Perrotta for President

Tom Perrotta just might be one of the hottest men in Hollywood--and chances are, he hasn't even been there.

Perrotta's novel Election, a scathing satire of American politics packaged in the metaphor of a high school election, is the inspiration for Alexander Payne's new film starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. The film has opened to phenomenal reviews and is poised to be one of the summer sleepers at the box office.

I recently spoke with Perrotta, a former expository writing preceptor at Harvard, about his new film, Hollywood and...freshmen.

THE HARVARD CRIMSON: What did you like most--and least--about teaching expos at Harvard?

Tom Perrotta: Oh. [laughs softly] Well, I actually really liked teaching Expos at Harvard 'cause the students are great. They actually do the work you ask them to do and some of them really surprised me. Harvard is a great place to teach. I also taught at Yale before I taught at Harvard and the experiences were similar. I mean, Expos is hard work--for teachers and for students. So in a way it's been nice to have a break from that this past year because it gives me more time to do my own writing.

THC: Do you plan on ever teaching Expos again?

TP: I do, yeah.

THC: How involved were you in actually making decisions during the scriptwriting and productions process?

TP: I've had a couple of books turned into screenplays at this point and basically you have no rights once you allow your book to be optioned. But in this case, I was on very good terms with the producers. So I was able to read the drafts and talk to the screenwriters, but it was much more in a consulting role than an "I don't like this, I don't like that" kind of thing. People were curious about my response, but I don't actually think my response response changed their plan.

THC: When did all this first happen?

TP: It was actually a relatively short time span from book to movie. I think it was about three and a half years ago that I gave the book to the producers and they gave it MTV. MTV financed the development, and they brought director Alexander Payne on board. It was November of 1995 when it started and they were inproduction by November of 1997.

THC: There are so many layers to your story--Tracy Flick's, her advisor's personal problems, the satiric elements, etc. Where did the idea actually originate?

TP: There were two interesting ideas really. In this case, I can't remember which story--the teacher's or the students'--xame first. I was writing the students' story as an attempt to recreate the 1992 presidential election in a high school so that was a fairly allegorical and satirical decision. The teacher's story was much more a serious character study and that came from an anecdote I read in the paper--I believe it was a teacher in a Southern state who had burned a box of votes for prom queen because the students had elected a pregnant girl. And didn't approve of that so he decided to--woops!--burn the votes. And he was sort of defiant asserting his right to establish a moral example. I was interested in this type of character--a teacher like me who wasn't grounded in religious or moral certainty. These two storylines then intersect to give a more public view of high school--high school as a microcosm.

THC: What's your personal perception of high school and the way teenagers treat each other?

TP: That's a good question. I think high school is a place where people create their identities--and I'm trying to say this the right way--I think that teenagers are a lot smarter than adults give them credit for. I also think that they aren't any more innocent than adults. Maybe that doesn't need to be said when we are dealing with the stuff we are dealing with now, but I felt there's something wrong with the idea that teenagers are morally pure and corrupted by hypocritical adults. And I think Election shows us how kids have to deal with moral dilemmas just as difficult as the ones adults deal with.

THC: Which writers inspire you?

TP: I'm a great admirer of Tobias Wolff, who was actually a teacher of mine. He writes so well about the pain of growing up. But where he writes about characters under extreme pressure, I tend to write about characters who are overtly normal.

THC: What was your first thought when your name flashed across the screen?

TP: I thought about how amazed the person who wrote the book five years ago would have been if he had been told this was going to happen. At that point, I was unemployed and ghostwriting teen horror novels for money. I thought I was coming to the end of my rope as a writer and I would have to give up my dream. But things have turned around since them....