Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Dead Poets Society

Before we get started, I feel a bit of a warning is in order. This is going to be a difficult movie for me to write about. We will inevitably have to discuss suicide, due to the film’s subject matter, my own personal relationship to it, and, of course, the tragic death of its star, Robin Williams. In addition, I am fully aware that a lot of people feel very strongly about Dead Poets Society. If anything, those feelings have likely deepened in the wake of Williams’ death. As you will see, I do not share those feelings. If you love it, please continue doing so and understand that nothing I’m about to say is meant to cause offense. With that out of the way, let’s attempt to unpack my complex reaction to Dead Poets Society.

The movie was written by Tom Schulman, inspired by his own experiences as a young man attending Montgomery Bell Academy, a conservative prep school in Tennessee. John Keating, the film’s unorthodox English teacher, was modeled in part after one of Schulman’s favorite teachers, Sam Pickering. Schulman’s spec script made the studio rounds and received a few compliments but no real interest in producing it.

The script eventually found a champion in Steven Haft, an attorney who had produced a couple of movies including Robert Altman’s Beyond Therapy. Haft began sending the script around Hollywood, attracting the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney. Katzenberg had already passed on it once but had a change of heart and now wanted to make the movie. Haft found a couple more production partners, Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, who were big names in television. They’d recently branched out to films with the domestic drama Firstborn.

To direct, the team hired Jeff Kanew, whose last picture had been Touchstone’s senior citizens buddy comedy Tough Guys. Kanew wanted to cast Liam Neeson (last seen here opposite Diane Keaton in The Good Mother) as Keating. But the studio’s first choice was always Robin Williams, who won raves and an Oscar nomination for his Disney debut, Good Morning, Vietnam. A deal was eventually worked out with Williams. But Robin really didn’t want to work with Jeff Kanew and, on the first day of shooting, didn’t come to set as scheduled. As a result, the entire production was shut down for a year while they searched for a replacement.