Rushmore

Wes Anderson’s second feature, written with Owen Wilson, sets Max Fischer, who runs every club at his school while failing every class, against Herman Blume, an industrialist who becomes his patron, then his rival for the same teacher. Anderson shot it at his own school. Rushmore Academy is St. John’s School in Houston, where he was a pupil, and Lamar High School plays the public school Max lands in after his expulsion. Around 1,800 teenagers were seen for Max before Jason Schwartzman turned up through his cousin Sofia Coppola, arriving at the audition in a blazer he had sewn a Rushmore crest onto. Anderson first planned a score drawn entirely from the Kinks; one of their songs survived, the rest giving way to other British Invasion records. Bill Murray worked for scale, about 9,000 dollars, and offered to pay himself for a helicopter shot the studio refused; it was never filmed. Murray won Best Supporting Male and Anderson Best Director at the Independent Spirit Awards, and Murray took a Golden Globe nomination. The Academy named the film in nothing. A good fit if you want Max’s staged school productions to stand in for a romantic resolution. Not for anyone who finds the bee hive and the cut brake line too far to come back from.