Here’s a Halloween story with an unexpected connection to public education.
If you’ve ever watched the closing credits of the 1996 horror classic “Scream,” you might have noticed an unusual message:
“No thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa City School District governing board.”
Wait. What?
The story takes us well outside Orange County, to the Northern California city of Santa Rosa, where director Wes Craven and his production team hoped to use Santa Rosa High School as the fictional Woodsboro High.
The filmmakers believed they had secured the location, but district officials had concerns.
The movie’s violent content had stirred controversy in the community, and school officials worried that filming would interfere with classes and final exams. Despite the prospect of $30,000 to $50,000 in filming revenue, the school board voted 4-1 in April 1996 to reject the request.
“It wasn’t a dollar issue,” school board president Frank Pugh told the Los Angeles Times. “At one time there were as many as 10 days that they were going to film at the school.”
The filmmakers weren’t happy.
Production moved to the Sonoma Community Center, a former elementary school, and “Scream” went on to become a box-office hit that December.
But the filmmakers apparently hadn’t forgotten the school board.
In a 1997 L.A. Times article, executive producer Marianne Maddalena acknowledged that the end-credit message was a response to the dispute.
Now, as Halloween approaches and “Scream” nears its 30th anniversary, the story offers a quirky reminder that even routine school board decisions can have an unexpected afterlife.
For Santa Rosa’s school board, it was a decision about using a school campus. For the filmmakers, apparently, it was something to scream about.