“Gay High School Fight Club” was the working title of the script that Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott sent off to a producer a few years ago, riding a surreal wave of virtual goodwill after their film Shiva Baby became a kind of cult sensation during the pandemic.
This story was about two unpopular friends, PJ and Josie, who are eager to lose their virginity (ideally to two beautiful cheerleaders). The only way they can figure out how to get close to said cheerleaders, however, is to form an all-female self-defense class that quickly devolves into a bloody fight club. They knew it had the potential to be riotously funny, slyly insightful and boundary pushing for queer teen representation. But would anyone want to make it?
Though the cinematic misadventures of horny, flawed, straight teenage boys may essentially be its own genre with dozens of films spanning decades, there has not been an equivalent for queer girls. Thankfully, though, the producer who got the script was Alison Small, the head of film at Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman’s Brownstone Productions (also behind another wild hit this year, Cocaine Bear). Instead of liabilities in untested concepts, Small thought it was the funniest thing she had ever read. It was smart, weird and original. They were in.
Photo: AP
The film, now called Bottoms, is on its way to theaters today (and expanding next week), featuring The Bear breakout Ayo Edebiri as Josie, Kaia Gerber as the cheerleader Sennott’s character PJ is lusting after, “Red, White & Royal Blue’s” Nicholas Galitzine as a toxic quarterback, and former NFL player Marshawn Lynch as a very unconventional teacher.
“We thought a lot about camp casting and, like, John Waters,” Seligman, who directed, said. “Taking people from all walks of life and all kind of industries — people who could make fun of their personas.”
Seligman and Sennott have been working on Bottoms since around 2017, writing the part of Josie for Edebiri specifically. The three met as students at New York University. Though they said the school didn’t exactly foster extracurricular collaboration between departments, Sennott helped create an environment where that was possible, encouraging people to help one another instead of just venturing out alone.
“You were like skipping your acting classes to work with the film students and meet the writing students and pushing to do stuff together and make sketches outside of school,” Seligman said in a joint interview with Sennott and Edebiri. “I don’t know what you were skipping to go audition for Shiva and make that happen, but I’m glad you did.”
The class, Sennott said, was Shakespeare.
“Nobody knows what they’re doing once they graduate,” Edebiri said. “Even if you think you have everything lined up, you’re still in the real world and there are still practical things like how do you get representation? Submit to festivals? How do you meet up with producers who maybe are more established? There aren’t classes for that. We were trying to figure out the answers while we were still in school. So then as soon as we graduated, we could just hit the ground running, like jump into it and do it together.”
And they all stayed true to their word, even if they weren’t directly working together. When Edebiri got a writing job, she told her friends what it was like. When Seligman started working on sets, she passed on her experiences. When Sennott and Edebiri teamed up for a short form (and short-lived) Comedy Central series Ayo and Rachel are Single, they learned how to take notes from a director as actors.
“I feel like we all helped each other forward,” Sennott said. “Some things you can only learn from doing.”
Bottoms, which is being released by MGM’s Orion Pictures, is coming at a time when its stars are having a moment too, with Edebiri now a household name after two seasons as Sydney in Hulu’s The Bear and Sennott having recently co-starred in the conversation-provoking HBO series The Idol as well as last year’s wild horror Bodies Bodies Bodies.
Seligman and Sennott have a library of references that helped inspire the tone of Bottoms, from Superbad and Drop Dead Gorgeous to Scott Pilgrim vs the World and Attack the Block, but it’s also just its own thing too and there were many, many discussions about exactly what reality this world existed in.
The answer isn’t abundantly clear — the town is a kind of “Anytown,” the sets and costumes and props are rooted in the 21st century but not anything hyper specific, and the intensity of a rivalry with a local football team is one that reaches absurd heights.
And then there’s the fight club, which they had to keep reminding everyone wasn’t just a joke. It was supposed to be very, very real.
“Once we actually started to shoot it and talk to other departments, we had to be clear that it was a real fight club and we were going to have real stunts and real blood,” Seligman said. “I think some people still thought it was just going to be a fun comedy. … As we kept on coming up against people asking, ’Wait, so are there going to be real stunts?” And for us it was like, ‘What did you think this was going to be like?’
“It became even more important as we were filming that we made clear that we wanted these girls to actually look really good as they were kicking ass.”
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
RSS