When films premiere at festivals, it’s not unusual for those movies to go through some fine-tuning before they make their way to general audiences. Maybe a little color-correction still needs to be done—a small tweak here or there is necessary. Most times, you wouldn’t notice the differences. But occasionally, the changes are more substantial. 

Last year, the Bill Skarsgård action film “Boy Kills World” debuted in Toronto’s Midnight Madness section. But when it hits theaters this weekend, it won’t be the same movie, especially in one important regard. Originally, Skarsgård’s deaf, mute character had an inner monologue supplied by the voice from a video game (provided by Skarsgård himself). But the new version replaces his voiceover with that of “Bob’s Burgers” star H. Jon Benjamin.

“I’m a massive fan of [Benjamin’s] and he was actually on top of my list for years,” “Boy Kills World” director Moritz Mohr explained recently. “When we got him it was just a dream come true. In the process of editing the movie, we did two things: We had H. Jon Benjamin and we had Bill, and we just sort of tried it out. For the screening at TIFF we decided that we would try out Bill, and we realized that it’s an amazing performance but it’s more on the dramatic and emotional side. Afterward, we were like, ‘Jon’s funnier.’”

Mohr is hardly the first filmmaker to have a change of heart after a festival premiere. Although hardly exhaustive, I decided to spotlight some of the most memorable instances of movies that went through radical changes in the wake of their debut. To be clear, I’m not including any instances in which a studio or producer demanded cuts—these alterations were all (at least as far as we know) initiated by the director. You’ll notice some commonalities in these stories: For one thing, filmmakers frequently blamed the changes on not being properly finished with their movie before the high-profile premiere. Another is that they found the festival screening to be incredibly enlightening in terms of what wasn’t working with their film. Sometimes, the changes helped—other times, it didn’t make a difference. But for those who saw these pictures at a festival and then caught them at the multiplex, it felt, in some ways, like a brand-new film.

“Apocalypse Now” (1979)

This article includes several stories of filmmakers rushing their movie to completion in order to screen them at a prestigious international festival. But none has been as infamous as Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” which was presented as an official work-in-progress when it unspooled at Cannes. 

When it played at the festival, the hallucinatory Vietnam War epic was approximately 140 minutes long and contained no credits, an indication of how last-minute the film’s “completion” had been. Also, it appears the movie’s opening was slightly different: Writing from the festival for The New York Times, Susan Heller Anderson noted, “It has an overture, in quintaphonic sound, of jungle noises—birds singing, mosquitoes buzzing—blended with the whir of helicopters and electronic music.” Does that mean the Doors’ “The End” appeared in a later cut? Perhaps: In 2014, an unnamed “eyewitness” to the film’s making told The Hollywood Reporter, “Francis was drunk, desperate, and rummaging around in garbage cans of film saying, ‘I’ve gotta find an opening scene for my movie!’ The ‘trim’ barrels were filled with film you threw away. Garbage, basically, thrown-away film turned upside down and used to space out the sound on the soundtrack. … [O]ne said ‘The End,’ the Doors music. I said, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if we started the movie with ‘This is the end’ at the beginning?’ So that’s a case of destiny or just chance that helped make the beginning of the movie.”

Coppola, who won the Palme d’Or for “Apocalypse Now” (shared with Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tin Drum”), continued to fiddle with the movie after the festival, a rare example of a theatrical version being longer than its initial cut, clocking in at 153 minutes. Of course, this film has never seemed “finished” considering that, in 2001, Coppola released “Apocalypse Now Redux,” which was 202 minutes long—only to be replaced by 2019’s 183-minute “Apocalypse Now: Final Cut.” With hindsight, it’s now apparent that Coppola’s Cannes cut was just one of many attempts by this passionate director to realize his vision—a pattern he repeated with some of his other films, such as “The Cotton Club” and “The Godfather Part III.”

“The Brown Bunny” (2003)

In the early 2000s, Vincent Gallo was a rising indie auteur. After working with respected filmmakers like Mira Nair and Abel Ferrera, the actor delivered his feature directorial debut with 1998’s well-regarded “Buffalo ‘66.” Then came the follow-up: the story of a lonely man (played by Gallo) who travels cross-country, haunted by the memory of a former lover (Chloë Sevigny). “The Brown Bunny” was to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Official Competition, alongside heavy hitters like “Dogville,” “Elephant” and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Distant.” 

The reaction to the film was notoriously poisonous, the most memorable negative reaction coming from Roger Ebert who, at one point during the screening when Gallo’s character was on a bike, started mockingly singing “Raindrops Keep Fallin” on My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Gallo found out about Ebert’s response, declaring that he hoped the critic got colon cancer. “I am not too worried,” Ebert wrote later. “I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than ‘The Brown Bunny.’”

When the dust settled, Gallo re-edited “The Brown Bunny,” trimming it down from two hours, which was its length at Cannes, to about 90 minutes for its theatrical release. (Or did he? In 2018, the actor-filmmaker claimed he’d lied about the Cannes runtime. “The running time I filled out on the Cannes submission form was arbitrary,” he wrote. “The running time I chose was just a number I liked. … [T]he cuts I made to finish the film after Cannes were not many.”)

Whatever changes were made worked for Ebert, who ultimately gave the new version a positive review. “The film’s form and purpose now emerge from the miasma of the original cut, and are quietly, sadly, effective,” Ebert wrote. “It is said that editing is the soul of the cinema; in the case of ‘The Brown Bunny,’ it is its salvation.”

“2046” (2004)

Wong Kar-wai’s perfectionism and tinkering are well-known. His 2013 film “The Grandmaster” exists in at least three versions—although one of them was due to Harvey Weinstein—but his sequel to the beloved “In the Mood for Love,” “2046,” was an especially fraught proposition. Indeed, its 2004 Cannes premiere had to be postponed to the very end of the festival so that Wong could buy himself a little extra time. Never mind that, by that point, he’d been shooting and editing the project since 2000. “I think it was like being in jail for four years,” the director later declared. “No one thinks it is fun at that moment, but maybe 10 years later, for some romantic reason, they will think of it as fun.”

Opinions at Cannes varied wildly on “2046,” which continues the story of Chow (Tony Leung), the lovelorn protagonist who is now without his soulmate (Maggie Cheung), but Wong wasn’t done yet. After the festival, he reinserted scenes that had been cut out and re-edited other sequences. (At the time, there were also stories that he had gone back and reshot as well, but those rumors proved to be unsubstantiated.) The final version never enjoyed the reputation of “In the Mood for Love,” but it remains an enrapturing experience—in part because Wong’s edits helped make its elliptical storyline a little more crystalline.

“Southland Tales” (2006)

Not many films star Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and Wallace Shawn, but Richard Kelly’s ambitious sophomore effort featured them all to tell a story of a near-future in which society is lurching toward becoming a dystopian hellscape. (Such things happen when, in his film’s alternate reality, American cities have been pulverized by nuclear strikes.) 

“Southland Tales” made its debut at Cannes, Kelly rushing to complete his dark comedy/sci-fi parable in time. (In fact, some of the effects shots weren’t completed.) But he was giddy about what he’d pulled off. “It’s a big, epic, political cartoon told with subversive humor,” Kelly said at the festival, later adding, “Well, maybe it’s like someone took mushrooms and read the Book of Revelation and had this crazy pop dream.” 

But for Kelly, “Southland Tales” soon became a nightmare. Clocking in at about 160 minutes, the film received mostly damning reviews, forcing the writer-director, who had established himself as a hot new voice in indie cinema thanks to “Donnie Darko,” to rework the story. Scenes were rearranged, Timberlake (whose character narrates the film) redid his voiceover, and the running time was trimmed to about 145 minutes. For Kelly, the experience was akin to a bad test screening—albeit at the most prestigious festival on the planet.

“Usually when you have a movie, at that point you take it to Sherman Oaks and show it to a bunch of teenagers at [a test] screening,” he said. “We took it to the Cannes Film Festival and showed it to the toughest audience in the world. Was that a good idea? I don’t know. But it happened, and you just sort of take the best from it.” “Southland Tales” bombed at the box office, halting Kelly’s meteoric rise, but the film has earned a cult status—and his original “Cannes cut” still plays on occasion in revival houses.

“Outlaw King” (2018)

“I wasn’t really ready, to be honest,” David Mackenzie told IndieWire of his historical Chris Pine action-drama “Outlaw King,” which premiered as the opening-night film at Toronto. Finished just a few days before that gala presentation, the violent portrait of Robert the Bruce sparked two major reactions from critics: (1) “Holy cow, Pine did full-frontal nudity in the picture;” and (2) “This movie feels way too long and convoluted.” Mackenzie, who had previously directed “Starred Up” and “Hell or High Water,” didn’t care if people online got weird about seeing his star’s anatomy, but he was determined to trim his bloated epic.

In the span of about two weeks, the director trimmed approximately 20 minutes out of “Outlaw King.” And as part of his focus on tightening the pacing, he cut battle scenes and anything else that seemed extraneous. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that I had a chance to go back in there and not be stuck in a position where the film was rushed for a festival and that was that,” he said in that IndieWire interview. “That would have been terrible. It feels like a privilege to be able to completely control your own destiny on a film of this scale.” Mission accomplished: The re-edited “Outlaw King,” while hardly a masterpiece, is a gritty, gripping action film. And for the immature who just wanted to see Chris’ Pine … well, that survived Mackenzie’s cuts. 

“Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (2022)

Four-time Oscar-winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu has wowed audiences with his operatic, humanistic portraits, but along the way his bombastic approach has earned him plenty of detractors, too. No wonder, then, that when “Bardo” was unveiled at Venice, the brickbats were out for the Mexican filmmaker’s sprawling, self-indulgent examination of a Mexican filmmaker (Daniel Giménez Cacho) in the midst of an identity crisis. Even more annoying for his critics, the film was close to three hours long.

Like its ghostly protagonists, Netflix’s “Dead Boy Detectives” is caught between two worlds—or rather, IPs. Initially conceived as a spinoff of then-HBO Max’s cult DC anti-hero series “Doom Patrol” (in which the characters, all played by different actors than here, guested in a backdoor pilot of sorts), the show was sold to Netflix—presumably as a symptom of the streaming world’s increasing contraction. Lucky for them, Netflix already has a “Sandman” adaptation on the books and considering the Dead Boy Detective Agency kicked off in those comics, it was a no-brainer to set this series in the same realm. The results are a clumsy, if occasionally charming, child of its two parent shows: eerie and contemplative like “Sandman,” but full of the same crassness and irreverence that made “Doom Patrol” so endearing. 

The titular private eyes are a pair of English schoolboys, Edwin Paine (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), who become ghosts after dying tragically at the same boarding school 70 years apart. Edwin, a closeted gay boy essentially hate-crimed into the underworld, died in 1916; Charles, a Thatcher-era British punk, shifted the mortal coil in 1990. Nonetheless, the pair found each other, forged a deep friendship, and decided to stay on this mortal plane to make something of their spectral existence. In their case, they start a detective agency in London—one centered on solving supernatural crimes. 

In the premiere episode, Charles and Edwin happen across a young psychic named Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson), whom after holding at bay the demon ex-boyfriend possessing her, decides to join the team as their living liaison. Not long after that, though, showrunner Steve Yockey (alongside Beth Schwartz) plops the central trio in the sleepy seaside town of Port Townshend; there, Edwin is trapped in the town by an enchantment courtesy of libertine demigod Thomas the Cat King (Lukas Gage), who bids him stay in the town until he either counts every cat in town or, well, finds some other way to satisfy him. 

Thus, we have our structure for a nice, budget-conscious season of television, keeping them in a single small location as Charles, Edwin, and Crystal work to free Edwin from the curse, all while solving a new case of the week. On top of that, they must stave off both the forces of Hell, who want the Dead Boy Detectives back in the afterlife where they belong, and a vengeful witch named Esther (Jenn Lyon), who wants revenge on the boys for foiling her plans in the pilot.

If that feels overstuffed, that’s because it kind of is: “Dead Boy Detectives” works best when it zeroes in on its central ensemble and the quirky, oddball ghost cases they must solve each week. One week, they’ll free a quirky Japanese girl named Niko (Yuyu Kitamura) from a pair of shady sprites (naturally, Niko later joins the team as ditzy comic relief). The next, they’ll try to help a pair of dead frat bros figure out which spurned college girl did them in. 

It’s weirdly funny to see a year mentioned in the title of “Art College 1994,” an animated Chinese college dorm rom-com about young people and their greatest loves, themselves. You could easily imagine this feature-length cartoon taking place in another time or place without losing much of either its specificity or universality. Swap out a Nirvana poster or a multi-tiered tape-deck stereo, and you’ll still have an unsentimental and quietly unsparing portrait of idealistic undergrads at a pivotal moment when they start to realize how small they are in the world that awaits them after graduation.

Director/co-writer Liu Jian’s affection for his impulsive young characters adds a welcome variation to the usual pre-graduation coming-of-age story’s concerns for life after college. It’s funny because it’s true, and not only to its young subjects’ inconstant values. These art students, like most art students, take themselves too seriously and also live in a beautiful oasis that fosters tendencies that, to anyone else, must seem indulgent. “Art College 1994” is unassumingly sweet because it’s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels.

“Art College 1994” is a time capsule about that shimmering moment in time when you think you know exactly what you’re talking about without knowing much at all. Liu (“Have a Nice Day”) shows an unusual patience and fascination with his characters, whose overlapping stories tend to meander more than they progress. There’s some intrigue about who will go where after school and who’s dating whom, making fair weather partners out of musical students Hao Lili (Zhuo Dongyu) and Gao Hong (Papi) and fine arts majors Zhifei (Shaoxing) and Xiaojun (Dong Zijian). There’s also a frequently rotated cast of supporting characters who receive and project their own ideas back at these four core main protagonists.

Liu focuses more on his characters’ academic setting since his blinkered twenty-somethings only think they know what they want and only on their own vaguely personal terms. Jokes about the art world and its young, impressionable supporters abound. Some are more amusing than laugh-aloud funny, though even that makes sense since most people in this movie don’t seem to have an outdoor voice.

A museum curator’s “manifesto” is greeted with shrugs—“I know every word here, but I don’t understand a thing.” A bemused student teases a well-traveled artist from Taiwan (renowned filmmaker Jia Zhangke) with a quasi-Daoist question—“Is the moon more beautiful abroad?”—and is instantly shut down by an embarrassed administrator: “Please don’t bring up things unrelated to today’s topic.” Art is burned for freedom and portfolios’ sake, and love matches are pursued and rescinded with startling regularity. Also, really, you’re engaged to him—you, so soon??

As we enter the warmth of spring, we are one step closer to the return of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) — this year celebrating its 58th edition. As one of Europe’s oldest film festivals, nestled in a verdant, picturesque, mountain spa town in the Czech Republic, the festival has always been a powerful launching pad for Eastern Europe’s biggest cinematic names. What I’ve also come to love about the festival, apart from its robust programming out of Cannes, Sundance, Berlin, and SXSW, along with the aforementioned top European titles that premiere there, is the illuminating retrospective blocs. 

In 2023, in fact, the festival paid tribute to Japanese auteur Yasuzō Masumura — bringing the filmmaker’s works to light for a new generation of moviegoers. This year, the KVIFF classics return with a new slate of definitive Czech cinema and other cinematic landmarks tied to the centenary of Franz Kafka’s passing.

The retrospective entitled “The Wish To Be a Red Indian: Kafka and Cinema” will feature highlights such as Orson Welles’ “The Trial,” Ousmane Sembene’s “The Money Order,” Pavel Juráček’s “Joseph Kilian,” Jan Němec’s “Metamorphosis,” Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant,” Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo,” Steven Soderbergh’s “Kafka” and “Mr. Kneff,” and more. 

“For decades, Kafka’s oeuvre has functioned as a continuing provocation to filmmakers,“ explained KVIFF’s artistic director Karel Och and the festival’s consultant Lorenzo Esposito (both co-curated the programme). “It is as if he were slyly challenging them to attempt to capture as authentically and intensely as possible the elusive nature of his formulations, of his narratives, of the realities he has crafted and the feelings of apprehension he elicits, yet also of the comic situations he has created.”

Kafka was born in Prague, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (following World War I, with the birth of Czechoslovakia, he became a Czech citizen). Before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 40, he penned groundbreaking novels like Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, along with the masterly novella The Metamorphosis. Psychologically rich and brimming with acute symbolism, heightened to greater intensity through a keen sense of environment, physicality, and dark fantasy — you can see why one hundred years since his death, Kafka remains a major inspiration for filmmakers in particular.

Actor and producer Terry Carter has died in New York City. The former co-star of TV’s “McCloud” and “Battlestar Galactica” was 95. Carter’s death follows on the heels of Black male stars Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree, Carl Weathers, Lou Gossett, Jr., and athlete-actor O.J. Simpson. Carter, born in Brooklyn in 1928, was older than them all. He was of Afro-Latin descent, and his given name was John DeCoste. In a predominantly Italian community, his childhood best friend grew up to be jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Carter also played some jazz piano as a young man.

The sixth annual Cinema Femme Short Film Festival will celebrate its second year of in-person events and screenings from April 25th to May 2nd. The festival’s ethos centers on uplifting up-and-coming female and non-binary filmmakers by platforming their work and facilitating connections with industry professionals. 

Hosted at Chicago’s beloved Music Box Theatre, twenty short films have been selected for screening and will be viewed across three programs. Program 1, “Dear Body,” examines the intersection of self and body. Program 2, “Sincerely Yours,” is a collection of films reflecting personal history and biography. And “P.S.”, the final program, is an assemblage of diverse genre films, from the bone-chilling to the absolutely hilarious.

The fest will kick off with live Q&A events with filmmakers Haroula Rose and Lori Felker, as well as the Chicago premiere of Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’ documentary, “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood,” which premiered at Sundance earlier this year. There will also be a wealth of virtual events over the course of the fest, including a producer panel that will be streamed live via Cinema Femme’s YouTube channel. Below is an interview with Cinema Femme founder and editor Rebecca Fagerholm about the festival’s inception, community, and future. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Can you discuss the inception of the Cinema Femme Festival and the central tenets of its creation?

In 2018, Cinema Femme started as a magazine, and we were actually print and online. The whole thing of our magazine was elevating underrepresented voices, specifically women and non-binary people’s voices. So, we had essays written about films, as well as interviews with women and non-binary people in the industry. We noticed that our audience was mostly emerging filmmakers in the community, and I was fortunate to be able to speak to some top filmmakers in the industry. I saw that these emerging artists are craving our content because they’re not seeing it anywhere else. It made me think that it would be amazing to have something where I could connect these emerging artists to seasoned professionals, and that’s what started the idea of the mentorship program. And then I was like, maybe we could do a festival where we screened those artists’ films and have the mentorship be the grand prize. 

Many festivals include shorts programs, but so much publicity and attention in the film sphere is feature-length focused. What made you decide to center the festival on shorts?

I think short films are so special. When I started the festival, I thought this is a great showcase for emerging artists to show their style. They’re putting their creative voice out there to get heard in a short period of time so if people want to mentor or support them, they can see their calling card. But then, over time, I’ve realized how powerful the short film medium is. 

“Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” was a film we both really loved out of Sundance this year. This will be its Chicago premiere! Why was it important to you to platform it in this year’s festival? 

I was just like, ‘People have to see this film.’ It was my favorite film of last year and it’s so personable and joyful and emotional. It’s a communal thing, which I think is very connected to Cinema Femme. I think it’s a special film that will stay with people. In fact, I asked Anna Hints to do an intro video we could play before the film, and she sang us an Estonian song! I’m so excited to play it. Cinema Femme has always had an international reach as well, so I think it’s special to bring something from another country here.

The variety of seasoned professionals on the roster is exciting. You’re in contact with other filmmakers, but this year, you’re also introducing a producer panel. What will that look like? 

It’s really exciting. It’s like one of those things where, again, I am fortunate to talk to some of the top people in the industry, and I hear all these filmmakers saying, “I wish I could find a female producer or non-binary person producer” because there are so many men. So I was like, you know what? We need a panel where we can elevate these producers and also talk about the realities that we’re in right now with the film industry, the scrappiness of being a producer, and also how these emerging filmmakers can get connected. I’m excited! We’ll have Rhiannon Jones (“Shiva Baby,” “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” “Tendaberry”), Natalie Metzger (“Greener Grass,” “Thunder Road“), and Oluwaseun Babalola (“Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches,” “United Shades of America”). So it’s a really good mix of different genres and types of film producers, so it should be interesting!

It’s cool how the Cinema Femme Fest is as much about the work of the creatives as it is about networking. It’s all very community-oriented, and I’m curious how you’ve seen the festival impact the Cinema Femme community over time.

If we want to go back to the mentorship program, one of our first mentee winners, Gabriela Ortega, got matched with Laura Moss, a horror director who did “birth/rebirth” last year. And Gabriela has been skyrocketing. She’s been at Sundance now and Tribeca and doing stuff for Disney Plus, and she screened her first show at our festival. To see her rise like that and have the people in our community elevating her as she goes on her journey … that’s really exciting! That’s been my motivation from the beginning with this festival: to get these emerging artists to have sustainable careers and have the community behind them.

This year, the mentorship program is a retreat. How is this different from years past, and what will this change look like? 

In past years, it was the mentor meeting the mentee in person or via Zoomfor 30 minutes minimum a month for six months. They could decide where they want to take it. The mentor could read over scripts of the mentee, give feedback, or get involved as much as they want. Like Haroula Rose, who we’re highlighting this year as our tribute filmmaker, she was a mentor for our first year and she actually went to London to visit her mentee, which I think is so cool. The retreat was recommended by Melora Walters, one of our mentors for the last two years, and I thought it was a great idea. 

Galena, Illinois is a place I love, and it’s a great place to reboot, you know? If we could have a weekend where the mentors and the mentees could get together, they could get to know each other more. There’s a workshop element, but we can also do outdoor activities together, like hiking with goats! It’s so cool, and I think it’s good because we’re getting back to in-person now, and it’s better, I think, to have something more contained in a short period of time rather than like a half-hour minimum once a month for six months. This gives the mentors a chance to concentrate more with the mentee because we’ll all be in the same place.

It’s admirable that Cinema Femme covers the bases from idea conception through final criticism through this festival, the mentorship programs, and the publication itself. What goals do you have for Cinema Femme moving forward?

I would like to do more community, in-person events. There was a period of time when I thought we should have Cinema Femme filmmaker meetups in all the cities around the world. Filmmakers from L.A. and New York come here, and I hear, “We don’t have this kind of community,” so I feel like having spinoffs of our Cinema Femme-type spirit events and maybe even screenings in other cities.

There’s an ongoing theme in Alexander Payne’s films — the people we think are the antagonists aren’t actually bad people; we simply force ourselves into the corner of seeing them that way. From the simple-minded and unfortunately coiffed future in-laws in “About Schmidt” to the adulterous characters in “Sideways” and “The Descendants,” to the animosity of the student-teacher relationship at the heart of “The Holdovers,” these films all feature cases of the protagonists incorrectly viewing someone as their nemesis. These perceived enemies eventually become characters with whom we deeply empathize and who (mostly) learn to empathize with each other. But “Election” is the exception, and it’s Payne’s only film that concludes with unresolved animosity. If anything, that animosity is given a renewed vigor, ending with Jim McCallister (Matthew Broderick) rhetorically asking, “Who the f*ck does she think she is?”

The “she” is Tracy Flick, a preternaturally ambitious teenager who dared to run for high school class president and tried really, really hard to win. In the 25 years since “Election,” Tracy Flick (as played by Reese Witherspoon) has become one of the most infamous and oft-referenced characters in modern cinema, and her name has almost become a loaded word, stigmatizing ambitious and over-qualified women ever since. 

Filmmaker Alexander Payne (and his writing partner, Jim Taylor) adapted the screenplay from an unpublished-at-the-time novel by Tom Perotta, who drew inspiration for his story from three disparate sources. First, the 1992 Presidential election and how the race was upended by a third-party candidate (Ross Perot). Second, a contemporaneous news story out of Wisconsin, where four school administrators conspired to block a 17-year-old from winning the election for Homecoming Queen because she was pregnant. (Reading the actual news story, you can immediately see how it inspired a movie.)

But Perotta’s third source of inspiration might be the most instructive one for the film’s enduring relevance. He had been teaching at Harvard and Yale, and he noticed the young women in his classes were far different from those he grew up with. Because, unlike his contemporaries, these women were raised by feminist mothers. As Perotta told writer Brian Raftery (in Raftery’s excellent book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.), these women “were going to conquer the world, and I could see they made people uncomfortable.” 

So Perotta created Tracy Flick, the ultimate generator of that discomfort, and Jim McCallister, the perfect vessel of mediocrity to receive it. And who better to play the man who feels threatened by an over-achieving high schooler than an actor who came to fame as a high schooler who skips class? (Though, amusingly, Payne claimed he had never seen “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” before casting Matthew Broderick as Jim McCallister.)

But it’s Reese Witherspoon’s performance as Flick that dominates the film, as well as the discourse around it. How should we feel about Tracy Flick? Is she a sympathetic character? Did she deserve to win the election? 

In thinking about those questions, it’s worth comparing responses to Tracy Flick with another lead character in a high school movie from late 1998: Max Fischer from “Rushmore.” Both characters had a ceaseless ambition to lead and control everything in their limited domain. But in Max’s case, it’s both played and received by audiences as precociously endearing (albeit comically misguided). In Tracy’s case, it reads as repellent self-importance. (“Repellent” is even the word Witherspoon used to describe her own performance upon finally seeing the finished film.) The teenage boy is seen as harmless and pathetic, while the teenage girl is a dangerous threat to the status quo. 

A few months back, I saw a Twitter prompt asking people what movie makes for the best test of someone’s media literacy. The most popular responses were “Fight Club” and “The Matrix,” but my answer is “Election.” And the fact that all three movies are from 1999 almost deserves its own think piece. I love all three films, but I sometimes wonder about the potential utopia we could live in if wrong readings of them didn’t seem to break so many brains.

The elephant in the room when talking about “Election” is Hillary Clinton, in that comparing her (and others) to Tracy Flick over the years has become a sort of code for calling a woman a robotic, success-obsessed ambition machine who needs to stay in her lane. Like Jim McCallister, people saw Clinton’s Flick-like ambition as almost an existential threat, something that had to be stopped at all costs. And we see this outsized reaction to female ambition repeated over and over with women who reach the top of American cultural relevance: whether it’s Kamala Harris and Taylor Swift, AOC and Beyoncé, Elizabeth Warren and Lady Gaga, or Serena Williams and Anne Hathaway, they all seem subject to constant barrages of scrutiny that men in comparable positions rarely receive. They’re all Tracy Flicks in a world of Jim McCallisters. 

Of course, Jim McCallister believed he had an altruistic reason for bringing Tracy Flick down. She had been having an affair with another teacher, Dave Novotny, who happened to be Jim’s best friend, and it’s evident in the film that Jim blames Tracy for seducing Dave into this tryst. We know that’s not how the imbalance of teacher-student power dynamics works and that Tracy never could have truly consented to the affair. But as so often happens in cases of sexual misconduct, the woman gets the blame anyway, so Jim sets out on his mission of stopping Tracy from winning the election for class president. (That he recruits an opponent to run against her incapable of articulating a coherent thought—star quarterback Paul Metzler [Chris Klein]—only further invites revisionist comparisons to Hillary Clinton.)

Political scientist Wallace Stanley Sayre once said, “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics because the stakes are so low.” Sayre was dead on, but the sad fact is that 17-year-olds cannot understand small stakes. The person who should know how small the stakes are in a high school student government election is Jim McCallister. But he brought the viciousness anyway. That so many people watch “Election” and not only sympathize with Jim’s viciousness but seem to view it as the correct—even necessary—response to Tracy’s try-hard ambition is, ummm, not great, Bob. 

Paradoxically, these wrong readings of the film are part of what keeps it so relevant. “Election” is impeccably crafted (Payne and editor Kevin Tent spent over a year cutting the film). Still, it wouldn’t have remained so omnipresent in our political discourse if “Tracy Flick” hadn’t become such a ubiquitous shorthand to unfairly describe certain types of women. As Reese Witherspoon said in an interview on the Criterion Collection edition of the film, “It’s become the archetype of female ambition, when there are seven other colors of the rainbow of female ambition.” Witherspoon also adds that she struggled to get work for a while after the film because studio executives saw her as “shrill,” a misogyny-coded adjective that has dogged and haunted countless ambitious women. 

On November 7, 2016—the eve of the Presidential election, when it looked almost certain that Hillary Clinton would enjoy a landslide victory—the New York Times ran an opinion piece called “The Triumph of Tracy Flick?” The piece talked about Flick as “a kind of test for American attitudes toward women who dared to aim high,” questioning whether the seemingly inevitable ascendancy of the first female President (one who went to Yale, just like the students that inspired Tom Perotta to create Tracy Flick in the first place) meant “the specter of Tracy Flick was vanquished.” But, of course, November 8, 2016, didn’t go as expected. Even a New York Times piece that correctly identified “the specter of Tracy Flick” hovering over Hillary Clinton still failed to understand just how viscerally people reacted to that specter.