Filmmaker Brian McQuery recently hosted a 25th anniversary screening at New Beverly Cinema of the high school comedy “Three O’Clock High” which starred Casey Siemaszko as Jerry Mitchell, a meek kid who accidently runs afoul of the school bully Buddy Revell. After Jerry pats Buddy on the shoulder, completely forgetting that Buddy doesn’t like to be touched, he is challenged to a fight at 3 p.m. and becomes desperate to find a way out of it. Joining McQuery was the film’s director Phil Joanou, actors Richard Tyson who played Buddy and Philip Baker Hall who portrayed Detective Mulvahill.
Before making “Three O’Clock High,” Joanou had directed a short film at USC which later led to him directing two episodes of the TV show “Amazing Stories.” One of the executive producers, Steven Spielberg, was the one who gave Joanou the script to “Three O’Clock High.” This however made him very nervous as his short film was also a high school movie, and he began fearing that he would be forever pigeonholed as the high school movie guy.
“I was all worried about it,” Joanou said. “I went home and read the script and I liked it, but I was overthinking this situation and was so nervous that I told him (Spielberg) ‘I don’t think I should do this high school movie.’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘what? No really you can direct this movie.’ I went home and I thought about it, and I remember lying in my bed at night thinking ‘oh god what have I done?’ I was just nervous because this was all happening so fast, but the next morning I went in at 8 o’clock and I sat there waiting for him to come. I got so worried that this film already went to somebody else, and I trapped him and said I would do it. He said ‘great!'”
Three O’Clock High” had a budget of $5 million dollars and was shot at Ogden High School in Ogden, Utah. Joanou said he chose this location because of the “gothic qualities” of its exterior, and he wanted to make it look like Jerry was trapped in this “house of horrors.”
Tyson had just graduated from Cornell University and was living out of his truck when he heard about this movie. He also said that he went through fourteen callbacks before getting cast. Joanou remembered watching Tyson’s audition and saying “this is the guy.”
“I remember the room, I remember where I was sitting, I remember you coming in, and I remember you scaring the crap out of me,” Joanou said to Tyson.
“He (Tyson) was full blown method into this part,” Joanou said. Nancy (the casting director) told me that this guy was crazy and that I might want to see some other people instead, but I was set on him playing Buddy.
The one thing that was holding up the start of filming on “Three O’Clock High” was in trying to find the right actor to play Jerry Mitchell. Even Tyson said that Joanou spent five days straight looking at every actor in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Spielberg, who Joanou said was heavily involved in the production of “Three O’Clock High,” pushed for Siemaszko as he had just appeared opposite Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.” Joanou recalled that Spielberg was looking for the next Michael J. Fox, and they both saw Siemaszko as being just that person. At one point however, the choice was between Siemaszko and Kirk Cameron. Everyone at New Beverly Cinema agreed that Siemaszko was the best choice to play Jerry.
“I kind of hope Buddy would win if it was Kirk Cameron,” responded McQuery to that piece of trivia.
During Siemaszko’s audition, Joanou had Tyson sit right in front of the actor and told Tyson to “stare a hole right through him” while saying his lines. It turns out that Siemaszko had cut himself while shaving that morning, and during that audition where Tyson was getting in his face big time, a spot on Siemaszko’s face started bleeding profusely.
“Wow,” said Joanou when he saw this happen. “I told you to stare a hole through him, but come on!”
McQuery described “Three O’Clock High” as having an “amazing visual style” and asked Joanou how he went about achieving the film’s look. Joanou said Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” already had come out and that he “might have borrowed a few techniques from Mr. Scorsese.” When it came to filming the fight scene between Jerry and Buddy however, he found inspiration from another Scorsese movie, “Raging Bull,” as well as George Miller’s “The Road Warrior.
“Stylistically I just always wanted it to feel like a clock was ticking and that time was moving along,” Joanou said. “The theory behind this was just that I really wanted it to feel like it (the fight) was this inexorable event that he (Jerry) was just not going to get out of, and it was just gonna keep coming and coming and coming.”
We also noticed in the opening credits that Barry Sonnenfeld worked on “Three O’Clock High” and was credited as the movie’s Lighting Consultant. Joanou talked about how he got the future director of “Men in Black” involved in this project.
I talked to Spielberg and said this is the guy who shot ‘Blood Simple’ which I loved and I really, really wanted him because he had all that kinetic energy,” Joanou said of Sonnenfeld. “He loved the kinetic camera, and I certainly wasn’t going to get Michael Ballhaus who had shot ‘After Hours!’ And Spielberg said ‘okay, let’s go get him.'”
The score for “Three O’Clock High” was done by Tangerine Dream which composed a lot of brilliant film scores for “Risky Business,” Sorcerer” and “Thief.” Joanou, however, said he spent three weeks trying to convince Tangerine Dream that the movie was actually a comedy and not a horror film.
Universal Pictures also allowed Joanou to write his own draft of the “Three O’Clock High” script, and he said it always helps him to do that as it allows him to make the film his own.
“It’s great because then you no longer have to interpret what someone meant when they wrote what they wrote,” Joanou said. “You then know how to get from A to B to C.”
Three O’Clock High” was released in October of 1987 and ended up grossing only $3.6 million at the box office. But like “After Hours,” it developed a sizable cult following on home video and Joanou and Tyson still get asked about the movie and Buddy Revell every single day. Seeing it on the big screen with an enthusiastic crowd proved to be a lot of fun, and it’s always nice when a movie like this finally gets the audience it deserves. Big thanks to Brian McQuery for helping to put this screening together.
See also:
Michael Biehn Screens ‘The Victim’ at New Beverly Cinema
James Gunn Looks Back on ‘Tromeo and Juliet’ at New Beverly Cinema
Thomas Jane on Playing Todd Parker in ‘Boogie Nights’
