All I Wanna Do
BY
Haley Mlotek
On a forgotten jewel from the golden age of teen cinema.
All I Wanna Do plays at 7 Ludlow from August 11 as part of Back to School with Kirsten Dunst.
Out of the three titles that her screenplay ended up having, writer-director Sarah Kernochan hates the one that I know best. Strike! was the name of the film that played in theaters near my house, as a Canadian pre-teen in 1998, and so Strike! was what I saw. Only later in life, when I tried to find out if anyone else had ever seen this movie, did I realize that it was the reason why I’ve always thought of myself as being a Kirsten Dunst fan in a way that only a select few are: at 13, I understood she was a movie star before she really was.
Whenever I would try to describe Strike!, almost no one seemed to even know what I was talking about, proving its status as a forgotten jewel in the late 1990s golden era for teen-girl cinema. Later, I learned to ask after the American title, All I Wanna Do, or, for those who locate their interest in movies through the knowledge of business, production, gossipy intrigues over fights for power and creative control, or all the above, The Hairy Bird. The title Strike! “never made sense to me,” Kernochan said in a 2019 interview with The Flashback Files. “Makes it sound like a working-class political movie.”
Well, she has a point. The strike that happens as the movie’s third act is a hard-won battle against an entrenched establishment, but it is hardly the struggle for rights between classes that the cry typically conjures. On the other hand, under any name this is a political movie—one about the politics of gender, education, and class, and a movie that had to fight its own battle to be seen at all.
The plot of the movie that I saw, for once lucky to have my movie options beholden to Canadian film distributors, is anything but simple. The year is 1963. Gaby Hoffmann’s Odette, a 16-year-old who prefers to go by Odie, previously attended a co-ed school, until her parents found her stash of contraceptives and deduced her plan to lose her virginity to her hot, kind of dumb boyfriend. When she arrives at Miss Godard’s Prep School for Girls, her distaste towards its hermetic environment is immediate. After she meets the headmistress Miss McVane (Lynn Redgrave), an obviously formidable opponent, and is given the compulsory tour by the prissy Abby (Racheal Leigh Cook, displaying perfect instincts for just how high she should keep her tiny nose), Odie is ready to hate everything and everyone at Miss Godard’s. “I was going to warn you about your roommates,” Abby yells as Odie walks away, flaunting her rejection, “but now I don’t think I will.”
All I Wanna Do (1998)
The roommates in question—named ludicrously, but not improbably, for boarding school girls—are Verena von Stefan (Dunst) and Tinka Parker (Monica Keena). Both are loud, funny, and in love with breaking the rules that dictate their every waking moment. Determined to have a good time despite the school’s attempts to control them, their two closest allies are Momo (Merritt Wever), a devoted science fanatic with designs for M.I.T., and Tweety (Heather Matarazzo), a happy-go-lucky, boy-crazy bulimic.
Though Odie tries to avoid getting too involved with anything related to school—“Dear Mother and Father, today I was elected to the Security Council of the Model UN,” she relays, flatly, in a voiceover narrating her letters home, “I’m so popular I got to play Russia”—she cannot help but be drawn in by the odd quartet of friends. Though insulted by Odie’s initial coldness, they are won over by her gift for language and her confidence as a speaker. “Up your ziggy with a wa-wa brush!” she yells angrily when she catches Tinka and Verena rifling through her things, causing them to laugh so hard they break a bed frame. When Odie dispatches Abby by insulting her and then barking in her face until she leaves the room, Verena is genuinely delighted: “That was breathtaking,” she says. “You should be a speechwriter or a demagogue or something!”
The quartet indoctrinate Odie into their secret society, the D.A.R. “Oh, I’m not a Republican,” Odie says when they first invite her. “I should hope not!” Verena responds. Having found the cafeteria staff’s secret storage unit of canned goods, the group hide out there, eating cold Chef Boyardee ravioli: the acronym, to them, stands for Daughters of the American Ravioli. You see, they have goals that extend beyond the expectations for women of their class and generation, they explain to Odie: unlike everyone else, who will undoubtedly go on to live in the same kind of house with the same kind of husband and the same kind of car and the same number of kids, they want careers. Verena plans to edit her own magazine, Tinka aspires to be an “actress/folk singer/slut,” Momo will of course be a scientist, and Tweety wants to be a psychiatrist. They promise to help each other, and are disappointed (yet resolute) when they learn Odie’s mission is to finally have sex with her boyfriend. “Your great ambition is to lie with your legs in the air like a bug?” Verena yells, before promising to help regardless.
Even after the five girls, who have the perfect levels of differences between them, decide they are best friends, there is much more to this story. A lecherous teacher must be gotten rid of, by any means necessary; a group of teenage boys they refer to as “townies,” led by Snake (Vincent Kartheiser), develop obsessional crushes on the girls and try to break into the school to see them; and finally we reach the true action of the film, the discovery that the board of trustees plans to merge Miss Godard’s with St. Ambrose, an all-boys school, to avoid near-certain financial ruin. Upon hearing this news, the girls immediately fall apart and against each other: Momo and Verena set out to destroy the plan, while Tinka, Tweety, and Odie are each alternately realistic about this development and horny for boys to join their everyday lives. Along the way, there are insults, silent treatments, elaborate schemes, some light nudity, a disastrous attempt at contraceptive foam, and an ungodly amount of vomit in a public setting.
Kirsten Dunst, Heather Matarazzo, and Racheal Leigh Cook on the set of Strike! (1998).
Dunst is not the film’s main character, but she is the star. The gang’s unofficial leader, Verena is a natural at getting her own way and then making others believe that it was their idea; Odie tries to insult her at one point by referring to her as a “totalitarian,” with all the gravitas of someone who has just learned that word. Verena might be a bit of a baby dictator, but who could stay mad at her petite fascist leanings when she’s got those dimples? She delights in asserting her own natural-born authority over the hollow, unearned authority of her teachers and parents, flaunting her disrespect like an accessory. When Verena tries to excuse her tardiness to class with a one-word reason (“Cramps,” she shrugs), her politics teacher asks where she thinks the country would be if President Kennedy blamed all his problems on cramps. “Possibly,” she deadpans, “history has already been influenced by his bad back.”
Strike! made a formative impression on me when I first saw it; I have since rewatched it a dozen times, perhaps more, and can recognize exactly how and where I convinced myself I should be just like the Dunst onscreen. I was at an age where all I wanted to be was not-myself. Verena is clever and conniving, making backroom deals with school staff by trading her allowance for cigarettes; she is bored by idiot boys before she accidentally falls in love with one of them; she steals pills from her parents, has a filthy mouth, and the prettiest long blonde straight hair. One can see how I decided she was the perfect role model.
But then, there was also the point of the movie itself: Kernochan describes the story as being about “the incursion of the penis in young girls’ lives” to explain exactly why the drama is concentrated around the planned merger, and why Verena’s arc mirrors that of the headmistress McVane’s. They are each other’s foils: they want the same things and fear the same outcome but cannot ask for them in the same ways. It is McVane who finally cracks, smashing a teacup against the wall when she’s told the boarding school she’s decided to make into a haven from everything she hates about the outside world must become just another miniature mirror of it.
Kernochan’s own pedigree is an impressive one: she attended Rosemary Hall, an all-girls boarding school that did, after she graduated, merge with a nearby boys school. The student body was made of daughters who would grow up to be successful in various avenues, buoyed by the then-radical politics of second-wave feminism (among them was Glenn Close, who provided vocals for the movie’s theme song). In Peter Biskind’s 2004 book Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film, Kernochan says that she wrote the screenplay that she called The Hairy Bird, wanting, she told Biskind, to fulfill a promise she had made to her former classmates: “I’m going to make a movie about us for our daughters.”
Kernochan directed it herself in the town of Whitby, Ontario, during the summer of 1997. Produced by Robert Lantos and Alliance Atlantis Films, it cost only $1.5M all in. Right after wrapping The Hairy Bird, Harvey Weinstein was in Toronto to visit the set of 1998’s 54 (another of my frequent Blockbuster rentals) and bought David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) from Lantos. “Perhaps as an afterthought,” Biskind writes, Weinstein also bought The Hairy Bird for $3.5M. “Just as Harvey looked at 54 and thought, Saturday Night Fever, he probably looked at The Hairy Bird and thought, Porky’s!”
Bring It On (2000)
In the book, Kernochan is one of the few people at the time willing to go on the record about what it was like working with Weinstein at the apex of Miramax’s control over the production, distribution, and promotion of movies. She recalls a grotesque scene when he attended a preview screening and immediately demanded cuts, the first in what would be a long line of attempts to mold the film into something more palatable to teenage boys, who Weinstein insisted would be the ticket-buyers for the movie. When Kernochan, Lantos, and some of the other producers seemed hesitant, Weinstein exploded, yelling “Fuck you” at Kernochan directly, before turning on the producers: “You may be willing to roll over for these filmmakers, but I don’t roll over for filmmakers. That’s why I’m so successful and you’re not. I’m so fucking rich, and you know what, I own your fucking movie now,” he said. “You don’t want to play ball with me? I’ll put it on TV. Because it’s just another Canadian made-for-TV movie. See you on TV, Robert.”
Kernochan tried to keep up with Weinstein’s demands while staying committed to her original vision. Weinstein seemed prepared to bury the film entirely, believing it was too between demographics to ever find a market— “too much of an art film for a commercial audience, and too much of a teen comedy for the art audience” is how Biskind puts it—but Miramax had contractual obligations to follow through with it. Weinstein had promised an opening of 1,600 theaters. Taking offence at the original title, a slang term for a penis, the film was renamed Strike! and opened in Seattle in 1998 in one theatre.
Then She’s All That opened in January 1999, before grossing over $100M worldwide. Racheal Leigh Cook was suddenly a box office draw; Dunst, too, was about to start filming Bring It On (2000), and The Virgin Suicides (2000) was soon to premiere at Cannes, the two films that would transform her from popular child actress into bona fide star. Hoping to capitalize on the pair’s recent successes, Weinstein asked Kernochan and Nora Ephron, one of Strike!’s executive producers, to write a new voiceover for Hoffmann’s character, an attempt to stitch together a story across some of the stranger cuts that he had insisted on. Still, even after all that, Weinstein refused to pay to open Strike! in New York and LA like Kernochan wanted. She then spent all her savings to open the movie in New York—$80,000 on advertising in the New York Times, and the rest on the actual screens. It was re-titled All I Wanna Do and ran for one week in March 2000.
Dunst is a nominally political actress, balancing the odd contemporary expectation that famous people should exert some influence with her natural grace for public attention. In the last presidential election, for example, she endorsed Bernie Sanders. Even more memorable were her grimaces during Lars von Trier’s anti-Semitic remarks at the press conference for Melancholia (2011) at Cannes—a masterclass in silently communicating personal distance from a public catastrophe. In looking back at the movies that she made before her fame ascended in the mid-aughts with the Spiderman franchise, one can also spot a tendency to accept roles in politically inflected satires: Tracy Lime, the child actress pretending to be a victim of a phony war in Wag the Dog (1997); the ditsy teenager who accidentally becomes half of the whistleblower duo known as Deep Throat that help bring down Nixon’s presidency in Dick (1999); even the perky yet beleaguered cheer captain of Bring It On is dealing with, if you think about it, an attempted coup and the attempt to broker a peace deal with a rightly aggrieved rival faction. Meanwhile, her beloved underdog beauty pageant contestant in Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) pretty much survives an assassination attempt.
I wonder if there is something about Dunst and her qualities as an actress that suggest conflict and its resolution are completely dependent upon her—a sunny disposition cut from steel, a winner in all the respects that matter most. For the Dunst completist, Strike! is neither proof of some quality not-yet seen or a key to some locked treasure; that is already obvious. Anyone lucky enough to watch will find a movie and a performance that is just wonderful to watch a dozen times over.
Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer based in Montreal.
All I Wanna Do (1998)
