We just finished the script last week to Greg Mottola’s follow-up to “Superbad,” and the winning screenplay, titled “Adventureland,” is one of the best we’ve read all year.
A coming of age story set in the 1980s at an Adventureland theme park, the film is set to star Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Ryan Reynolds among many others as post-college graduates forced to spend a miserable summer working in a Long Island family amusement park (Bill Hader and Kirsten Wiig, play the married managers).
Mottola has already noted that the film will include fifty-some songs, with a few penned by Lou Reed, Falco and The Replacements, but the script actually contains screen directions for a ton of songs including quite a few by Neil Young who’s all over the story, both musically and as part of the narrative; his tunes are practically the theme to the movie (they include, “Cowgirl In The Sand, “Everbody Knows This Is Nowhere,” “Cortez The Killer” and “Hey Hey My My (Into The Black),” in a climactic movie-music moment near the end). Ryan Reynolds’ lothario character allegedly jammed with Young once and it’s a plot device that comes up a few times.
Other tunes included in the script are tracks by The Smiths, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out,” (itself sounding like a true music-cinema moment), The Replacements (“Bastards of The Young,” “Willpower”), The Buzzcocks (“Ever Fallen In Love”), Lou Reed (“Coney Island Baby”), Level 42 (“Something About You”) Buckner & Garcia (“Pac Man Fever”), El Debarge (“Who’s Johnny”), Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (“Roadrunner”), The Rolling Stones (“Tops”), Generation X (“Gimme Some Truth” by John Lennon), General Public (“Tenderness”), Johnny Thunder (“Born To Lose”), Brian Eno (“Taking Tiger Mountain”), Bruce Springsteen (“I’m On Fire”) Meco (the disco “Star Wars” theme), George McCrae (“Rock Your Baby”), Shannon (“Let The Music Play”), Nu Shooz (“I Can’t Wait”), Cutting Crew (“I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight”), Motley Crue (“Shout At The Devil”), Taco (“Puttin On The Ritz”), Kool And The Gang, (“Fresh”), Run DMC (“Tricky”), Murray Head (“One Night In Bangkok”), Junior (“Mama Used To Say”) and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” which is the ironic theme of the film that drives all the characters nuts (it plays ad nauseum). Plus the film also drops references to Molly Hatchet, Rush, The Scorpions, Judas Priest Van Halen and Aerosmith.
So obviously a lot of music in this one. Who knows if they all made the script, but Mottola did say they cleared the use of 50-some songs and Yo La Tengo’s James McNew (YLT composed the movie’s score) confirmed to us that an early cut of the film contained a boatload of songs including an unaccounted for one by Hüsker Dü.
It’s a wonderful, wistful and bittersweet bildungsroman story in the vein of ” Rushmore,” “The Squid And The Whale,” and perhaps more recently, “The Wackness.” It’s hilarious, funny, dramatic, sad and contains all the hallmarks of a well-rounded, early adult tale of being in love and stuck in life. Forget the Apatow films (though we love them), this is much more honest and deep, and could truly be a breakout indie film of 2009 if all goes according to plan cause the script is excellent and feels super genuine.
“Adventureland” was supposed to come out in August of 2009, but Miramax pushed the film to Spring of 2009 (last we heard May 2009).