School of Rock (Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, MFP Munich Film Partners GmbH & Company I. Produktions KG, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday,April 19) at about 9:30 I wanted to watch something light and u uplifting after all the gloom and doom of the news, and I found it in School of Rock, a 2003 production by Scott Rudin, directed by Richard Linklater from a script by Mike White. It’s basically another rock-conquers-all youth movie, though it has some interesting “spins” on the formula. Dewey Finn (Jack Black) is the lead singer and guitarist for a rock band called No Vacancy that is going nowhere in particular. People who go to their shows text their friends on social media (which was already enough of a “thing” in 2003 to be part of this movie’s plot, even though neither Facebook nor Twitter existed yet) and say the band sucks, and Dewey is the main reason they don’t like them. Dewey is living rent-free as a house guest of Ned Schneebly (played by Mike White,who also write the script), who was in a previous group with Dewey before he realized he was never going to achieve his dream of rock ‘n’ roll stardom and he needed to find another gig. Ned has become a substitu9te teacher and has acquired a girlfriend, Patty De Marco (Saturday Night Live alumna Sarah Silverman), who wants Ned to throw Dewey out. Dewey insists that as soon as No Vacancy wins an upcoming battle-of-the-bands contest he’ll have the money to pay off Ned’s back rent. Only when he shows u p for his band’s next rehearsal he finds the rest of the members have fired him and hired a new frontman, Spider (Lucas Babin), to replace him. They made this decision after a show during which Dewey did an ill-advised dive into the audience – only no one caught him and he came to in his bed in Ned’s and Patty’s home.

Desperate, Dewey answers a call for Ned offering him a job substitute-teaching at the prestigious Horace Green Preparatory School, and he poses as Ned and gets the assignment. Once there he’s bored shitless by the school’s routie of carefully planned curricula and a system of gold stars to reward the students for doiogn well and demerits for punishing them if they screw up. The forst thing Dewey does in class is tear down the red poster board that hods the demerits. He announces that he’s not going to grade anybody and he’s going to keep callignr ecesses until he figures out what to do. Naturally this arouses the ire of the school’s principal, Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack), who seems to have gone to the same education school as Miss Togar, the fearsome female principal played by Mary Woronov in the film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, to which this film owes quite a lot. Dewey hits on a plan when he hears the school’s band rehearsing a rather lame arrangement of the hauntingly beautiful slow movement from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra, and he’s impressed enough with the musical skills of the students he decides, without telling either their parents or anyone at the school, to start a rock band with them and enter them in the battle-of-the-bands contest. He has to deal with the concerns of the kids not only that their parents will find out but he’ll have to break the school’s ironclad policy against field trips to get them to play at the battle of the bands. Dewey solves the last problem by romancing Rosalie, offering to take her to a “coffeehouse” that is actually a beer bar and getting her drunk. He got the idea to do this from a faculty meeting at which someone mentioned a party at which Rosalie had got drunk and did a killer Stevie Nicks impersonation – so naturally he tanks her up with alcohol and puts on a Stevie Nicks record in the bar’s jukebox.

Dewey’s cover is finally blown when Ned Schneebly receives a check for $1,200 reflecting “his” pay for substituting at Horace Green – where he’s never worked in his life – and Patty calls the police and they show up on the school’s parents’ night to arrest him. Dewey confesses all to the kids and then essentially kidnaps them to go to the battle of the bands, whereupon the parents follow and demand to be let in – only to be confronted by an officious doorman who demands that they buy tickets before they can go in. In a major departure front he way movies like this end [spoiler alert!], the School of Rock does not win the big contest – the prize goes instead to Dewey’s former band, No Vacancy – but the audience demands a second song from the School of Rock, and it dissolves into an extended band rehearsal that for once gives us something to watch during the closing credit roll. An imdb.com “Trivia” post on the film says Mike White’s original plan was to have Dewy and Rosalie fall inlove and end up a couple at the end of the film – which suggests to me a monroe interesting ending than the one we got, in which the School of Rock wins the battle of the bands prize, a group of horrified parents demand that the school fire Rosalie for her dereliction of duty, but Rosalie , Dewey and the parents who are supportive found their own school, the School of Rock, which will offer tough academics but also a rock band program, and the prize money and the support of the parents who are on-board with what being in a rock band has done for their kids would provide the startup capital. )I'd also have liked to hear Joan Cusack do her Stevie Nicks impersonation at the concert.)

School of Rock owes a lot to just about every movie about rebellious youth and their battle with authority figures who don’t like their music – the parallel I thought of was the 1940 film Make Mine Music, in which an elderly classical-music teacher at a high school inadvertently becomes a swing goddess with a school fight song she wrote, then she writes a second hit and explains to the students who have rejected her music for theirs that it’s based ont he Chopin nocturne she was futilely trying to teach them to appreciate in the opening scene. It also has a lot in common with Shake, Rattle and Rock, a 1956 production from Sunset Films and American International that not only dealt with the controversy surrounding rock as “the music of the devil” but actually made it the center of the plot: a young, idealistic activist sets up rock ‘n’ roll clubs for the kids of a big city and argues that such organizations will keep them away from gangs and juvenile delinquency. Of course Chrles and I both noticed the similarities to Rock ‘n’ Roll High School as well – especially the appearance of one of the kids in the final scene wearing a Ramones T-shirt, an homage to the real-life band that starred in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. I quite liked School of Rock despite the sheer preposterousness of its plot– though one thing I give Linklater and White credit for is a seeming awareness of the plot’s sheer preposterousness and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink to the audience to the effect that they don’t take it seriously for a moment and they really don't expect us to, either! Ironically, one gag in the film is that one of the kids, Summer Hathaway (Miranda Cosgrove), auditions for the band with a deliberately dreadful version of “Memory” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats – only when School of Rock was turned into a Broadway stage musical in 2015, Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the score.