All I Wanna Do | |
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Poster featuring the title Strike!
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Directed by | Sarah Kernochan |
Produced by |
Nora Ephron (exec.) Ira Deutchman Peter Newman |
Written by | Sarah Kernochan |
Starring | |
Music by | Graeme Revell |
Cinematography | Anthony Janelli |
Production
company |
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Distributed by |
Buena Vista Pictures (United States) Alliance Atlantis (Canada) |
Release date
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Running time
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97 minutes |
Country | Canada United States |
Language | English |
All I Wanna Do, also known under the titles The Hairy Bird in Australia and Strike! in the United Kingdom and Canada, is a 1998 comedy film written and directed by Sarah Kernochan. It stars Kirsten Dunst, Gaby Hoffman, Monica Keena, Heather Matarazzo and Rachael Leigh Cook in an ensemble cast as students of the fictional Miss Godard's Preparatory School for Girls, and Lynn Redgrave as the school's headmistress. The film takes place in 1963 and focuses on several students' plotting and sabotage of a proposed merger for the school to go coed.
The film's setting, in 1963, is based loosely on Kernochan's experiences at Rosemary Hall around that time. Filming was done in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at the Trafalgar Castle School in Whitby. The song "The Hairy Bird" plays during the film's end credits; it was written by Kernochan and sung by a group which includes Kernochan and five of her Rosemary Hall classmates, including Glenn Close.
The film takes place at an elite New England boarding school in 1963 before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Odette "Odie" Sinclair (Hoffmann) is forcibly transferred by her parents to Miss Godard's Preparatory School for Girls after her parents find out that she has planned to have sex with her boyfriend, Dennis (Matthew Lawrence). Upon arrival to the school, which is run by the headstrong headmistress Miss McVane (Redgrave), Odette is introduced to her roommates, the intelligent and charismatic Verena von Stefan (Dunst) and the promiscuous Tinka Parker (Keena). Verena and Tinka are the school's primary troublemakers; both mock an uptight hall monitor named Abigail "Abby" Sawyer (Cook), who has a penchant for tattletaling, and Verena regularly buys cigarettes from a lunch cook and is constantly late for classes.