Rocket Science is a 2007 comedy-drama film written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz, and starring Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick, Nicholas D'Agosto, Vincent Piazza and Aaron Yoo. It tells the story of Hal Hefner, a fifteen-year-old stutterer who decides to join his school's debate team when he develops a crush on its star member, and touches on the themes of sexuality and coming of age.

Blitz conceived a rough storyline for the film while making Spellbound, a documentary about 1999's Scripps National Spelling Bee, but an HBO Films executive persuaded him to write the film based on his own adolescence when he told her about his experiences as a stutterer. The film's producers visited seven American and Canadian cities, and after six months of auditioning young actors for the lead role HBO told Blitz that they would drop the project if an actor was not found in two weeks. Another actor had been cast, but was forced to pull out due to filming conflicts; the producers cast Thompson after viewing a tape that his agent had sent from Canada. The film was shot over 30 days in Baltimore, Maryland and Trenton, New Jersey.

Rocket Science premiered on January 19, 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival and was theatrically released on August 10. It was not a financial success, earning only US$756,000 from its $4.5 million budget, though it was well-received by critics. Reviewers praised Thompson and Kendrick's performances and the film's parallels to real life; others believed that the film was deliberately quirky and uninteresting. It won Sundance's Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, though it failed to win any.

Plot

Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson) is a teenager of Plainsboro, New Jersey with a pronounced stutter. His older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) is an obsessive-compulsive kleptomaniac, his father Doyle (Denis O'Hare) has recently walked out on the family following a heated argument, and his mother Juliet (Lisbeth Bartlett) has begun to date the father of his school friend, Heston (Aaron Yoo).

Hal is riding the school bus home one day when he is approached by Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick), the articulate, competitive star of the debate team. She urges him to join her and replace her former partner, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D'Agosto), who has dropped out of school after falling silent midspeech and losing the New Jersey State High School Policy Debate Championships. Though Hal initially declines, he finds himself besotted with Ginny and agrees to be her partner. Hal and Ginny begin to study for the upcoming tournament and form arguments on either side of whether the Federal government should support the teaching of abstinence in public schools. When Hal finds himself unable to talk in debate practice, he runs out of the room and hides in the janitorial closet, where Ginny joins him. Hal kisses her hopefully but she subsequently falls out of contact with him. Ginny's parents assure him that she is confident with the work they have already completed, and that she will meet him on the day of the debate.

On the day of the tournament, Coach Lumbly (Margo Martindale) of the debate team tells Hal that Ginny has transferred to Townston Prep for the remainder of her senior year, and that Hal will be competing with Heston for the day. Struggling with his speech and his stutter, Hal calls his therapist (Maury Ginsberg), who suggests that he sing his speech or talk with a foreign accent. Hal and Heston finish the day without much success, while Ginny wins a trophy, which inexplicably goes missing, for First Place as an Individual Speaker. Coach Lumbly asks Hal to leave the team, telling him that Ginny had never planned to debate as his partner, and had only recruited him to damage the school's chances of winning. He breaks into Earl's bedroom and takes a bottle of stolen tequila, then rides with Heston to his friend Lewis's (Josh Kay) house, who lives across the street from Ginny. A drunken Hal drags Lewis's mother's cello across the street and throws it through Ginny's window just as she is arriving home with her new teammate, Ram (Utkarsh Ambudkar).

Later in the year, Hal's mother breaks up with Heston's father (Steven Park), and Hal decides to seek out Ginny and return her trophy, which he stole. She rejects his apology, and he travels to Trenton?the "Big City"?to find Ben, Ginny's former debate partner. Hal convinces Ben to debate with him and they register as a homeschooled team in the upcoming Policy Debate Championships. In order to overcome his stutter, Ben helps Hal to write his entire speech to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". He is interrupted in the middle of his song-speech by Coach Lumbly and a Debate Official, who disqualify Hal and Ben on the grounds that neither of them is homeschooled and thus would have to be enrolled in a school team. Ben is satisfied with their efforts, but Hal seeks out Ginny before leaving. He insists that one day will be his day, while she tells him that it was not easy for her to betray him as he walks off. He spends the evening at a nearby beach, and when his father picks him up, Hal tells him that life and love "shouldn't be rocket science".

Cast

• Reece Thompson as Hal Hefner, a shy fifteen-year-old student at Plainsboro High School, New Jersey with a pronounced stutter. Rocket Science's producers travelled to Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago and San Francisco looking for an actor to play the lead role of Hal.^[1] At one point, Carter Jenkins was set to play Hal, but NBC decided that he would not spend his Surface hiatus shooting a film.^[2] HBO Films, who were financing the project, told the producers after six months of searching for a Hal that they would be abandoning the project if a lead actor was not found in two weeks.^[3] Desperate, writer-director Jeffrey Blitz watched all of the unsolicited audition tapes that he had been sent and "knew immediately we had a promising candidate" when he watched Reece Thompson's tape. Thompson was flown out from Canada, auditioned amongst a number of other contenders, and eventually cast.^[1] Although a casting call was originally posted for a teenage boy aged 13?18 who had a stutter and could also act, Thompson had been coached to stutter.^[4] When he first auditioned, his mother had taught him how to stutter in a particular manner, but this was different to the way Blitz wanted Hal to speak.^[5] Blitz had a very specific style of stutter in mind, where Hal would block up around a particular word and would have to find ways of moving around such a word.^[5] To learn this style of speech, Thompson underwent a reversed process whereby he was taught how to stutter by a speech pathologist.^[6]

• Anna Kendrick as Ginny Ryerson, the ambitious and competitive star of the Plainsboro High School debate team. Anna Kendrick was one of the first cast members to sign on to the film. Blitz recalls writing "Anna Kendrick is Ginny Ryerson" after her audition and, after auditioning many other girls, she was cast.^[3] "I thought I was a fast talker naturally, and then we saw this video of a national collegiate championship, and I thought, 'I can't do this. What have I gotten myself into?'" said Kendrick about the typical debating strategy of "spreading", a speed-reading technique used in order to present as much evidence and information as possible within a time limit.^[7] A college debate coach was also brought in to discuss techniques with Kendrick and D'Agosto, but Blitz says the most valuable lessons in the art of debate came from watching a live high school debate at a debate camp in Baltimore.^[1][8] Before filming, he also asked Kendrick to keep a journal for a while,^[9] and inserted one of her comments, "I upped your game, little man", into Ginny's dialogue.^[10]

• Nicholas D'Agosto as Ben Wekselbaum, Ginny's former debate partner who dropped out of high school to work at a dry cleaner's after falling silence midspeech and losing the championship trophy. "Nick takes his work very seriously?it's an approach that's very much like Ben, in my mind," said Blitz of D'Agosto. "[His] intelligence combined with a generally high level of confidence and bravado that Nick brought to shape Ben was just right."^[1] D'Agosto joked about his being cast as a high school student, having been cast as a student previously in Election, which was released eight years before Rocket Science, in 1999.^[11] Playing Ben, a policy debater, D'Agosto, along with Kendrick, had to learn a number of debate techniques, including "spreading", which involves delivering long, wordy sentences in a matter of seconds. He and Kendrick were able to get a feel for policy debate through watching videos, speaking to a debate coach and watching a live high school debate.^[1]

• Vincent Piazza as Earl Hefner, Hal's obsessive-compulsive, kleptomaniac older brother. Vincent Piazza was studying at the New York acting school where Rocket Science casting sessions were being held, and decided to audition. Like Kendrick, he was cast very early on in the project. When he first auditioned, he spoke with a lisp, said Blitz: "I eventually decided to do away with the lisp?one major speech impediment per family is plenty?but kept many of the rest of the choices Vince brought to Earl."^[1] Blitz cited Piazza's portrayal of Earl as an example of "the strong choices that actors make in interpreting their character".^[9]

• Aaron Yoo as Heston, Hal and Earl's bi-curious school friend who ends up joining Hal in the debate team. "Aaron made Heston almost an alien among the kids of New Jersey. He's never quite connected to the scene but he's always aware of it," said Blitz about Yoo's performance as Heston.^[1] He says Yoo was cast because of the "dramatic decisions" he brought to Heston's portrayal "from the start".^[9]

• Josh Kay as Lewis Garrles, an eleven-year-old boy whom Hal befriends while loitering in the street outside Ginny's house. Blitz was pleased with Kay's original audition: "When Josh Kay came in to audition in New York, it was instantly obvious that he was perfect: smart, deadpan and with a natural ability to either nail the timing of the lines himself or mimic my reading to him."^[1]

• Denis O'Hare as Doyle Hefner, Hal's father who walks out on the family abruptly, following an argument with his wife about suitcases. Denis O'Hare originally auditioned in 2005 for an alternate role, and, describing O'Hare as a "must-have",^[1] Blitz had him re-audition at a different session in the role of Doyle.^[12] Because of scheduling conflicts, O'Hare was only available for filming on two days of production: the first day and the last, filming one of the first scenes of the film and also the final scene.^[12]

• Jonah Hill as the Junior Philosopher, a teenager Hal meets in the library while studying for the policy debate with Ginny. Jonah Hill had initially auditioned for another role in the film, but was unavailable as he was shooting another film at the same time. Blitz was keen to have him appear, though, and so wrote him a small role as the Junior Philosopher, appearing in only two scenes.^[9] When one interviewer asked whether the role was a cameo appearance, Blitz replied that it was not, however he had considered having celebrity cameos in Hal's parents' roles. Ultimately, though, he decided that cameos would draw away from the film as the celebrities would not be "onscreen long enough for them to become someone other than the celebrity".^[13]

Production

Conception

After the success of his 2002 documentary Spellbound, Jeffrey Blitz was keen to film another documentary, but his agents encouraged him to write fiction because of the larger revenue brought in by fiction films.^[14] The Walt Disney Company had asked Blitz to adapt Spellbound's story of young spelling bee entrants into a fictional narrative, but the idea was abandoned after The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee opened as a musical theatre production.^[8] Instead, Blitz began to piece together a story that had come to him while he had been filming Spellbound: "I kept thinking, what if we met a kid that was just an amazing lover of words? What if we met a kid that was lured into the spelling bee because he was in love with a girl?"^[8] While making Spellbound, he compiled a mental list of "characters I hoped I would encounter", several of whom eventually became Rocket Science characters.^[15] Despite claiming to be "allergic" to autobiographical films,^[16] he was persuaded by HBO executive Maud Nadler to write a screenplay based on his own adolescence when he told her that, as a teenager, he joined his school's debate team to try and overcome his stutter.^[8] He says that he is uninterested in teen films, so "the only way I was going to do a teen movie is if I felt like I could try to be more honest about what the actual experience of being a teenager is like."^[17] Blitz wrote the script "off and on" over a year in between stints of commercial directing.^[18] He still stutters today and was experiencing a bad period of stuttering at the time he was writing the script, "so it was really accessible to me?the frustrations that Hal feels at not being able to speak in a moment that you must speak."^[16]

Jeffrey Blitz drew from many of his own experiences as a stutterer when writing the script.

Blitz chose to use an third-person narrative narrator, voiced by Dan Cashman, to juxtapose Hal, a character with no voice, with a character who is "nothing but a disembodied voice, a purely articulate voice", showing "the gulf between who Hal is and who he wishes to be".^[3] While Blitz grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, he chose to set the narrative in Plainsboro, New Jersey?a place he has never visited^[21]?because it was closer to Trenton, rather than New York City.^[14] He found it humorous that the characters referred to Trenton as the "Big City" and that Plainsboro seemed to orbit around a dead city, Trenton, in comparison to New York.^[8] His first draft of the screenplay was set in Grover's Mill because the script contained a reference to Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which takes place there. He later removed the War of the Worlds reference and moved the story to Plainsboro.^[21]

Filming

The night before filming began, Blitz took Thompson, Piazza and Yoo to dinner, insisting that they stay in character. Thompson, as Hal, was unable to tell the waitress what he wanted to order; Piazza, as Earl, obsessive-compulsively asked the waitress for a fresh straw each time she passed; and Yoo, as Heston, could not decide what to order and had the waitress explain the menu repeatedly.^[1] The purpose of the evening, according to Blitz, was for the actors to "be comfortable around each other inhabiting their roles without self-consciousness", as each of their roles required them to act in potentially embarrassing ways.^[1]

Principal photography began in Baltimore, Maryland on the week beginning July 18, 2005, the project receiving a portion of the US$4 million fund as part of the Employer Wage Rebate Program for filmmakers established by Baltimore's Department of Business & Economic Development.^[22] The film was shot on a 30-day schedule^[17] with an overall budget of $4.5 million.^[23] Blitz says he decided to film primarily in Maryland despite the narrative's setting in New Jersey because of the relaxed child labor laws with so many underage actors, including Reece Thompson, who was sixteen years old at the time and appears in almost every scene of the film.^[17] He said that in New Jersey, they would have only been able to shoot six or eight hours each day, while Maryland's child labor laws were more "like China", and that with parental permission they could shoot for extended hours with the underage actors.^[8] While Baltimore stood in for Plainsboro, New Jersey, scenes set in Trenton, New Jersey were filmed on location, including shots of the Lower Trenton Bridge over the Delaware River.^[24] The film was shot somewhat sequentially, with the final scenes taking place on a boardwalk at the Jersey Shore and concluding at 5 am.^[12] While filming, Blitz sometimes used hand gestures from the director's chair instead of yelling "cut" because of his stutter.^[6]

Score and soundtrack

Jeffrey Blitz wanted the film's music to be "sweet and a touch melancholy and just a step out of rhythm", demonstrating Hal's sense of himself in the world, and to express his teenage angst while "maintain[ing] an underlying sweetness".^[9] While writing the Rocket Science script, Blitz had been listening to indie rock band Clem Snide's music^[25] and suggested the use of their music on the soundtrack to the HBO executive producers.^[26] He contacted Clem Snide's lead singer Eef Barzelay to use some of the band's songs, but Barzelay says "it just made more sense for me to write original instrumental music", and composed the incidental score himself.^[27] Barzelay composed the score using a ukulele, accordion, cello, tuba, banjo and kazoo.^[28] When choosing instruments, he tried to create sounds that would match Hal's awkwardness. "I had this little ukulele that I never played ... And Jeffrey [Blitz] had gotten a little bee in his bonnet about the accordion ... and then at one point I started using a kazoo."^[29] One of his original songs, "I Love the Unknown", later featured on his solo album Lose Big.^[27]

Blitz also chose to use the Violent Femmes' songs "Blister in the Sun" and "Kiss Off". He had chosen to use their music before filming had begun as he believed that they expressed "the rage of love gone wrong better than any band out there", and they allowed their songs to be used in the film after reading the script.^[8] Blitz thought that the Violent Femmes suggested "both [Hal's] anger and the humor all around it".^[9]

Distribution

Rating

Rocket Science received an R rating when reviewed by the Motion Picture Association of America. Jeffrey Blitz described the decision as "mind boggling" and "ludicrous"; he claimed that the images of Kama Sutra seen briefly in the film were "antique Indian paintings" and that the teenagers' discussion of blow jobs was harmless as they had clearly never engaged in fellatio themselves.^[17] He criticized the MPAA for its PG-13 rating of Live Free or Die Hard (also released in 2007), which involves "a girl getting groped at the beginning, all sorts of cursing, gigantic body count, just completely fucking crazy."^[17] Some other questionable elements were altered during production, including a more graphical male beefcake calendar shown to Hal by Heston.^[5]

Theatrical release

The world premiere of Rocket Science was held on January 19, 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival.^[30] The film was subsequently screened at the European Film Market,^[31] U.S. Comedy Arts Festival,^[32] Philadelphia Film Festival,^[33] Atlanta Film Festival,^[34] San Francisco International Film Festival,^[35] Cannes Film Festival,^[36] Maui Film Festival,^[37] Provincetown International Film Festival^[38] and Nantucket Film Festival^[38] before its theatrical release on August 10, 2007.

Rocket Science had a limited theatrical release in the United States, initially playing only in selected theaters in New York City and Los Angeles.^[39] In its debut week beginning August 10, it was the week's second highest-grossing independent film after 2 Days in Paris, earning US$58,536 across six screens with a per-screen average of $9,756.^[39] The following week, the film expanded to 40 screens^[39] but fell to a per-screen average of $2,930.^[40] In its third week, it earned a per-screen average of $1,998 from 59 different theaters, placing 22nd on the list of highest-grossing independent films with a cumulative total of $389,261.^[41] Rocket Science ended its theatrical run with a total domestic gross of US$714,943 and a foreign gross of $40,831, a worldwide total of $755,774.^[42] It placed 258th for the highest-grossing films of 2007 and 104th for the year's R-rated films.^[42]

Home media

Rocket Science was released on DVD on January 29, 2008 in Region 1 and February 4, 2008 in Region 2. The single-disc volume includes two additional featurettes: "The Making of Rocket Science" and a music video for "I Love the Unknown" performed by Eef Barzelay, featuring various clips from the film.^[43]

Reception

Critical reaction

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 84% of 99 collected reviews for Rocket Science were positive, with an average score of 6.9/10.^[44] At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 73, based on 28 reviews.^[45]

Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 out of 5 stars, praising Thompson and Kendrick's performances and the film's honesty and plausibility. He suspected that "a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie."^[46] Bruce Feld of Film Journal International agreed, calling the film a "dead-on revelation of what high school is really like".^[47] Variety magazine's Justin Chang thought that Blitz displayed a "terrific ability to embrace people's idiosyncrasies, real or fictitious" and called the cast a "strong ensemble", commending Thompson, Kendrick and D'Agosto in particular.^[28] The San Francisco Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub thought that the script "never fails to present an unexpected scenario ? usually accompanied by a moment or two of hilarity", but felt that Hal's ultimate failure was anticlimatic and "frustrating for moviegoers who prefer tidy endings".^[48] Stephen Holden, however, writing for The New York Times, believed that the final scenes were a "[sure] sign of the movie's integrity".^[49] TV Guide's Ken Fox similarly admired the more "real" ending, and wrote that the film was "sharp, observant ... [and] wonderfully dry".^[50] Desson Thomson of The Washington Post praised Blitz for straying from common stereotypes and "opt[ing] for deeper, darker and wittier developments".^[51]

Other reviews were less positive. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly graded Rocket Science as a C, calling the film "one of those terminally annoying, depressive-yet-coy Sundance faves in which the tale of a mopey teen misfit unfolds behind a hard candy shell of irony" and criticizing its imitation of Napoleon Dynamite and Rushmore with "one-third the skill".^[52] David Cornelius of DVD Talk criticized the film's phoniness and deliberate quirkiness. He was impressed by Thompson's portrayal of Hal, "bursting with authenticity", but wrote that the supporting characters "never have the chance to ring true" in a cast "overflowing with unnecessary hokey colorfulness".^[43] Online film critic for ReelViews James Berardinelli called the film "moderately uplifting but not especially memorable" and claimed that "the problem with Rocket Science is that the character at the center of the drama isn't very energetic or, truth be told, interesting."^[53] The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips, who gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, felt that it "doesn't quite work" and "the spark goes out of the writing" when Hal seeks out Ben in Trenton.^[54]

Awards and nominations

Rocket Science was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, in the categories of "Best First Feature", "Best First Screenplay" (Jeffrey Blitz) and "Best Supporting Female" (Anna Kendrick), but failed to win any.^[55] At the Sundance Film Festival, Blitz won the Dramatic Directing Award and the film was nominated for the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize.^[56] The film's DVD trailer was also nominated at the Golden Trailer Awards for the "Best In-Theater Advertising" and "Best Music".^[57]

References

External links

• Official site

de:Rocket Science

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