Original novel In February 1967, Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia Pictures, announced he had bought the rights to the novel
Getting Straight by Ken Kolb. Richard Rush described the original novel as "a nice novel about a graduate student taking his orals to get his teaching credentials. The administration of the college is like a medieval torture chamber, and the oral exam is like the
Salem witch trials. He barely escapes with his sanity."
Richard Rush Director Richard Rush had impressed with his
AIP films
Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and
Psych-Out (1968) and was signed to an independent deal with Columbia. They offered the book to him, and he said he would do it if they let him make a contemporary film about kids at college rebelling against
the draft and the war. He wrote a treatment and they eventually agreed. Rush's signing was announced in June 1968. "To me the whole 'revolution' is not a political revolution but a personal one", he said. "It is the result of the inability of an entire generation on a personal, individual level to accept the disparities in the morality at the foundation of our society." Rush says the studio gave him a list of writers to do a screenplay and he picked one, but was not happy with the result. Rush then hired someone not on the list, Robert Kaufman, who Rush had known at AIP. Rush called Kaufman "a brilliant, vicious intellectual, total amoral comic. He could make me laugh. He was a bright, funny man." "All my films are about commitment", said Kaufman later. "Somehow. The moral was, love is better with a monster who'll make a commitment than with a nebbish who won't. " Rush says Kolb later did some work on the script. "It was risky material because the war was still going on and students were at the barricades and Hollywood movies weren’t really addressing this stuff yet head-on", Rush says.
Casting Elliott Gould had just made
M*A*S*H and was going to make
Move when Columbia came to him with
Getting Straight. "Columbia said if I didn't take the part they'd drop it", he said. "I was the only actor they'd go with. I was never so flattered in my life." Gould says when he met Rush the director asked him, "'Can you get angry?' Because I had never been in the Army, nor had I ever gone to college, nor am I an angry person. I said, 'I believe I can show you some passion and emotion for this character.' " Rush had made several movies with
Jack Nicholson and offered him a role but the actor had to decline when deluged with offers post-
Easy Rider. "I guess I've lost my standing with him", said Nicholson of the director.
Candice Bergen was cast in July 1969.
Harrison Ford had been under contract to Columbia, which had expired. However he was brought back to the studio for a role in this film. Richard Rush signed Max Julien to a three-picture contract over two years.
Filming Filming started July 7, 1969 in
Eugene, Oregon, with
Lane Community College standing in for the fictional university. Rush later said Gould "had complete abandon. Elliott did a hell of a job." When filming ended Kaufman wrote "we have sought to record, with a sense of humor, the reality of today's student protest, campus riots, and establishment reprisals. We will undoubtedly be charged with
sensationalism but anything less than a straightforward depiction of these events would be ludicrously false." Rush says when he got to the location he saw it was full of glass walls. "We had to suit what was happening inside with what was happening outside, and it opened up enormous opportunities", he said. "Also, I'd never shot a riot before with tear gas and policemen beating up people. When I suddenly had the equipment to do that, with the tear gas and the paddy wagons and the helicopters, it became a different version of the movie than I had originally pictured in my head as I had written it." Rush used a lot of rack focus on the film. He later said he did this because he felt the script was very verbal and needed to "make it visual." Rush says "We shot the film on a very long lens, so we could peer inside and outside of the classrooms on the campus to gather relevant information, and get interesting angles in order to create a mood of tension or unpredictability. And this is where we really started using the rack focus technique. This type of shooting draws the viewer into the shot on an emotional level." ==Reception==