Easy A (2010)

Easy A (stylized as easy A) is a 2010 American teen romantic

comedy film directed by Will Gluck, written by Bert V. Royal, and starring Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Cam Gigandet, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm McDowell, Aly Michalka, and Stanley Tucci. The screenplay was partially inspired by the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Shot in Ojai, California, the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2010 and was released on September 17, 2010 by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film received positive reviews with high praise for Stone's performance, and was a major financial success, grossing $75 million worldwide against a budget of $8 million. Stone received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical, while the movie won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Comedy. The film is ranked as number 14 on Entertainment Weekly's 2021 list of the Best High School Movies. Easy A is also Bynes’ final performance to date.

Plot

The story is narrated by Olive Penderghast, a 17-year-old high school student living in Ojai, California, speaking into her webcam. Desperate to avoid going on a camping trip with her best friend Rhiannon Abernathy and Rhiannon's hippie parents, Olive dishonestly claims she is going on a date with a college boy that weekend; truthfully, she stays home all weekend listening to "Pocketful of Sunshine" from a musical greeting card her grandmother sent her. Pressed by Rhiannon the following Monday, Olive eventually lies about having lost her virginity to her fictional date. Prudish, devout Christian student Marianne Bryant overhears their conversation, and Olive's story soon spreads throughout the school. The school's church group, run by Marianne, decides to "save" Olive from her supposed promiscuity. Olive confides the truth to her classmate Brandon, a gay student who is bullied for his sexual orientation. She agrees to serve as his "beard" and pretend to have sex with him at a teen party so people will believe he is straight.

After a fight with Rhiannon, Olive decides to embrace her new reputation as a "tramp" and begins to dress more provocatively. She stitches a red "A" onto her clothes, inspired by Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, which she has been reading in English class. Boys who have had no previous luck with girls beg Olive to increase their popularity by letting them claim they have had sex with her, which she does in exchange for gift cards to various stores. Marianne's ex-boyfriend Micah contracts chlamydia from having sex with the school guidance counselor, Mrs. Griffith, but claims Olive was the one who gave it to him. Because Mrs. Griffith's husband, Mr. Griffith, is Olive's favorite teacher, she accepts the blame to spare their marriage.

The church youth group, now including Rhiannon, begins harassing Olive in an attempt to get her to drop out of school. She goes on a date with Rhiannon's crush, Anson, which ends with her storming off angrily after he tries bribing her to actually have sex with him and not just claim that she did. Olive reconnects with Todd, her childhood crush and the school mascot, who says he does not believe the rumors because she lied for him when he was not ready for his first kiss years ago. She asks everyone who paid her to admit the truth, but nobody is willing to relinquish their newfound reputations. When Mrs. Griffith refuses to admit to her affair with Micah, Olive threatens to expose her; Mrs. Griffith says no one would believe her. Olive immediately informs Mr. Griffith, who subsequently separates from his wife.

After talking with her mother, Olive comes up with a plan – she performs a song-and-dance number at a pep rally to draw people's attention and tells them to watch her webcast that night, promising an online sex show with Todd. In actuality, Olive uses the webcast to explain the truth of what happened, which has served as the frame story for the film. As Olive is concluding her webcast, Todd comes by her house riding a lawnmower. She signs off by saying that she may lose her virginity to him eventually, but whether she does or not is "nobody's goddamn business". Olive texts a tearful Rhiannon and apologizes for lying to her. She goes outside to meet Todd, and they kiss before riding off on the lawn mower.

Cast

Production

Development

Screenwriter Bert V. Royal claims to have written the entire screenplay, except for the last ten pages, in five days. Royal's plan was to adapt three classic works into films and to set them at the same high school, so that some characters would appear in multiple films. Besides The Scarlet Letter, which was the source material for Easy A, Royal wanted to adapt Cyrano de Bergerac and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Natasha Bedingfield's song "Pocketful of Sunshine", which becomes a running joke in the film, was not in Royal's original script. He envisioned "Olive", a track from Ken Nordine's 1966 album Colors, to play during Olive's weekend montage (which introduces the song). Director Will Gluck's favorite film is Ferris Bueller's Day Off and has multiple homages to it in the film (Olive's shower Mohawk, "never had one lesson"), among many other John Hughes references. According to Royal, although the word "fuck" appeared 47 times in the original draft, which was written as an R-rated comedy, all occurrences were cut from the final film. Gluck shot other versions of many scenes, with or without coarse language. Although the film was cut down for a wider audience, it still obtained a 15 rating in the United Kingdom.

Jennifer Lawrence auditioned for the role of Olive.

Filming

Gluck credits Emma Stone with improvising the line about being a "Gossip Girl in the Sweet Valley of Traveling Pants". The entire film was shot in Ojai, California in the summer of 2009, using Panavision's Genesis and later filmized. Not a single film set was used; even the houses in the film belong to Ojai residents. The school used as "Ojai North High School" in the film is Nordhoff High School, and the end credits are filmed on Fordyce Road, both located in Ojai, California.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack was released by Madison Gate Records on September 14, 2010, and is available via iTunes. It features tracks from Jessie J, Lenka, Natasha Bedingfield, Kardinal Offishall, and Cary Brothers. Other songs in the film but not on the soundtrack album are from OneRepublic, Angus & Julia Stone, The Dollyrots, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Pussycat Dolls.

Release

Easy A had its world premiere at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

Home media

Easy A was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on December 21, 2010. The DVD features a gag reel, Emma Stone's audition footage, an audio commentary with director Gluck and Stone, and previews. Blu-ray exclusive bonus features include: The Making of Easy A, The School of Pop Culture: Movies of the '80s, Vocabulary of Hilarity and a trivia track.

Reception

Box office

The film opened on September 17, 2010, and grossed $6,787,163 on its opening day and $17,734,040 in its opening weekend, placing second behind The Town on both figures, and already making back more than double the film's slim $8 million budget. This was in line with expectations from Sony of an opening weekend take of around $15 million.

The film grossed a total of $58,401,464 in the United States and Canada plus $16,624,752 in international markets for a worldwide total of $75,026,216, earning its budget back more than nine times, making it a huge financial success.

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Easy A has an approval rating of 85% based on 192 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "It owes a huge debt to older (and better) teen comedies, but Easy A proves a smart, witty showcase for its irresistibly charming star, Emma Stone." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, assigned the film a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade of A− on an A+ to F scale.

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half out of four stars, writing: "Easy A offers an intriguing middle ground to the absolute of sexual abstinence: Don't sleep with anybody, but say you did. It's a funny, engaging comedy that takes the familiar but underrated Emma Stone and makes her, I believe, a star." Richard Corliss of Time magazine named Stone's performance one of the ten best film performances of 2010: "Stone lends winning maturity and a gift for making sassy dialogue sound natural. This 22-year-old is an actress-personality — a star — around whom Hollywood could build some pretty good movies." John Griffiths from Us Weekly gave it two and a half stars out of four: "With her husky voice and fiery hair, Stone is spectacular, echoing early Lindsay Lohan...The story is thin, and the laughs meager."

The Independent praised Easy A for redefining tropes of teen films, particularly sex comedies. In a retrospective piece for The Washington Post, Anying Guo discussed its influence, pointing out how it subverted "sex-crazed tropes into a sharp, thoughtful film" by satirizing teens' obsession with virginity itself. Guo added: "Packed with references to “Say Anything” and other ’80s homages, the film felt refreshing against the steady churn of bildungsroman narratives that often centered on young men."

Accolades

Sequel/spin-off

It was announced on June 20, 2019, that a spin-off film of Easy A is in development, which would be written and directed by Bert V. Royal. Further confirmation of the film came in 2021, with Aly Michalka stating: "There are talks that there might be a sequel. That actually is semi real. ... It would be kind of like a new retelling but you'd see some of the characters from the original come back into the story."

References

External links

Official website

Easy A at IMDb

Easy A at Box Office Mojo

Easy A at Rotten Tomatoes