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Black raises his goblet to rock
With all the power of 'School House Rocks,' Mike White crafts a caper for his tenacious former neighbor
By John Behling
Published:
Monday, September 22, 2003
When "Chicago" won best picture last year, it was the Academy delivering an affirmation of the public's need for cinema escapism. Hollywood followed with a flood of spineless, brainless romantic comedies, action vehicles and horror-crap.
People are still going to movies, but are we really on the road back to normalcy?
Thursday, a sneak-preview screening of "School of Rock," puts a punk-rock twist on our sliver-screened escape hatch. Fine, we can't handle CNN anymore, but let's not escape to some over-lit backlot. Let's escape to where everyone goes at the end of endless depressing nine-to-fives: our record collection.
Screenwriter Mike White channels Jack Black for a one-man show that urges us to escape from the vacuum of '00s pop culture to a highly romanticized vision of late '70s, early '80s pop-culture.
Dewey Finn is Jack Black. After being kicked out of his band for too many solos and stage dives, Finn impersonates his straight-laced substitute teacher roommate (Mike White) and takes a gig at a preparatory school. When he realizes that his pupils are already talented musicians, Finn harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of the rock deities of the '60s, '70s and '80s to turn his class into a band, and not just any band: the greatest rock band ever.
As his name suggests, Mike White is the polar opposite of Jack Black. Soft spoken, childish in a 33-year-old-wearing-red-shoes sort of way, and above all mellow. There seems to be no residue of his wild-eyed air-guitar shredding former neighbor and roommate whose world he recreated inmate "School of Rock."
But after our interview at the stylish Meridien Hotel in Minneapolis earlier this month, I'm a little scared of him. His wet, nearly-reptilian blue eyes make me uncomfortable. With the ease he inhaled and dissected Jack Black's universe, I feel as if I could be easily co-opted, consumed and reproduced. I could be a nervous, unkempt bratt film critic stewing in a Word document somewhere in California by the time this piece goes to print. And I mean, this is the same guy who wrote for "Dawson's Creek" and "Freaks and Geeks."
Mike White got his start as the antihero of Sundance creep-out "Chuck and Buck," which he also wrote. Next he did "Orange County," which bequeathed Hollywood bratt Colin Hanks a role suspiciously written for his father (Tom Hanks) bachelor party-era. His next screenplay, the down-beat "The Good Girl," became the Anti-Jennifer Aniston vehicle for Jennifer Aniston. Now he plays tribute to Black, the sideshow from "Orange County," "High Fidelity" and "Saving Silverman."
"This is the first movie that I've ever wrote with someone in mind. And it was really less because I wanted to write a star vehicle (it was) because I'd lived next door to Jack and became friends with him, and saw all the kind of movies that were being sent to him and feeling like all the movies that he's done,while he's great in them, didn't really capture all the comical aspects of him," White said. "I felt like there was an opportunity to write something that was more specifically capitalizing on his, you know, different aspects of his persona besides the guy who just gets wasted and rolls through the room."
White knows that by writing a star vehicle, he may draw attention to write more with an actor in mind.
"There's real pressure both as a writer and as what's being made. You know they take these sort of tent-pole, action, you know these comic book franchise, these sort of franchise movies and once you get a little bit of success they try to like get you to write those movies for them, you know," White said. "And like to just write original stuff and just follow your own instincts, you have to move against the tide to keep trying to make those kind of movies."
"School of Rock" does the same thing for the star vehicle that it does for the seventies. It puts a fascinating glow on a subject that's not completely shiny in real life. For every great rock band there's great social injustice. For every "School of Rock," there's "Maid in Manhattan."
But let's escape even that, and let this film be the classic rock station, blaring from our car stereos as we drive home from work.
In a fantastic long shot, Jack Black reveals his secret song to the class. Black nails the scene, which feels like it's five minutes long, with no cut-aways and no distractions. The only thing in our ears is Black's booming voice as he fleshes out a rock fantasy land of Dio and Iron Maiden proportions. As his vision grows, the camera tracks backwards, allowing the fantasy to fill the gap between us and him.
There will be a special preview screening of "House of Rock" Thursday, 7:30 p.m. at the Parkwood 18 theater in Waite Park.
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