“Working on Booksmart was the most fun imaginable,” she says. It may have taken Silberman longer than Booksmart’s characters to learn those valuable lessons about work and play, but these days she’s having a very good time. “We wanted to show what it’s like to be a teenage girl in 2019, while hopefully telling a story that’s evocative to people of all ages and genders. “Those movies are really timely in the way they depict what it’s like to be a teenager in a specific moment, and the way they examine the authenticity of friendships,” Silberman says. She ticks off a list of her favorites: Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Dazed and Confused.
Screenplays wanted 2019 movie#
The teen movie might have been due for a 2019 upgrade, but Silberman sought to do precisely what the genre’s best have always done: to capture a generation. “I was so constantly inspired by them.” Her admiration shines through in Booksmart, which highlights Gen Z’s progressive sensibilities and imbues its characters with unexpected complexity, rejecting tired tropes of high-school labels. “They became such vocal, brave, and powerful symbols of a movement,” she says.
Rewriting the script right around the same time as the Parkland shooting, Silberman found inspiration in high school students who came forward to protest gun violence. They also absorbed teen-created content, from YouTube videos to social media posts to political protests.
To do that, the duo did their homework: They spoke with as many young people as possible and relied on insight from their talented cast, helmed by Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein alongside a slew of supporting characters whose real-life personalities shaped the script.
The Washington Post called it “hilarious and surprisingly heartfelt.” The New York Times commended its “exuberant, generous, matter-of-factly feminist sentiment.” Glamour called it “the first truly evolved high school movie.”Ĭritics lauded Silberman’s and Wilde’s capacity to capture teen life in 2019. It now boasts a 97 percent “Certified Fresh” rating on film review site Rotten Tomatoes. Booksmart hit theaters nationwide in May to widespread acclaim. The studio was sold on Silberman’s idea, and she got the gig. People there were so multi-dimensional, it made me realize how one-dimensionally I’d treated myself.” “When I realized the spectrum of experiences and interests and how much fun they had, it rocked my world and refocused my point of view. “Dartmouth is a place where everyone is hardworking and brilliant, the smartest kids from their high school classes-but also very fun and different,” Silberman explains. But at Dartmouth, she learned that being studious didn’t necessarily mean missing out on fun. “I convinced myself I was so focused on school because I was responsible and not because I was scared to put myself out there,” she says. The story was personal for Silberman, who was an overachieving teen herself. So, on the eve of graduation, the duo would attempt to cram four years of missed fun into one epic night.
She imagined that the main characters had spent high school overachieving in order to get into the Ivies, only to find out that they’d misjudged everyone else: The kids who partied, too, were headed to good schools. The alumna jumped on the chance to pitch a new plot twist. Actress Olivia Wilde, who was tapped for a directorial debut, reached out to Silberman seeking writers to recraft the storyline. Originally written by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins in 2009, and revised by Susanna Fogel in 2014, the Booksmart script was latent until Annapurna Studios finally picked it up in 2017. Little did she know that eight years later-after attending Columbia Film School, moving to Los Angeles to become an assistant, and getting into screenwriting-Silberman would be hired to rewrite and produce that very film. Silberman remembers printing and reading the screenplay, which chronicled the adventures of two female best friends on the last night of high school, around her fourth year at Dartmouth. “I was that person standing by the printers waiting for 100 pages to print, and everyone wanted to kill me.”Īmong those many pages was a script for a fledgling teen comedy titled Booksmart. “I printed out so many scripts that I used up all my printing credit in the first three days of every semester,” she remembers. Katie Silberman ’09 didn’t study film at Dartmouth-but she loved reading movie scripts.
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