As the co-writer of deeply loved comedic baubles Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, Steve Pink helped locate
the unique humor in both violently clashing cultures and slacker ethos, and he
says you’ll see that same idiosyncratic stamp of personality on Accepted, a high school laffer that
serves as his directorial debut.

The film centers on Bartleby “B” Gaines (Justin Long), an
inveterate dreamer and graduating senior who’s on his way to amassing a perfect
collection of college rejection letters. (“We establish that he’s a very clever
guy,” says Pink, “but someone who applied it in ways that aren’t traditional —
like he didn’t write for the paper, but did his own ’zine.”) To avoid the
embarrassment of confessing to his parents that he didn’t get into school, B
drafts several of his oddball friends from similar, college-less circumstance
and creates his own university. Calling in some friendly favors, he has techie bud Sherman (Jonah Hill) craft a web site, secures some free space courtesy of a local
abandoned mental hospital and also convinces Sherman’s burnout uncle (Lewis
Black) to pose as the dean.

And voila! The South Harmon Institute of Technology
is born. B and his fellow South Harmon classmates soon realize they’ve done
their jobs too well, though, as dozens of other college rejects from out of
town start showing up for classes. Under the scornful eyes of the privileged
students and faculty from a neighboring college, B and his friends forge ahead
with maintaining a functioning but inherently fake university.

Pink says he was lured behind the camera by the film’s
unique potential (it was written by Mark Perez, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage),
and that he wanted to bring a touch of reality to the adolescent experience and
inject Accepted with some character
and energy from classic teen films of yore. Bartleby is somewhat similar to Ferris
Bueller in that he’s an inventive and otherwise directed kid with a healthy
disregard for institutions — someone who wants to see what it’s like to live
outside the carefully prescribed borders of adolescent life.

In Ferris Bueller,
notes Pink, the joke is that he’s teetering on the edge of this “gateway evil,
when he just really wants to take off a day of school. In this movie it’s
similar: if you don’t go to college, you’re a lost soul. Your very happiness is
threatened by virtue of the fact that your success is put squarely in doubt.
Will you be a successful, productive member of American society if you don’t
get a college degree, or one that’s prescribed by a mainstream institution? If
you have a massively entrepreneurial or artistic spirit or something, then yes
of course you will, but that’s not what kids are trained. Kids are tracked to
go to college to get a degree to get a good job so they can be happy. OK,
there’s nothing wrong with that value, but that can’t be the only value.”

Those expecting Advanced Level Buffoonery or an audit of
Comedic Archetypes 101, meanwhile, might be disappointed or at least surprised
by the film. “I didn’t want to do the ‘hair gel goofballs,’ you know? I tried
to find people who didn’t seem to fit anywhere else instead of construct
deliberately a bunch of freaks,” says Pink. “I love movies where, even inside
the genre, you love all the people. The bad genre movies, to me, are the ones
where all the characters are in service of the gross-out joke or the wacky set
pieces that they engage in. I want kids to identify with people in the movie
and also have it be really, really funny.” If Accepted is accepted, Pink might emerge as the new John Hughes. Accepted is slated to open August 11, from Universal.
For a review of the film, meanwhile, click here.