Rock ‘n’ Roll High School: High School Musical with a Difference

With Labor Day now a memory, school’s back in session across the U.S.A. Which makes this a good time to salute Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, the 1979 high school musical that refuses to die. Producer Roger Corman and director Allan Arkush both love to talk about how Roger’s demand for a movie cashing in on the disco craze was vetoed by Allan, because “you can’t blow up a high school to disco music.”

But I know better. Because I’ve just had a long chat with Joseph McBride, the veteran journalist and film historian who was Rock ‘n’ Roll High School's original screenwriter. Joe's a bit frustrated that few give him credit for his thoroughly outrageous concept. But Rock ‘n’ Roll High School—the movie about the Ramones and their #1 fan Riff Randell—stands as a cinematic landmark of sorts, because (as Danny Peary put it in his 1981 book Cult Movies) “there is no other commercial American film in which an American institution is destroyed and no one is punished for the deed.”

According to Joe, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School began with Allan Arkush and director-crony Joe Dante dictating a script into a tape recorder. This was standard New World Pictures procedure for that era, a way of skirting Writers Guild rules by coming up with a crude first draft, so that a guild writer would need to be paid for a rewrite only. But though Joe and Allan’s draft contained a rock music element, it was hardly a true screenplay, just sixty pages of high school hijinks without a plot. Joe McBride, guild-certified author of a previous rock ‘n’ roll script in which Roger had briefly shown interest, was then hired to flesh out the story. He remembered that in 1927 his father had led a student strike to protest the firing of a beloved teacher. That strike got national attention, because it was the first time high schoolers took a public stand against campus administrators. Having survived a Catholic school education, Joe found it easy to invent a repressive principal who would incite a student protest. Still, his story seemed a bit tame for the era, until he combined it with the notorious 1970 episode at the University of Wisconsin when Sterling Hall was bombed by students protesting the Vietnam War. Also not far from his mind was the anarchic French film Zero for Conduct, as well as the bloody student revolts that ended Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . .

The ending of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School is not tragic, like the Wisconsin bombing that killed a grad student working late in a physics lab. And it is not angry and nasty, in the mode of If. . . Instead, says McBride, “It’s a parody of the old Fifties films. We did that on purpose. Like Rock Around the Clock, and those kind of things.” The sheer exuberance of its music numbers lifts Rock ‘n’ Roll High School into another realm. But that exuberance came at a price: Roger had demanded that the musical, with its 45 songs, be shot in a mere 23 days. At around day 20, Allan was carted off in an ambulance, and Joe heard he’d had a major heart attack. Happily, Arkush (barely 30 at the time) has long since recovered, and gone on to a busy career in television. He continues to be a passionate fan of pop music, and his work on The Temptations earned him an Emmy award. Roger Corman, meanwhile, continues to come up with impossible shooting schedules, for which young directors give their all.