High school reading lists coming to a theatre near you

By Sarah Sluis

Turning high schoolers' required reading into easily digestible adaptations gave Hollywood a great deal of success during the mid-1990s. Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet (1996), Clueless (1995), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, with Heath Ledger) and latecomer O (2001, from Othello) captivated teen audiences--and were frequently rented before midterms or shown as a treat in classrooms. Now, two projects are attempting to revive the classics-to-modern-classroom genre.

Emile Hirsch, who starred in Into the Wild, Milk, and The Lords of Dogtown, apparently pitched the idea to retell Hamlet, that high school Shakespearean staple, for the teen crowd. After being passed over for the Twilight sequel, Catherine Hardwicke will direct for Overture. Philadelphia screenwriter Ron Nyswaner will pen a script

that will star Hirsch as the young Hamlet. He must decide what to do after his father, the president of a small liberal arts college (another favorite place for teen suspense thrillers, a la

The Skulls), is murdered. The director and producers' vision is to turn the film into a suspense thriller and move some of the offstage drama on-screen.

The idea of adapting The Scarlet Letter to a high school setting seems tricky and slightly misguided, especially when teen films like Juno have de-guilted single motherhood. In that film, her classmates of Juno, while a bit mean, have better things to do than to bug her. How do you tell the puritanical story of a single mother ostracized from her community and forced to wear an "A" on her chest, while the popular village priest suffers from the guilt of his invisible "A," when high schools are probably the furthest thing away from puritanical? The ABC Family network has probably come the closest to tackling the subject in the series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," which got early dramatic mileage out of the fact that the unknown father was mega-popular (a.k.a. The Priest).

It seems that the teen film Easy A, which will star Emma Stone in the Hester Prynne-like role, struggled most with depicting the transgressions of the Hester Prynne character. In each version of the script, she never actually does anything. In the first version, she falsely spread rumors that she was promiscuous to gain attention (What?), but now it appears that other people will circulate those rumors about her (sounds more believable). Stone will then perform some expert PR and use the rumors to pit the conservative and liberal students and teachers against each other, not her. As if that wasn't enough, MTV Movies Blog warns, "Don't be surprised if you see Stone sporting pilgrim gear in dual roles," since a proposed parallel storyline involves Stone playing the actual Prynne. The last item makes me officially afraid. It's either going to be extremely heavy-handed, or an all-out parody.

Will Gluck (Fired Up) will direct the film, and a cast of familiar names lends support: Lisa Kudrow, Penn Badgley ("Gossip Girl"), Cam Gigandet (Twilight), Thomas Haden Church, and Patricia Clarkson have all been named. Compared to Easy A, the relative simplicity of Hamlet seems refreshing. With a classic work of literature on your side, there's a certain level of quality you have to begin with--easily destroyed in the adaptation process.