Making the Grade: Gimme an F

This is my contribution to the White Elephant Blog-a-Thon hosted by Lucid Screening. Each participant sent in the title of a particularly bad movie (or so I thought, although other participants are reviewing Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Purple Rain, and Forbidden Games), and in return receives a random title. I suggested William Holden and his bare-chested antics in Picnic, which Hedwig reviews over at As Cool as a Fruitstand.

I was nine years old in 1984, when Making the Grade was released. In schoolyard conversations, my friends and I sometimes discussed the social divisions in "big kids" and "grownups." We were reasonably certain that they were divided into "preppies" and "burnouts"; some kids with older siblings could report, with that nine-year-old solemnity brought on by superior wisdom, on the brands of clothing that signified true preppiehood. So I was struck with a peculiar kind of nostalgia during a scene in Making the Grade when one character gives another a lesson in how to dress preppy: peculiar because I was too young to experience the preppy years firsthand, so the nostalgia was for a time when such things as alligators on polo shirts and rolled-up pantlegs were the mysteries of distant adulthood.

Of course, the mystery is still there, but in a different form: why on earth did anyone ever think that layering pink and green polo shirts was a good idea?

But on to the movie. Slovenly rich boy Palmer Woodrow (Dana Olsen), desperate to figure out how to avoid having to go to prep school (he's apparently a seventh-year senior, although he looks more like a fifteenth-year senior, what with his big head emphasized by his receding hairline), stumbles upon the brilliant idea of hiring a poor person to impersonate him at school. But where could he find a poor person in his world of luxury cars and private country clubs? Enter Eddie Keaton (Judd Nelson in his film debut), a street kid from Jersey who's on the run from his faux-eloquent bookie Dice Man (Andrew Clay). The two strike a deal, and it's off to posh Hanover Academy for Eddie's fish-out-of-water story.

At the prep school are bullies named Biff (Scott McGinnis) and Skip (John Dye), mysterious sports like field hockey, and, most importantly, preppy clothes. The film's best scene is when the real Palmer's friend Rand (Carey Scott) takes Eddie clothes shopping and explains to him the code of the preppy, which is likely lifted verbatim from Lisa Birnbach's Official Preppy Handbook, which had been published as a satire but quickly became a bible. "A tie's knot should never be bigger than your head," Rand explains to a mystified Eddie. "Socks: wear them only to weddings, and then only if it's your own." Eddie falls for Tracy (Jonna Lee), the beautiful granddaughter of the school's founder, who loves him because he's different. However, prepdom insinuates itself into Eddie's personality, turning him into more of a Palmer Woodrow than the real Palmer was. Will there be a big speech where he learns his lesson and explains it to an unlikely audience? I wouldn't dream of telling you.

There's another kind of nostalgia here: for that particular brand of early- to mid-eighties filmmaking. I loved the aforementioned shopping scene, which is in a long line of "training" sequences, such as the scenes in Footloose when Kevin Bacon teaches Chris Penn to dance. There's a scene in which Eddie shows off his breakdancing skills, although the person dancing is clearly not Judd Nelson, who gets intermittent closeups striking poses and doing an awkward Robot. There's a song score of particularly bad synth-pop, a sort of sub-Giorgio Moroder collection of songs that sound like rejects from Scarface and Flashdance (indeed, one of the performers, Shandi, wrote and performed "He's a Dream" from the latter film). And there's not one, but two spontaneous dance numbers: I'm cheating a little here, because the first one, during the opening credits, has Eddie semi-dancing to the film's theme song, "Living on the Edge," which he's playing on his large silver boombox; and the second one does take place at a school dance, albeit the kind of dance that has never seen breakdancing before. Walter Olkewicz appears as Coach Wordman, a third-rate approximation of John Belushi; and an uncredited Dan Schneider appears as "Blimp," the obligatory picked-on fat kid (you might remember him from a string of 1980s films and TV shows, such as "Head of the Class").

And, of course, there's Andrew Clay, a standup comedian approached by the producers in the parking lot of a Los Angeles comedy club. He apparently loved his John Travolta-meets-Mean Streets character Dice Man so much that he started calling himself Andrew Dice Clay. In that same parking lot, the producers approached another comedian about starring in this film, but Jim Carrey turn them down, giving Judd Nelson his first starring role. A similar "what might have been" involves the soundtrack: the film had little money to spend on the composer, and they gave it all to a relative newcomer named Danny Elfman. However, the producers then rejected him, which might have had something to do with the rather confused state of the music rights (see the film's trivia page at IMDB).

The film is not, by any measure, any good. There are a few laughs, and the first kiss between Eddie and Tracy was unexpectedly sweet and poignant, but that was one of the few times when the film gave the impression of really knowing anything at all about high-school kids. The filmmakers had studied other teen comedies, but not closely enough to pick up any real feeling for their subjects. Making the Grade was released the same month as Sixteen Candles, and whatever you think about John Hughes, his films showed that he had an ear for how teenagers express themselves. Here, screenwriters Gene Quintano (Police Academy 3, Operation Dumbo Drop) and Charles Gale (Ernest Scared Stupid)... well, there's nothing more to say after typing Ernest Scared Stupid. Making the Grade has to go to summer school. (In fact, a return trip was planned: the closing credits promise a sequel, Tourista, which never materialized. Ah, the 1980s.)