10 Things I Hate About You
1999 · Gil Junger
On the first day at his new school, Cameron instantly falls for Bianca, the gorgeous girl of his dreams. The only problem is that Bianca is forbidden to date until her ill-tempered, completely un-dateable older sister Kat goes out, too. In an attempt to solve his problem, Cameron singles out the only guy who could possibly be a match for Kat: a mysterious bad boy with a nasty reputation of his own.
dir. Gil Junger · 1999
The Taming of the Shrew relocated to a Seattle high school named, with a wink, Padua — the sharpest entry in the late-nineties wave of teen Shakespeare that Clueless made possible. Screenwriters Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith perform the crucial surgery on the source: the shrew is no longer tamed but understood, and Kat Stratford — Julia Stiles, ferocious and wounded — becomes a riot-grrrl heroine whose contempt for the social ladder is the film's moral center. Around her, Gil Junger marshals a murderer's row of about-to-be-famous faces, none more magnetic than Heath Ledger in his American breakthrough, whose bleacher-storming serenade of 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You,' marching band in tow, remains one of the great romantic gestures in the teen canon. Shot largely at Tacoma's castle-like Stadium High School, the film has the architecture of a fairy tale and the mouth of a screwball comedy. Its title poem, read aloud in a classroom, still lands like a dare: sincerity, played absolutely straight, right at the moment irony ruled.
Lines of influence
- Clueless (1995) — Established the template the McCullah–Smith screenplay copies: transpose a canonical literary text into fluent contemporary high-school vernacular (Austen's Emma), turning a period comedy of manners into idiomatic teen slang.
- The Taming of the Shrew (1967) — The direct source play in modern-dress form — the younger-sister-gated courtship and the suitor paid to woo the 'shrew,' which the screenplay converts into Padua High's 'nobody dates Bianca until Kat dates.'
- His Girl Friday (1940) — Supplies the screwball register of courtship-as-verbal-combat: rapid, overlapping, antagonistic dialogue as the primary romantic idiom, which Stiles and Ledger play out as sparring.
- Say Anything… (1989) — Model for the grand diegetic musical serenade as romantic gesture (Lloyd's raised boombox), reworked here as Patrick's stadium-bleacher PA-system 'Can't Take My Eyes Off You.'
- West Side Story (1961) — Precedent for relocating Shakespeare into contemporary American youth idiom and staging its emotional beats through musical performance rather than verse.
- Heathers (1988) — Source of the acidic register of teen social-hierarchy contempt and the smart, wounded heroine who regards the clique system with open disdain — theme/social-hierarchy-contempt in caustic form.
- Roxanne (1987) — Modern-dress literary-courtship adaptation (Cyrano) built on the go-between / paid-intermediary deception that structurally mirrors Patrick's bankrolled wooing.
- Pretty in Pink (1986) — The Hughes ensemble grammar of caste-stratified high school (richies vs. outsiders) and the wounded-outsider heroine whose social geography the film inherits wholesale.
- She's All That (1999) — Same 1999 teen cycle transposing a literary source (Pygmalion/My Fair Lady) into high school via a bet-driven makeover romance — the parallel 'boy manipulated into courtship' engine.
- Cruel Intentions (1999) — The same-year classic-text-into-teens wave: Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses recast as prep-school seduction, sharing the source-adaptation-revision strategy.
- Never Been Kissed (1999) — Same late-nineties teen-comedy cohort built around a witty, wounded female lead whose sincerity finally defeats the school's performed cool.
- O (2001) — Extends the Shakespeare-in-high-school adaptation model directly, relocating Othello into American prep-school basketball with the tragic jealousy plot intact.
- Get Over It (2001) — Heir to the formula, staging A Midsummer Night's Dream as a high-school play-within-the-film and mining the same literary-source-meets-teen-romance comedy.
- She's the Man (2006) — The most direct heir: Twelfth Night transposed to high-school soccer, replicating the Shrew-in-high-school method of gender-combat courtship from a Shakespeare comedy.
- Easy A (2010) — Carries forward the source-revision plus sincerity-against-irony wit, framing The Scarlet Letter through a literate, self-aware teen heroine-narrator descended from Kat's acerbic intelligence.
- Ghost World (2001) — Extends the ferocious-wounded, riot-grrrl-adjacent outsider heroine — Enid's caustic anti-conformist stance is the Kat Stratford mode pushed toward deadpan alienation.