Getting Straight

Getting Straight (1970)

America's children lay it on the line.

Graduate student Harry Bailey was once one of the most visible undergraduate activists on campus, but now that he's back studying for his master's, he's trying to fly right. Trouble is, the campus is exploding with various student movements, and Harry's girlfriend, Jan, is caught up in most of them. As Harry gets closer to finishing his degree, he finds his iconoclastic attitude increasingly aligned with the students rather than the faculty.

Date of release
1970-05-13
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (37)
Runtime
2h 4m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Director
Richard Rush

Casting

Interesting facts

Getting Straight is a 1970 American satirical and romantic comedy-drama motion picture directed by Richard Rush, released by Columbia Pictures.

Production

In February 1967, Mike Frankovich, head of Columbia Pictures, announced he had bought the rights to the novel Getting Straight by Ken Kolb.

Richard Rush described the original novel as "a nice novel about a graduate student taking his orals to get his teaching credentials. The administration of the college is like a medieval torture chamber, and the oral exam is like the Salem witch trials. He barely escapes with his sanity."

The novel was published in early 1968. The Chicago Tribune called the book "very funny".

Director Richard Rush had impressed with his AIP films Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and Psych-Out (1968) and was signed to an independent deal with Columbia. They offered the book to him, and he said he would do it if they let him make a contemporary film about kids at college rebelling against the draft and the war. He wrote a treatment and they eventually agreed. Rush's signing was announced in June 1968.

"To me the whole 'revolution' is not a political revolution but a personal one", he said. "It is the result of the inability of an entire generation on a personal, individual level to accept the disparities in the morality at the foundation of our society."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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