Samuel L Jackson names his most overlooked movie: “Kicked to the curb”
In 1997, after years of stealing the show in supporting roles, Samuel L Jackson tackled his first leading man part. Unfortunately, the movie tanked at the box office and was met with mixed reviews. However, in the years since its release, it has developed a cult following among audiences who like their films to be risky endeavours that live on the edge of good taste. The director of the movie has also gone on record to say the movie suffered because it was too bleak, while Jackson believes it’s his single most overlooked picture.
Two years before Jackson starred as a teacher named Trevor Garfield in the film, its script was written by a Los Angeles substitute teacher. Scott Yagemann was spurred into writing the screenplay, a thriller about the fracturing mind of an educator who is stabbed by a student in a tough Brooklyn school by real events that he had experienced while teaching in Los Angeles. In fact, he said he wrote the script out of desperation to shine a light on the plight of public school teachers in rough neighbourhoods.
“90% of what you see in One Eight Seven either happened to me or to other teachers,” Yagemann wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I have always thought of my screenplay as a wake-up call, like a mirror held up to our school system in an effort to expose its worst elements.”
He added, “I wanted to write a cautionary tale about a good man who is destroyed by his environment. A story like this is not always pleasant to watch.”
Yagemann described a harrowing scenario in which a student threatened to murder him and his family. Naturally, he called the police, and a week later, he received a call from the District Attorney asking if he was willing to testify against the student in court. Surprised the case had progressed so far, he only then learned why the DA was so keen to prosecute—the same student had stabbed a teacher’s aide the year before.
“This young man was in my classroom for 15 weeks, and no one had ever told me that he had stabbed someone,” Yagemann raged. “I should have been told.”
One Eight Seven, therefore, which told the story of a teacher so traumatised by his experiences that he eventually starts killing students, was always going to be a hard sell. Audiences and critics ultimately tend to prefer uplifting tales of teachers overcoming the odds to reach difficult students, and this was the exact opposite. Perhaps this is why its director, Kevin Reynolds, told Den of Geek, “The picture didn’t make a dime.”
The film’s ending, which shows Garfield committing suicide during a Russian Roulette game with a student before a disclaimer flashes up that reads, “A teacher wrote this movie,” was a particularly bitter pill for viewers to swallow. “That’s why it didn’t work so well,” Reynolds admitted. “People…that’s not the message they wanted to hear.”
The movie’s failures must have always rankled Jackson, especially because he considered it to be a brave attempt to broach an uncomfortable societal topic. When asked by Vulture which of his more underrated films deserved a second look, he immediately answered, “One Eight Seven, for sure. One Eight Seven was a serious subject that got kicked to the curb for some reason. I remember they were trying to get us on Oprah to talk about the plight of teachers in schools. And she was busy promoting Beloved, so she wouldn’t.”
Jackson concluded by bitterly noting that the film was ahead of its time because “now prophetically teachers are getting jacked in schools every day. This movie spoke directly to that”.
