Dead Poets Society (1989): 27 Shocking Facts Hidden for Decades
Secret Tape
4,421 views
Peter Weir's boarding-school drama reached screens after a false start that nearly ended it for good. This video works through 27 documented secrets from behind its making, beginning with the Nashville prep school where screenwriter Tom Schulman sat in a class whose English teacher disappeared between school years with no explanation offered to anyone.
The production side covers the studio note proposing a musical instead of poetry, the abandoned earlier version directed by Jeff Kanew with Liam Neeson wanted for the lead, the school set built outside Atlanta and destroyed by fire after a single day of shooting, and the rewrite that removed a terminal illness from the teacher's story. Also here: the location hunt across more than seventy campuses that ended at St. Andrew's School in Delaware, the classroom and the cave built on soundstages rather than found, the immersion programme that had the young cast living together before cameras rolled, the unlogged half-day Weir hid from the studio so Robin Williams could improvise, and the care taken over the film's most difficult sequence.
Later entries take in Maurice Jarre's score and its synthesized bagpipes, Norman Lloyd's long career before he played the headmaster, the friction between Ethan Hawke and Williams, the two moments the young actors invented themselves, the role almost entirely removed in the edit, the spread of a two-word Latin phrase far beyond the film, and an awards outcome the screenwriter genuinely hoped to avoid.
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Dead Poets Society (1989): 27 Shocking Facts Hidden for Decades
Secret Tape
4,421 views
Peter Weir's boarding-school drama reached screens after a false start that nearly ended it for good. This video works through 27 documented secrets from behind its making, beginning with the Nashville prep school where screenwriter Tom Schulman sat in a class whose English teacher disappeared between school years with no explanation offered to anyone.
The production side covers the studio note proposing a musical instead of poetry, the abandoned earlier version directed by Jeff Kanew with Liam Neeson wanted for the lead, the school set built outside Atlanta and destroyed by fire after a single day of shooting, and the rewrite that removed a terminal illness from the teacher's story. Also here: the location hunt across more than seventy campuses that ended at St. Andrew's School in Delaware, the classroom and the cave built on soundstages rather than found, the immersion programme that had the young cast living together before cameras rolled, the unlogged half-day Weir hid from the studio so Robin Williams could improvise, and the care taken over the film's most difficult sequence.
Later entries take in Maurice Jarre's score and its synthesized bagpipes, Norman Lloyd's long career before he played the headmaster, the friction between Ethan Hawke and Williams, the two moments the young actors invented themselves, the role almost entirely removed in the edit, the spread of a two-word Latin phrase far beyond the film, and an awards outcome the screenwriter genuinely hoped to avoid.