Get Real (film)

Steven Carter (Ben Silverstone) is a 16-year-old middle-class schoolboy who is intelligent and good-looking, but unathletic and introverted. Bullied at school and misunderstood at home, his only confidante is his neighbour and best friend, Linda (Charlotte Brittain). Keeping his sexual orientation hidden from everyone else, he cruises in public toilets. He is surprised to find the school jock, John Dixon (Brad Gorton) also cruising, but John denies that he is gay.

At a school dance, Steven gains a friend after he comforts Jessica (Stacy Hart), following her argument with her boyfriend, Kevin (Tim Harris), who is also his bully. When Steven returns home, John follows him and confides about his own sexual orientation. They start a relationship.

Word around the school spreads about someone being gay, and John fears that Steven has been telling people. In order to maintain his status, John beats up Steven in front of his friends. Steven announces in front of the assembly that he is gay, and looks to John for support, who ignores him. John apologizes for beating him up and says he loves him, but as he is too afraid to come out, Steven breaks up with him, wishing him happiness.

In 1992 Patrick Wilde wrote What's Wrong with Angry? a stage play about a gay love story between two British schoolboys. Wilde said that he wrote the play because “I was sick of being told by people – even gay people – that it’s easier to be gay now… But I don’t believe it’s easier than it ever was to come out.”^[3] What's Wrong with Angry? first opened at the LOST Theatre in 1993 in Fulham, London and was then staged in January 1994 at the Oval House in London, where it sold out and was extended for an extra week at the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) Studio. After the final performance, film director Simon Shore and producer Steven Taylor approached Wilde about producing a film version of the play.^[4]

During the early development of the script the production had the working title of Sweet Sixteen.^[4]

During development, director Simon Shore and writer Patrick Wilde, struggled to find a way to make heterosexual audiences understand why Steven was so tortured by staying in the closet. Shore later recalled that he “got Patrick to write a list of 20 reasons why it’s bad to be gay and not come out” and that this list became a template for how they would make Steven’s predicament comprehensible. For example, one item on Wilde’s list was, “Girls fall in love with you, and you don’t know what to tell them,” which prompted a subplot in which a girl at school has a crush on Steven. “I wanted some way of identifying with the way Steven’s being gay impacts everyone in his circle of friends,” Shore says.^[5]

Filming on Get Real began on 17 August 1997 with shooting taking place throughout Basingstoke, including at Cranbourne School, Alton School, Market Square, Foyle Park, Sorrell's Corpse and the War Memorial Park.^[6]

The Vyne Community School which was used as the principal location for the fictional Belvedere School in the film.^[7]

Filming in Basingstoke ended on 21 September, with production moving on to the Millennium Studios in Borehamwood on the 22nd of September, where filming took place in the studio of scenes shot in Steven's bedroom and the inside of the public toilet. The entire movie took six weeks to shoot.^[6]

Get Real - Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack was released on 1 June 1999, by BMG on CD. Along with John Lunn's score, the album features tracks like Republica's "Ready to Go," the Troggs' "Love Is All Around," Cameo's "Word Up!" and Dodgy's "Staying out for the Summer." The tracks in the film, titled "Respect", "If You Want It to Be Good Girl (Get Yourself a Bad Boy)", "Misunderstood", "Bobby's Girl", performed by Aretha Franklin, Backstreet Boys, Kings of Infinite Space and Charlotte Brittain, respectively, were omitted from the soundtrack due to copyright issues from their record labels.^[8]

Get Real premiered publicly at the Edinburgh Film Festival in August 1998 where it won the Audience award.^[9] Paramount Classic then purchased the film for distribution.

Get Real premiered on 30 April 1999^[10] in the United States and on 14 May 1999 in the United Kingdom where the opening took place in Basingstoke where the story is set and the majority of the filming had taken place.^[4]

The film was released on VHS on 22 January 2001^[11] and on DVD on 7 November 2017.^[12]

In its first weekend, the film earned $54,254 while in the following weekend, it earned $55,752 and in its third $78,100.^[10]

The film ranked number 34 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies.^[13]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 79% of 47 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "An authentic portrayal of homosexuality in high school, Get Real is an engaging dramedy that doesn't sermonize its audience nor trivialize its characters."^[14]

In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Paula Nechak praised the film for allowing the characters to be themselves rather than change to fit in, and praises the treatment of the 'jock' character, John, as being just as bound by the school popularity game as Steven.^[15]

Roger Ebert commented, "Certainly this film has deeper values than the mainstream teenage comedies that retail aggressive materialism, soft-core sex and shallow ideas about "popularity."^[16] Steven Holden from The New York Times wrote "The movie captures the excruciating paranoia of a situation in which there’s nowhere the lovers can be alone except in each other’s homes on the rare occasions their parents are out."^[16]

In the Daily Record, Siobhan Synnot criticised the film as being like a "preachy episode of Grange Hill with cardboard cut-out characters" and also criticised the character, John, for being unbelievable, describing him as "simply a bland fantasy hunk. It's hard to see how this dim bulb is bright enough for Oxford, because all the smart lines go to his smart-alec boyfriend."^[17]

• Get Real at IMDb
• Get Real at AllMovie
• Get Real at Box Office Mojo