Ray Pride

It's a Tuesday afternoon, the middle of the Toronto International Film Festival, Jack Black's the star of "The School of Rock," the fest's surprise across-the-board favorite, and slumping down in a stiff-backed hotel chair for an interview, he looks as if he has been calm inside the storm for weeks on end.

He's tired but not winded, wringing laughs from the simplest intonation--at least two dozen equally funny variations on "rock" and "rawk"--the actor-musician had been given a gift by a longtime neighbor. While he's held forth memorably as a slacker id monster in movies like "Jesus' Son" and "High Fidelity," screenwriter Mike White thought no one had written the Jack Black vehicle.

"When I first approached him about the role, he said, 'It sounds great,' but by the time I had completed it everyone in town had a Jack Black screenplay," White, whose intended directorial debut instead went to 43-year-old veteran Richard Linklater, says. "This was so specifically for him I felt that if he didn't do it, it wouldn't be done. I got to watch him go from a bit player to someone who was headlining movies. I had written a part for him in 'Orange County,' but I don't think he was used to his fullest potential. I felt that there were so many colors to his comedy and I knew that someone was going to come along and capitalize on that. I decided that I might as well beat them to the punch."

""I've never done a movie someone wrote for me before," Black says. "When Mike called me to say, 'Hey, I'm thinking of writing this movie for you, that might as well have been the Coen brothers calling to say they've got fuckin' 'Barton Fink 2' for me."

But the writer of "Freaks and Geeks" and the writer-costar of "Chuck and Buck" pulling off a kids' movie? And a hilarious, heartfelt one as well? "The problem is 'kids' movie' has a stigma to it now, that automatically means 'cheesy sellout,'" Black says. "Kids' movies are so lame now, other than some cartoons. There hasn't been a good one for, like, twenty years. Back in the day, 'Bad News Bears,' 'Willy Wonka,' these are just great movies. And I think it's because of censorship and the super-tiptoeing we do around kids, not wanting to damage them or expose them to anything that might harm their psyche, when actually we're robbing them of funny stuff. I mean, 'Bad News Bears' had Walter Matthau falling around drunk, and kids survived watching that. This is not fucking 'Kindergarten Cop,'" riffing on Schwarzenegger's peanut-butter accent. "It's got subtle, subversive messages in there that are funny and cool. You don't see that [nowadays], not just with kids' movies, but with movies."

Black plays Dewey Finn, a club band guitarist who flubs an audition and winds up becoming a substitute teacher, where he subverts the curriculum for his 10-year-old charges with a dose or two of Sabbath and Zeppelin. As he tells his class one morning, "I'm hungover. Anyone know what that means?"

"You're drunk?" a moppet asks. "No," Dewey replies with Black's inimitable timing. "It means I was drunk yesterday."

Some writers have shorthanded Black as a twenty-first century John Belushi. But he knows the loud, big man shtick goes only so far.

"I don't know, I'm 34 now. I don't know how long I can be, y'know, an adolescent thirty-something. At some point you get too old to be the party animal." Another interviewer had asked him when he'd branch out. "He started making me paranoid. I'm thinking, 'Maybe I should start looking for my thinkpiece.'" (Maybe the first time in history "thinkpiece" has been a funny word.)

Richard Linklater brought his love of music to the table, alongside the Tenacious D frontman's love of "the metal." "He's a little more evolved than me with his musical taste. I'm all heavy metal, prog rock and he's more the obscure punk-rock aficionado." Linklater enlisted Jim O'Rourke to work with the kids in the cast, who are all classically trained musicians. "He was grrrrrrrreat," Black says, rolling the word like Tony the Tiger. "The kids kind of thought he was a nerd though. [O'Rourke's] kind of like a mad scientist, and a couple of them didn't see the genius part. It was cool because we all got to rehearse in the Sonic Youth recording studio. That was pretty rad."

Tenacious D will tour soon, and hope to follow "The School of Rock" with "Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny," which Black describes as "a fictional biography about our quest to become the greatest band on Earth." Are Tenacious D serious or is it all a big joke? "We are sincere, sort of," he says. "I actually tried to rock sincerely in high school in a band and was a miserable failure. Me and Kyle [Gass] figured out the key was not take it seriously and, while embracing the rock, also kind of make fun of it."

And he remains willing to mock his own looks, his own avoirdupois. "I'm not a studly looking guy, but there's so many of those guys in Hollywood that the competition is just super intense. Meanwhile, people who look like me figure there's no point in trying. But in fact, there's lots of roles for them. And I'm scooping them all up." A smile, a pause, another self-deprecating joke. "I keep trying to find parts closest to me till I get to the bottom of me--and I'm almost there."

"School of Rock" opens Friday.

(2003-10-02)

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