It’s different for girls. Consider the fate of two teen movies: “All I Wanna Do,” which was released this week for rental by Miramax Home Entertainment, and “Coming Soon,” an A-Pix Entertainment video release in stores next week. Like “American Pie” and “Road Trip,” both concern characters obsessed with sex or who are anxious to lose their virginity. There is candid language and moments of gross-out humor.
But “American Pie” and “Road Trip” are about teen boys, and “All I Wanna Do” and “Coming Soon” are about teen girls, and despite positive receptions at film festivals and screenings, both films received only scant theatrical distribution.
Both films, its creators say, were in part victims of an entrenched perception in Hollywood that young female audiences don’t support movies geared toward them. “The general idea is that when girls begin to date, they tend to let the boys pick the movies for them,” observed Ira Deutchman, former Highland Park resident and producer of “All I Wanna Do.” “Girls are willing to see films that are geared more to a boy audience, but boys are not willing to go see films that are more girl-oriented.”
Filmed in 1997, “All I Wanna Do” boasts a cast of now-familiar faces, including Kirsten Dunst (“Dick”), Gaby Hoffman (also in “Coming Soon”), Rachael Leigh Cook (“She’s All That”) and Heather Matarazzo (“Welcome to the Doll House”).
It is set in 1963 at a private girl’s school, where Hoffman’s Odette Sinclair has been sent by her parents when they learn of her plan to be an “ex-virgin.” Odette hates her new surroundings but soon bonds with her rebellious roommates, who try to sabotage plans to merge their school with a nearby boy’s academy.
“I thought I’d written a commercial script,” laughed writer and first-time director Sarah Kernochan, whose screenwriting credits include “Sommersby.” “But it simply came down to what the marquee would look like: nothing but 16-year-old girls and a 59-year-old woman [Lynn Redgrave as the headmistress].”
Miramax spent $3.5 million for domestic rights to the film, but the studio with a reputation for being marketing-savvy mishandled the film, Kernochan said. The first misstep was to give the film the misleading title “Strike!” There also were demands for her to cut the film to get more quickly to the scenes with the boys.
She said she found it “extraordinary” that the film was a success in Canada and other countries, but it never got a U.S. release. “I wrote [Miramax co-founder] Harvey Weinstein an impassioned letter asking for a New York and Los Angeles release,” she said. “He replied, `Who’s going to pay for it?’ Ultimately, she did. The film was self-distributed under the title “All I Wanna Do.”
“The industry cannot get behind films slanted to making girls feel their power as a group,” she said. “I completely expect to be vindicated when the film is out on home video. Girls are going to discover it, and pass it around.”
“Coming Soon” plays like a cross between “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Sex and the City.” It is set in contemporary New York among college-bound high school seniors. Bonnie Root stars as Stream, who has yet to experience “the deepest female pleasure.”
Co-writer and director Colette Burson said her film’s message of female empowerment also met with resistance. She was compelled to direct the film herself after producers set up meetings with male directors who, she said, insisted on putting more emphasis on the film’s two main male characters, not to mention cutting its most memorable scene, in which an unwitting Stream finds fulfillment in a Jacuzzi.
Receiving an initial NC-17 rating for the film, which had no nudity, “was so wrong and ludicrous,” Burson said in a phone interview. “I think of my movie as having a wonderful life spirit. I look at films such as `American Pie’ as being exploitive of its characters.”
Despite trimming the film to get an R-rating, “Coming Soon” still could not find a distributor. Fox 2000 purchased only international distribution rights.
Burson, too, said she was certain “Coming Soon” would find its audience on video. She also proudly noted that her film, along with “Clueless,” “Dazed and Confused” and “Election,” recently was chosen by New York’s American Museum of the Moving Image for a festival of movies deemed destined to be teen classics.
