Easy A

Will Gluck frames the whole film as a broadcast Olive records on her webcam, so every scene is her flashback and the film never steps outside to correct her. You watch a rumour spread, narrated start to finish by the person spreading it. Bert V. Royal wrote the script in five or six days by his own account, stopping at about 110 pages and returning two weeks later for the last nine or ten. His plan was three classics at the same high school; The Scarlet Letter became this film, while Cyrano de Bergerac and The Mystery of Edwin Drood were never made. The Hawthorne reference is the engine, not the decoration: Olive stitches the red A on herself. Gluck grew up in New York and Tokyo and has said his whole idea of an American high school came from John Hughes movies. That is why the school reads as a continuation of the Hughes universe rather than a real place, and why it could be shot in Ojai inside Nordhoff High with no sets built. It cost eight million dollars and took seventy five million worldwide. A good fit if Olive’s webcam confession works as the only record you get. Not for anyone who wants an American high school observed rather than assembled out of Hughes films.