Easy A (stylized as easy A) is a 2010 teen comedy film written by Bert V. Royal, directed by Will Gluck, and starring Emma Stone. The screenplay was partially inspired by the novel The Scarlet Letter. The film was shot at Screen Gems studios and in Ojai, California. Screen Gems distributed with a release on September 17, 2010 (2010-09-17). It was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc December 21, 2010.^[3][4][5][6]

The film was a box office success and received critical acclaim, particularly for Emma Stone's performance.

Plot[link]

Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) lies to her best friend Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka) about going on a date in order to get out of camping with Rhi's hippie parents. Instead, she hangs around the house all weekend. The following Monday, pressed by Rhiannon, Olive lies about losing her virginity to a college guy. Marianne (Amanda Bynes), a strictly religious girl at their school, overhears her telling the lie and soon it spreads like wildfire. The school's conservative church group run by Marianne decides Olive will be their next project.

Olive confides the truth to her friend Brandon (Dan Byrd), and he explains how others bully him because he's gay. Brandon later asks Olive to pretend to sleep with him so that he will be accepted by everyone. Brandon convinces Olive and they pretend to have sex at a party.

After having a fight with Rhiannon over Olive's new identity as a "dirty skank", Olive decides to counteract the harassment by embracing her new image as the school tramp. She begins to wear more provocative clothing and stitches a red 'A' (à la Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter) to everything she wears. Boys who usually have had no luck with girls in the past begin to give her money to say they have had sex with her in order to increase their own popularity, which in turn increases her reputation.

Things get worse when Micah (Cam Gigandet), Marianne's 22-year-old boyfriend, contracts chlamydia from sleeping with Mrs. Griffith (Lisa Kudrow), the school counselor, and blames it all on Olive. Olive agrees to lie to cover up the affair so her favorite teacher, Mr. Griffith's (Thomas Haden Church) marriage would be spared. Marianne's religious clique (which Rhiannon also joined) begins harassing Olive in order to get her to leave school.

After an ill-fated date with a boy who wants to pay her to sleep with him, Olive reconnects with Todd (Penn Badgley), her old crush, who is also the school's mascot. Todd then tells her that he does not believe the rumors because he remembers when she lied for him when he wasn't ready for his first kiss years ago. Olive then begins to ask everyone she lied for to help her out by telling the truth, but since everyone is enjoying their new popularity they don't want the truth to get out.

After a friendly talk with her eccentric, open-minded mother (Patricia Clarkson), Olive comes up with a plan to get everything finally out in the open. She then does a song and dance number at a school pep rally to get people's attention to watch her via web cam, where she confesses what she has done. Later, she texts Rhiannon (Rhi), apologizing for lying. When she is finishing up her web cast, Todd comes by riding a lawnmower and tells her to come outside. She goes outside to meet him and the two are shown riding off on the lawnmower.

Cast[link]

• Emma Stone as Olive Penderghast
• Penn Badgley as "Woodchuck" Todd, Olive's crush.
• Amanda Bynes as Marianne Bryant, the film's main antagonist.
• Aly Michalka as Rhiannon "Rhi" Abernathy, Olive's best friend.
• Cam Gigandet as Micah, Marianne's boyfriend
• Mahaley Hessam as Nina Howell, Marianne's best friend
• Thomas Haden Church as Jack Griffith, Olive's favorite teacher.
• Patricia Clarkson as Rosemary Penderghast
• Stanley Tucci as Dill Penderghast
• Bryce Clyde Jenkins as Chip Penderghast, Olive's adopted younger brother.
• Lisa Kudrow as Mrs. Griffith, Olive's School counselor.
• Malcolm McDowell as Principal Gibbons
• Dan Byrd as Brandon
• Johanna Braddy as Melanie Bostic
• Jake Sandvig as Anson
• Fred Armisen as Pastor Bryant
• Juliette Goglia as young Olive
• Stacey Travis as Mrs. Bryant
• Bonnie Burroughs as Micah's mom
• Lalaine as Gossipy girl (cameo)

Development[link]

Screenwriter Bert V. Royal claims to have written the entire screenplay, except for the last ten pages, in five days.^[7]

Royal's plan was to adapt three classic works into films and to set them at the same high school, so that some characters would appear in multiple films. Besides The Scarlet Letter, which was the source material for Easy A, Royal wanted to adapt Cyrano de Bergerac and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.^[7]

The song "Pocketful of Sunshine", which becomes a running joke in the film, was not in Royal's original script. He envisioned "Olive", a track from Ken Nordine's 1966 album Colors, to play during Olive's weekend montage (which introduces the song).^[7]

Director Will Gluck wrote the scenes to play "Pocketful of Sunshine" by Natasha Bedingfield because his daughters used to play with a magazine advertisement for Verizon Vcast which featured the song.^{[citation needed]}

Gluck's favorite movie is Ferris Bueller's Day Off and has multiple homages to it in the film (Olive's shower mohawk, "never had one lesson"), among many other John Hughes references.^[8]

Gluck credits Stone with improvising the line about being a "Gossip Girl in the Sweet Valley of Traveling Pants".^[9] According to Royal, although the word "fuck" appeared 47 times in the original draft and was written as an R-rated comedy, all occurrences were cut from the final film. However, director Will Gluck shot two versions of many scenes, both with and without the coarser language.^[7] Although the film was cut down for a wider audience, the film still obtained a 15 rating in the United Kingdom.^{[10][citation needed]}

This movie was not shot on film, but rather on Panavision's Genesis and later filmized.

The entire film was shot in Ojai, California. Not a single movie set was used; even the houses in the movie belong to Ojai residents. The school used as "Ojai North High School" in the film is Nordhoff High School, also located in Ojai, California.

Release[link]

Easy A had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.^[11]

[edit] Home media

Easy A was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc on December 21, 2010.^[3] The DVD features a gag reel, Emma Stone's audition footage, an audio commentary with director Gluck and Stone, and previews (including Burlesque, which features Cam Gigandet and Stanley Tucci, Beastly, and The Social Network). Blu-ray exclusive bonus features include: The Making of Easy A, The School of Pop Culture: Movies of the '80s, Vocabulary of Hilarity and a trivia track.

Reception[link]

Box office[link]

The film opened on September 17, 2010 and grossed $6,787,163 on its opening day and $17,734,040 in its opening weekend, placing second behind The Town on both figures, and already making back more than double the film's slim $8 million budget. This was in line with expectations from Sony of an opening weekend take of around $15 million.^[1] The film has grossed a total of $58,401,464 in the United States and Canada plus $16,057,768 in international markets for a worldwide total of $74,459,232, earning its budget back more than nine times, making it a huge financial success.^[2]

[edit] Critical response

The film received mainly positive reviews from critics, with many praising Stone's performance. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a "Certified Fresh" rating of 85% based on 175 reviews, with an average score of 7.1/10 and the consensus being, "It owes a huge debt to older (and better) teen comedies, but Easy A proves a smart, witty showcase for its irresistibly charming star, Emma Stone." ^[12] Another review aggregator, Metacritic, assigned the film a weighted average score of 72% based on 34 reviews from mainstream critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[13]

In his review, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert awarded the film three and a half out of four stars, writing, "Easy A offers an intriguing middle ground to the absolute of sexual abstinence: Don't sleep with anybody, but say you did. It's a funny, engaging comedy that takes the familiar but underrated Emma Stone and makes her, I believe, a star."^[14] Richard Corliss of Time Magazine named Emma Stone's performance one of the Top 10 Movie Performances of 2010, saying "Stone lends winning maturity and a gift for making sassy dialogue sound natural. This 22-year-old is an actress-personality — a star — around whom Hollywood could build some pretty good movies".^[15]

John Griffiths from Us Weekly gave the movie two and a half stars out of four; he praised Stone, stating that "With her husky voice and fiery hair, Stone is spectacular, echoing early Lindsay Lohan", but also added that "The story is thin, and the laughs meager".^[16]

Awards[link]

[edit] Soundtrack

The soundtrack was released on September 14, 2010, and is available on iTunes. It features records from Jessie J, OneRepublic, Lenka, Natasha Bedingfield, Kardinal Offishall, the Dollyrots, Cary Brothers, Death Cab for Cutie and The Pussycat Dolls.^[23]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Easy A

• Official website
• Easy A at the Internet Movie Database
• Easy A at AllRovi
• Easy A at Box Office Mojo
• Easy A at Rotten Tomatoes