Booksmart

Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins put it on the 2009 Black List, built around prom. Susanna Fogel rewrote it in 2014, made one lead a lesbian and moved the night to after prom. Katie Silberman rewrote it again in spring 2018 around one question: what if these two did high school wrong? For her first feature Olivia Wilde had the two leads share a flat for ten weeks and let the cast rewrite lines that felt untrue, which is what the double act runs on. The doll sequence in the drug scene came after principal photography: thirty people at ShadowMachine, the studio behind BoJack Horseman, spent five months on it. Dan the Automator wrote the score, his first full one for a major American release. Annapurna opened it wide after SXSW across 2,505 theatres; the four day start was 8.7 million dollars and the total 25 million on a 6 million budget. Wilde won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, the four credited writers took a BAFTA nomination for original screenplay, and Beanie Feldstein a Golden Globe nomination. A good fit if you want the night’s conflict to be the friends’ own snobbery, not a romance. Not for anyone expecting the classmates drawn as enemies; each turns out to have a life the leads never checked.