Junior High School

This film is a minor classic. A fantastic musical score and an incredible lead performance by P. David Ebersole (going by temporary stage name David Stewart) who should have been a teen superstar. Please put this out on DVD!!!!

Really bad. I hate to be harsh, but it's so cringe. The plot, music, cuts, all of it is just really bad. I wasn't expecting anything stellar, but this almost seems like a joke. Try not to cringe while watching this... I failed incredibly.

This movie was probably not intended to be as funny as it is. If you have the opportunity to see it (it's hard to find), take the time. You'll walk away laughing.

This film has recently made it on to YouTube, and I have to say that it's probably more entertaining now than it was at the time of it's release. In 1978, when big-budget star-studded musical extravaganzas like Grease were all the rage, this must have looked like a glorified home movie by comparison. The only person in it who had any showbiz credentials at all (at the time) is the wood-shop teacher, played by well known singer/songwriter Dave Frischberg.

The dialog, the acting, the singing and the dancing are all ridiculously amateurish, but there are two things this movie has in it's favor that make it quite watchable: Many of the songs are actually quite good (surprising for something that was made during the height of the disco craze), and the fact that the entire cast appears to be in on the joke. They all instinctively realized that the best way to suddenly break into silly song and dance routines about shop class, jockstraps and training bras, is to maintain completely deadpan expressions on their faces, leaving it to the audience to provide the laugh track.

Filmed over the summer of 1977 at John Muir Jr. High in Burbank California (not Van Nuys Jr. High as is often mistakenly reported), the kids were all ages 13-15 at the time of filming, and considering that this appears to be the sole movie credit for most of them, one can only marvel at the energy they put into a project that was obviously not their chosen vocation.

I first saw Junior High School in 1978 as an entry in the Movies on a Shoestring Festival held in Rochester N.Y. (now called the Rochester International Film Festival). It was a cut above the usual MOS fare and was well received by the judges and festival attendees. The principals, writers and directors, were a group of USC cinema majors that made the movie as their senior project and to demonstrate their abilities to potential Hollywood employers. If you check their other credits, you will see that they collaborated on a prior short called Gravity. The principals attended the screening and each was given a trophy. Several years before this film was submitted, Movies on a Shoestring began purchasing copies of the most popular films screened during the festival for a lending library called "Best of the Fest". A copy of Junior High School was purchased and it went on to be one of the most popular in their catalog.

While many people today classify this as a really bad movie that you have to watch, at the time JHS was considered good work, especially for a group of film students with a relatively untrained non-union cast (save for Mitzi McCall & hubby Charlie Brill who appeared in disguise and were originally credited under aliases) and crew making little or no money. Yes, the story line is schmaltzy and the performances shallow but the production work was close to professional, all things considered.

Unlike the storyline and the acting, the music was quite good. I assume this is due in large part to the lineage of David Wechter whose father Julius was a well respected studio and touring musician (Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass and the Baja Marimba Band) as well as a composer/arranger/film scorer. I suspect that dad made a few uncredited contributions to the movie... Audio recording and post production capabilities for big budget movies were crude by today's standards; on a low budget production like this the music had to stand on its own.

The direction, camera work and editing occurred before music videos took film making on a downward spiral of fast cuts and often indiscernible imagery. By today's often unpalatable standards of film production, JHS may be dated but it was very well done for the pre-MTV era. Junior High School achieved its objectives: the principals graduated from USC with cinema degrees and three out of four quickly found jobs in Hollywood where they continue to work today. Jacobson appears to have skipped the Hollywood film business as there are no subsequent credits for him.

BTW, I would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall listening to a bunch of twenty something students trying to convince the the school principal to hand over his building to them for several days of shooting without a big fat compensation check. It would be interesting to get one or more of the principals to open up about the making of Junior High School.