Pleasantville
Short description
David is a shy teenager in the 1990s who escapes into marathon viewings of Pleasantville, a black-and-white 1950s television sitcom set in a flawless small town where nothing ever goes wrong. His twin sister Jennifer is his opposite: popular, confrontational and thoroughly plugged into the modern world. Through a strange turn of events, both are pulled into the show itself and become part of its cast, living inside the tidy routines and cheerful neighbours they had only watched from the sofa. Jennifer's blunt, contemporary manner quickly disturbs the town's placid order and gradually introduces colour into its grey existence, while David finds himself drawn into the lives of the people around him.
Gary Ross wrote and directed the film, his first time in the director's chair; he went on to make Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games, Free State of Jones and Ocean's Eight. Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon play the twins, with William H. Macy, Joan Allen, Jeff Daniels and J.T. Walsh among the townspeople. Around 50 cast and 52 crew members are credited.
Produced by New Line Cinema with Larger Than Life Productions and Juno Pix, the film cost about 60 million dollars and took roughly 50 million worldwide, so it did not recover its budget in cinemas. Viewers rate it at 7.5/10 on IMDb from 143,000 votes and 7.3/10 on TMDB from 1,966 votes, while critics were more favourable still.
What's left behind the scenes
- The book "The World of Art" by Edward Bissel, which David Wagner brings to Mr. Johnson, never existed. It is a prop created solely for the film.
- Filming took place in California from March 1 to July 2, 1997.
- Upon entering Pleasantville, Jennifer becomes a Mary Sue. This is the name given to a character that the author endows with exaggerated, unrealistic virtues, abilities, and luck. It is believed that the author identifies with their Mary Sue (Marty Stu for male characters) and embodies their complexes from real life.
- In the bowling alley scene, the operator uses a technique known as the “Dutch angle.” It was very popular in the era of black and white cinema and was used, for example, by Alfred Hitchcock. The technique is used to convey a character’s emotional turmoil or tense state – the camera looks up at them from below, while the horizon is tilted to one side.
- The film is dedicated to the mother of director Gary Ross, actor J.T. Walsh (1943-1998), and camera assistant Brent Lon Hershman, who died in a car accident during the filming of "Pleasantville."
- The film's promotional campaign included a contest in which winners were promised a trip to Pleasantville, Iowa (the smallest town with that name in the United States).
- The character played by Tobey Maguire retells teenagers stories from "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain, 1884) and "The Catcher in the Rye" (J.D. Salinger, 1951). These are precisely the works that top the lists of banned literature in most educational institutions in the United States.
- Gary Ross's directorial debut.
- Mr. Johnson’s music machine is a 1952 Seeburg M100C, known among collectors as the “Happy Days” machine. This exact model appears in the opening and closing shots of episodes of the ABC-TV television series.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
