Stick it to the man! In 2003, writer Mike White collaborated with Jack Black and director Richard Linklater on the musical comedy School of Rock. The flick was so successful that it even spawned a Nickelodeon series and a Tony-nominated musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
In the original movie, struggling singer Dewey Finn (Black) goes undercover as a substitute teacher for a local prep school in order to earn some quick cash to pay his rent. He pretends to be his best friend and former bandmate, Ned Schneebly (White), and discovers that his students all have gifted musical talents. He teams up with the children to form a band, intent on entering a Battle of the Bands competition to bag its cash prize.
White originally penned the script after living next to the Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle actor in Los Angeles, wanting to show off his comedic chops.
“He was starting to get a lot of heat as an actor and he would occasionally give me scripts that had been submitted to him to star in,” White recalled to Viacom in October 2018. “They were invariably these flat comedies or he was, like, the John Belushi guy who gets drunk and falls through a sliding glass door or something. I’m reading these scripts and I was like, ‘I could do better than this.’”
The White Lotus creator continued, “Obviously, music is a big passion of [Black’s]; he has his band Tenacious D. I had the idea of him leading a band of little kids — somehow it just seemed like a funny visual. Then I got the idea that it would be fun to have him be more of a W.C. Fields [character] a little bit, like a guy who isn’t really somebody you’d want around kids, but that’s part of the fun of it.”
With the script written, the creative team was certain that Linklater could pull off the project and transform it into a hit.
“It was a huge, different thing for me to come aboard,” the filmmaker explained in his Richard Linklater: Dream is Destiny documentary. “I was a color on his palette, someone had cast me as the right person to perhaps realize this thing that he thought had potential.”
The Boyhood director was certain about casting children who were musicians instead of actors.
“I began casting in New York in 2002. We had an unusually long casting process of seven months. Everyone involved knew that finding the right young people, even if not professional actors, who also had musical gifts would require time, patience, and an intensive search,” casting director Ilene Starger recalled to Viacom in 2018. “It didn’t matter if they had had prior acting experience; in fact, we wanted the film to have a freshness, re: unknown talent where possible.”
The film went on to cast young stars Miranda Cosgrove, Maryam Hassan, Robert Tsai, Joey Gaydos Jr., Rivkah Reyes and the late Kevin Clark as the precocious and musical fourth-grade students.
“It was so fun to see those kids as real performers,” White told Viacom at the time. “I think that obviously made the movie feel more authentic as far as the musical performances, but I think it also made it more authentic as far as the acting performances, too.”
Hassan, for her part, didn’t realize the gravity of the project until they were filming.
“Going into it, I had no idea,” the songwriter recalled to Vulture in January 2021. “It didn’t hit me until a month or so into filming the extent of what I was doing. I knew what the movie was about, but not enough to initially realize, ‘Oh, we’re the kids who will be part of Jack’s band.’”
However, Hassan was convinced that the Holiday star was more of a fan of the kids than they were of him.
“Honestly, I think Jack was more blown away by us,” she added. “We were all so young and possessed such a huge mix of musical and vocal talents. He would often end a scene being like, ‘Wow, remind me how old you guys are! You can do all this stuff at your age?! How?!’ He was fascinated by our talents and always seemed to enjoy watching us work. He was a fan in that sense.”
Scroll below to find out what the School of Rock cast has been up to since the movie’s debut:
