20 facts you might not know about 'School of Rock'

Mike White provided the screenplay for School of Rock, but he did more than simply write the film. He also plays the real Ned Schneebly, the substitute teacher that Black’s Dewey Finn pretends to be.

White and Black were friends who also worked together on Orange County, which White wrote prior to School of Rock. White would then Nacho Libre, which starred Black as well. The two had a production company together called Black and White, but it shuttered in 2006.

In this movie, Black plays a musician with a love of classic rock. White actually had no interest in that style of music. He wrote the film with Black in mind for the lead role and catered it to Black’s own history performing rock music as one-half of Tenacious D.

White got the inspiration for School of Rock in part from the Langley Schools Music Project. Basically, back in 1970s, a teacher in British Columbia had recorded a bunch of kids at four schools in his district singing choral versions of pop hits of the time. It came out…kind of spooky. The records were not notable at the time, but in the early 2000s, they were discovered, released, and quickly became a cult object. This happened in 2001, and School of Rock would be released in 2003.

As a movie about a teacher who turned his class into a band, there are a ton of child actors in School of Rock. One of them would end up skyrocketing to fame. Miranda Cosgrove made her acting debut as Summer Hathaway in the movie, and she would eventually become well known as the titular star of iCarly.

Dewey Finn tries to stage dive at one point in the movie, but it turns out disastrously. Black added this into the movie based on a real occurrence he had witnessed. Apparently the same thing happened to Ian Astbury, lead singer of the band The Cult.

Director Richard Linklater made use of several New York City locations in shooting the film. That includes the school that stands in for Horace Green Prep. The location for that school was the Main Hall building of Wagner College on Staten Island.

Schools are littered with hallways typically, but instead of moving around the location, Linklater and company decided to just stay put and change the look around them. They shot every single hallway scene in the film in the same hallway.

Jack Black is the kind of comedic performer who likes to riff, which is obvious if you’ve ever seen his movies or seen him on a late-night talk show. In fact, he came up with all of the nicknames he uses for the students in the film.

Linklater was approached to direct School of Rock, and he was interested. However, there was one thing he wanted. Namely, all the kids in the film had to actually be playing their instruments. To make that happen, Linklater did casting across the United States looking for kids who were talented musicians, as opposed to focusing on finding actors.

Cosgrove’s Summer doesn’t get into the band because she can’t sing, butchering the song “Memory” from Cats in the process. In reality, Cosgrove had the ability to sing. She was given a quick “bad singing” lesson in order to nail what they were looking for in the movie.

Finn shows a photo of the band that he and Ned had been in together before Ned went “straight” and got his teaching gig. Also in that photo? None other than Linklater himself.

Dewey is able to pose as Ned for a long-term substitute because the real teacher slips in the shower. That’s not exactly cheery, but originally, the story was darker. In an earlier version of the screenplay, Dewey hit the teacher with his car.

One of Black’s costars in School of Rock is Joan Cusack, who plays the principal at Horace Green. Black and Cusack had both previous been in High Fidelity together, where Black plays an employee at the main character’s record store.

The director really wanted to use “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin in the film and on the soundtrack. However, getting Led Zeppelin to sign off on one of their songs being used is rare. In an attempt to curry their favor, Linklater show a video of Black asking the band for permission to use the song with extras cheering and chanting behind him. He then sent the video to the surviving members of Zeppelin. It apparently worked, as the song is in the film.

After debuting No. 1 in the domestic box office, School of Rock would stay in the top 10 for six weeks. The movie was made on a budget of $35 million and made $131.3 million worldwide. It was the highest-grossing “music-themed comedy” ever until Pitch Perfect 2 overtook it in 2015.

Black took home Best Comedic Performance at the MTV Movie Awards for his turn as Dewey Finn. He also received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor – Comedy or Musical, but lost to Bill Murray for Lost in Translation.

In 2008, murmurs of a sequel to School of Rock began to emerge, with Black, White, and Linklater all in talk to return. Purportedly, it would be called School of Rock 2: America Rocks and feature Black’s Finn taking summer school students on a road trip. However, in 2012, Black said that he, White, and Linklater could never lock in on a vision for the film and that it was likely never going to happen.

If they can turn Beetlejuice into a musical, they can obviously turn a movie like School of Rock into a musical. It wasn’t just adapted for Broadway. Andrew Lloyd Webber did the adaptation, with Broadway staple Alex Brightman playing Dewey. All in all, it was a success. It was nominated for four Tonys, but it didn’t win any.

Nickelodeon adapted School of Rock into a TV show several years after the movie came out. The TV version focused more on the kids, unsurprisingly, and ran for three seasons from 2016 through 2018.