Rip-Off

Rip-Off (1971)

THEY'VE GOT IT MADE...(well, almost) a rock band, a commune...AND THE GIRLS

Best friends Michael, Steve, Cooly and Richie are seniors at a large Toronto high school. Foremost on their minds and that of many of their classmates are what they are going to do this upcoming summer and beyond. They don't want to waste away the summer much like they did this past summer. Mike is being pressured by his parents to go to university following graduation from high school, although Mike himself is unsure if that's what he wants to do. Other ideas they discuss are to tour with their band, Arctic Madness, or to start a commune on a five hundred acre parcel of wilderness property outside of Timmins that was deeded to Mike. As the end of the school year approaches and these successive ideas come and fall by the wayside, the four come to a realization of what their future together holds

Date of release
1971-09-30
TMDB
4.0 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 29m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Donald Shebib

Casting

Interesting facts

Rip-Off: Trying to Find Your Own Thing is a 1971 Canadian slice of life teen comedy film directed and co-edited by Don (Donald) Shebib, written by William Fruet, and produced by Bennett Fode, about the misadventures of four high school friends in their graduating year who make valiant but unsuccessful attempts to impress their school friends, especially the girls, trying filmmaking, forming a rock band, and starting a commune on a piece of land inherited by Michael. The film features a score by Gene Martynec and Murray McLauchlan.

Production

Director Donald Shebib recounted in a 2013 interview how the distributor of his first feature, Goin' Down the Road, "wanted to make a film about teenagers, so I just sat down and started to write it. It was very rushed."

The film's working title was Mike and Sue. In an interview which took place prior to the release of his later film, Between Friends, Shebib was asked if he was consciously posing "socially-loaded questions", Shebib answered: "Partially, yeah. Rip-Off was one case where it was stronger." In the same interview, Shebib remarked: "Bill Fruet writes dreadful women", and that he had to "fight" with him to make Sue more "sensitive".

Wyndham Wise says the film was made on a strict budget with a "skeleton crew" of nine. Cinematographer Richard Leiterman said the film was a little over budget, but stayed on schedule. Leiterman originally made documentary films.

The film was shot on 35mm (Kodak 5254), mainly in Toronto. Michael (Dunky)'s home is in the North York suburb of Don Mills, while the plot of land left him by his grandfather is near Timmins. All the locations were real, something Leiterman did not care for because of the tendency to want to rush.

Around the time of composing the score for Rip-Off with Gene Martynec, composer Murray McLauchlan released his first album, Songs from the Street (True North Records) in the summer of 1971.

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

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