Booksmart (2019) on Netflix
Amy Antsler and Molly Davidson are best friends and top students. On graduation eve, Molly learns their partying classmates got into the same colleges. She talks Amy into a classmate's party.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb7.1/10141,994 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Molly Davidson is class president, and she and best friend Amy Antsler have spent high school as academic stars. Amy is drawn to a classmate named Ryan, and Molly pushes her to approach the girl. In the school bathroom, Molly overhears three classmates mocking her; when she answers that she is bound for Yale, they reply that they won places at selective colleges and companies while still enjoying themselves. Stung, Molly says they should have spent less time on schoolwork and proposes they attend a graduation-eve party at classmate Nick's aunt's house. Amy agrees, though without enthusiasm. The pair dress up, tell Amy's parents they are sleeping at Amy's, and call Jared, a rich classmate, for a ride; he carries them off instead to a party he has thrown on a yacht.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Booksmart (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- An early version of the screenplay, titled Book Smart, was written by Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins and appeared on the 2009 Black List. In 2014 Susanna Fogel revised it, rewriting one lead character as a lesbian and replacing the prom-boyfriend plot with an after-prom party.
- The animated sequence where the girls become dolls took a team of thirty people five months to create, after Olivia Wilde contacted ShadowMachine, the studio behind BoJack Horseman, on which she had voiced a character. Rewrites cut a Roomba and a glitter-vomit scene from it.
- Olivia Wilde had stars Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever live together to build their rapport, and the two actresses were roommates in Los Angeles for ten weeks.
- Dan the Automator composed the score, his first full film score for a major US film, after assisting on the scores of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) and Money Monster (2016).
- Making her feature directorial debut, Olivia Wilde found the night shoots hard as a working mother but still drove her children to school each morning afterwards, an effort she said she could not have kept up long-term.
- Writer Katie Silberman said Olivia Wilde's mantra on set was that "high school is war", and that Wilde herself imagined the drug trip in which the girls turn into Barbie dolls, leaving Silberman to find where it fit in the story.
