Shout-Out to the Extra: School of Rock Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

Last year My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I and a couple friends attended a show by bluegrass supergroup I’m With Her at Thalia Hall. Midway through the show, after a rousing number, as the crowd applauded the all-female trio, some male knucklehead in the balcony nosebleeds thought it a fine time to holler god-knows-what in the direction of band member Sara Watkins. I couldn’t make out what he was saying; no one around me could make out what he was saying; Sara Watkins couldn’t make out what he was saying. When his noisy mush-mouthed blather concluded Sara Watkins waited the perfect comic pregnant pause and then said into the microphone with this strained sort of voice as honest as it was humorous: “What?” The crowd laughed so loudly in unison that we drowned out whatever this dufus bellowed as a response Sara Watkins didn’t want to hear anyway. And I thought, That Guy. Every concert has That Guy.

A few years earlier when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I saw the incomparable Nikki Lane at the Double Door (rip) some mostly bald, middle-aged moron in a black leather jacket kept hollering at Ms. Lane, like he was 22 and thought he was going to hook up with her after the show, when he wasn’t pointing at the guitarist after every one of his soloes like the two were axeman contemporaries. The guitarist deftly evaded eye-contact. At the turn of the century, at The Landing in St. Louis, when I was sitting in the grass listening to some band play a free show, I became so disgusted that they chose to play “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” (there is backstory I will not delve into) that I vocally announced my displeasure with their choice of cover. My friend Daryl then incredulously advised: “Uh, Nick, I think that’s their song.” Hells bells, it was. Five For Fighting, at the peak of his power, was playing a free stage, and I was mocking him for playing his own song. Some guy I didn’t know sitting nearby actually commiserated on my behalf that he didn’t know it was really Five For Fighting either. Still, if I’d been closer to the stage and Five For Fighting had decided to heckle me, I would have had no choice but to sit there like the idiot I was and take it. I, readers, was That Guy.

The climactic moment in Richard Linklater’s critically appreciated yet somehow still significantly under-valued “School of Rock” (2003) involves a band of musically gifted kids under the command of their metal axeman masquerading as teacher (Jack Black) playing The Battle of the Bands. They knock the gig out of the park. They are the clear winners, but, like Roy Jones Jr. inexplicably losing the Light Middleweight Gold Medal boxing match at the 1988 Olympics, lose out to the piffling No Vacancy. The crowd is chagrined. Well, not the whole crowd. As No Vacancy’s victory is announced, Linklater cuts to a wide shot of the audience, presumably to breathe in the pall that has just been cast. But one person, near the foot of the stage, over to the left of the frame, goes hog wild.

On the DVD commentary track, both Linklater and Black reference this dude. Black even calls the moment one of his favorite in the movie. Neither of them, however, indicate this was planned. Linklater, in fact, says that working with such a large crowd often results in unexpected moments of spontaneity. Many filmmakers, I reckon, might have edited this out, or before the next take told this extra to zip it. But Linklater, bless his heart, left the moment in. He knew what that extra was doing, and Black did too. That extra decided, in the moment, to make this concert feel truly authentic; he decided he would play That Guy.

Pour one out for the extra...

Chin Up, Cheer Up

The republic’s been a little frothy, America, and if you’re feeling blue about it, fear not. Because hey, in a mere 12 years, which gives us at least enough time to send another probe to Pluto* (*planet), Summer Hathaway will be eligible to run for President meaning she can become President in 2032. Hold holy this last hope, dear reader.

Summer Hathaway: Likely President in 2032 

Hey, Good News

As the worst Presidential election of my lifetime rolls on in all its televised soundbites and social media fury, it is important to take a brief recess and remind ourselves that in just thirteen years Summer Hathaway will finally be eligible to run for President. And then America will be great again.

Friday's (Not So) Old Fashioned: The School of Rock (2003)

In writing about the tenth anniversary of Richard Linklater’s “The School of Rock” for Esquire, Michael Hoinski referred to a specific scene, the one in which Dewey Finn (Jack Black), an aspiring hard rock axeman masquerading as a private school teacher acts out the theoretical live performance of his own composition, “Legend of the Rent” (“when the legend of the rent comes due”), to his musically-gifted students whom he's yearning to enlist in a brand new band. Hoinski explains that “Linklater wanted to shoot the scene just once: one shot, with a slow pull-out. Black was nervous, self-conscious. He wanted to break it down, do some close-ups, capture multiple angles — just in case he beefed it. But Linklater was steadfast. He envisioned the scene as a centerpiece. It ended up one of Black's favorite moments.” It speaks wholly to the idea of live music, one that is not created in a studio with extra takes and overlays, but a spontaneous eruption of the soul.

The transformative power of music never ceases to amaze me. A couple weeks ago I had plans to go see a show but it was across town at my least favorite music venue in the city and it was, like, four degrees outside and I had to wait for a bus – and wait, and wait, and wait – and the show didn’t start ‘til 9 even though it was a school night and I’m old and yada yada, more whining, etc. Then, the show began. And there but for the grace of Nikki Lane’s twang went I. Shivering in the cold before and only getting a few hours of sleep with a slight whiskey hangover after? Fughetaboutit. The concert, like so many concerts I've attended in my time, altered my mood, and allowed me communion with that beautiful place – the ever present now.

Richard Linklater has always been a filmmaker interested in music. More than that, though, he has been interested in how music relates to time. In his seminal “Dazed and Confused” he memorably marks the end of the Moon Tower party with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”, a song, not coincidentally, about moving on. In his astonishing “Before Sunrise” he plants our darling Jesse and Celine in a listening booth with Kath Bloom's “Come Here” and then doesn’t cut, lingering on them stealing looks of one another, music momentarily freezing time. In last year’s “Boyhood”, a movie made and set over the course of twelve years, he employs pop songs as a means to both convey the passage of time and transport us to a particular place, the nifty trick that music itself is always able to manage. But never was music was more integral than in “The School of Rock”, his 2003 family comedy semi-musical in which drifting misfit Dewey Finn, needing to make quick cash, takes the place of his academically inclined pal who's been asked to substitute at a prestigious school only to instead find himself transforming the children in his charge into a rock ‘n’ roll super group.

At first blush “The School of Rock” and “Boyhood” may not have a lot in common, but what they share most precisely is a conventionality of form. Yes, the latter was filmed over 12 years, but its narrative is completely linear, one touching on many of the more unremarkable moments of a child’s rearing, snapshots, like moving photos from the family album that a stranger doesn’t want to see and yet, somehow, is drawn into anyway. It is virtually resistant to the set-in-stone McKee-ish screenwriting principle of Dramatic Conflict. Consider the sequence, mentioned by many, where Mason Jr. and his pals are messing around with a circular saw blade. McKee would demand that blade “pay off” in some way. Linklater leaves it alone, which is the payoff. Yet it also adheres to a McKee screenwriting rule, the one that goes “Every scene is a story event”, it just doesn’t adhere in the way McKee necessarily intends.

You could, as many have, dub the plethora of scenes as mere “ennui”, and you would not be wrong, yet that two-and-a-half hours of “ennui” subtly add up to something whole. Not something concrete, per se, not a resolution so much as a realization. “It’s like,” says Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) sitting with his brand new lady friend at film's end, “it’s always right now.” It comes across simplistic, sure, because, duh, of course it’s always, like, right now. But so what? If it's so simple, why does no one appreciate it? Why does no one grasp it? It’s taken him the entire film to realize it and makes him, and us, go back every other event in the film where “nothing’s happening” to appreciate it for the way in which each and every one is always right now, and how it just slipped on by, undetected, like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing, to quote some dude.

Not only is “School of Rock’s” form conventional, so is its execution. As a teacher, Dewey enlightens his mighty-mite protégés to real rock history and teaches them to play their instruments with a flair becoming Keith & Ronnie to win The Battle of the Bands, but with Dewey pretending to be someone else, he is always in danger of being exposed. That exposure, of course, arrives like clockwork, forcing him to leave school in shame, ruining their shot at music-making glory. The kids, as they must, bust out of class to “kidnap” their favorite fool, Dewey, and make it to the gig late but still on time, just like a true rock band, while their parents and principal and give chase.

Formulaic as it comes, right? Yet the screenplay, which was written by Mike White, is doing some incredibly deft things. It uses these rote reversals to intrinsically embody the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. Even better, rather than having than turning it into a showdown of Parents & Principal vs. Dewey & The Kids, it lets all the conflict fall away once the concert commences. Everyone looks up, shuts up, and simply gives themselves over to the ministry of rock ‘n’ roll. In other words, they realize “it’s like, it’s always right now”. The movie ends in the middle of the encore, which is apropos because that's the ultimate dream of every magnificent concert - to extinguish suffering and desire and consciousness and just be.

“Time,” wrote Indian philosopher Jidda Krishnamurti “is transcended only in the stillness of the present.” That's the ineffable place magnificent live music takes us; that's the ineffable place Richard Linklater and his Richard Linklater-y protagonists are always striving to find, and sometimes, even if they don't realize it, they do.