They wrote a script named "Junior High School," which would be a musical about young love, bitter jealousy and cheating on exams, and would be shot entirely on the campus of a junior high school. Their film schools, which annually finance a certain number of student films, liked the screenplay but declined to back it because (a) it would be relatively expensive, and (b) Nankin and Wechter were just in their second year of school.
So Nankin and Wechter made the film themselves. It eventually cost around $25,000, which they scrounged from their parents, from bank loans and from the American Film Institute. And it was a terrific movie. I saw "Junior High School" for the first time last March, at the USA Film Festival in Dallas, where it delighted its audiences. It's won all sorts of film festival awards, and played here commercially not long ago at Facets Multimedia.
And it caught the attention of Ron Miller, the executive producer at Walt Disney Productions, who fulfilled all young filmmakers' dreams when he called the two into his office and, point blank, offered them office space, a salary for six months and a promise to seriously consider producing whatever project they came up with.
It is here that the story grows temporarily disappointing. Wechter and Nankin came up with "The All Night Treasure Hunt," a comedy about a scavenger hunt. Re-titled "Midnight Madness" to avoid confusion with last year's dreadful "Scavenger Hunt," it's now in limited neighborhood release. (But it doesn't carry the credit "Walt Disney Productions" because it's rated PG and has a few non-Disney touches such as a college kid diving into a vat at a brewery.)
The movie is a big disappointment to me, because I liked "Junior High School" so much. It's a pleasant, well-meaning little comedy, and it's obviously trying for the same kind of innocent, sophomoric humor that was so charming in "Junior High School." But it just doesn't have the same magic. A lot of its jokes miss, the pace is slow, there are too many characters to keep track of and there's an unpleasant streak of nasty humor directed at characters who are fat, ugly, old or otherwise out of step with Southern California physical ideals.
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