had played opposite Ashton Kutcher in a fake high school in a Hollywood lot somewhere? Would we be discussing it 20 years later? I’m gonna take a punt on ‘no’.
Although this genre was popular, just as we saw in Booksmart, Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith’s whip-smart screenplay struggled to appeal to some directors who didn’t want the hot-potato of a high school movie on their hands.
According to IMDb, Gil Junger’s agent gave him the script for a teen version of The Taming of the Shrew, “I said ‘absolutely not,’” Junger admitted in the film’s production notes:
“I had no interest in doing a typical high school film. I wanted to do a romantic love story. But, at the urging of my agent, I read the script. I loved it. The depth of it surprised me. It really is a romantic love story. The plot is beautifully interwoven and the humor works because it comes from the characters.”
Junger was right: all the overwrought emotions and grand gestures of bored, frustrated or overlooked teenagers is all spot-on.
JUDITH! WHAT’S ANOTHER WORD FOR ‘ENGORGED’?
One of my favourite articles online about this film comes from David Krumholtz (who played Michael Eckman) for Vulture, in time for the film’s twentieth anniversary.
I love this quote especially, because it really does come across on the screen:
“Before I knew it, the cast was experiencing what I’ve since found to be all too rare: a unified chemistry throughout the ensemble, without a single bad apple in the bunch. The experience was communal, it sang like a well-tuned chorus both onscreen and off-, and we all agreed that we were having the best summer of our lives.”
By and large, this film has aged incredibly well over the years - although, in a 2020 light, a lingering plot hole (why isn’t Kat also annoyed at Bianca, for helping to set up the deal where Patrick was paid to take Kat out?) is even more jarring. Especially when Kat’s character arc of feelings towards her sister from grating to tender is so well-played.
As with many of the hit high school films of the era, 10 Things is also woefully under representative of anyone that isn’t a white person, or able-bodied, or heterosexual. Gabrielle Union is brilliant and under-used, as she also was in Bring It On. It’s impossible to watch this film now without thinking of how many more stories you could tell. We need films to build on the power of this genre but also bring stories to the centre that aren’t just sustaining white, heteronormative narratives.
AND HELL IS JUST A SAUNA
As a teenager, I craved belonging in a school enough to have friends you could plan to skip prom with “on the quad”. I spent years trying to find a stairwell to allow for the the party invite scene set to Air’s Sexy Boy, and always wanted to throw a party so raucous that a fight had to be taken outside by breaking through the French windows (thankfully, we never quite got there!). I couldn’t wait to like Angry Girl Music of the Indie Rock Persuasion or turn up to gigs where you have to shout to be heard.
Going to such lengths to make this film so rich in detail gives it an incredible quality so rarely afforded to films aimed at teenagers. The full effect of it comes through no matter if your teenage years were decades ago or still ahead of you. Someone bothered to film this in a beautiful setting. They bothered to get a band on the roof of the school just for the closing shot. 10 Things I Hate About You is embroidered with a joie de vive so many other films of its genre don’t even try to search for. Secondary school rarely played out with the grace of Shakespeare, but we were grateful to have the source material on which to base our scheming. Real life pours from every scene of this fantasy world.