If Scream is one of your go-to Halloween films, you may have noticed that in the closing credits, there is a strange note from the production team.
At the end of the film, a disclaimer pops up which reads: “No thanks whatsoever to the Santa Rosa City school district governing board.”
While this may seem silly or lighthearted, it turns out that the production team was deeply serious with this swipe, and for good reason (even if it is still a little funny).
That’s because the aforementioned governing board apparently caused a huge roadblock, which stopped planned filming going ahead as planned.
The setting of Scream was supposed to be different
According to a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, the Scream filmmakers believed they had secured the film’s primary shooting location of Santa Rosa High School.
However, once the crew were in pre-production, they discovered that actually... the deal to film in the high school hadn’t been fully signed off, and the verbal agreement the team thought that they had secured wasn’t enough to go ahead.
Marianne Maddalena, executive producer of Scream told the Los Angeles Times: “We made a decision to go to Santa Rosa because the high school was perfect for our movie.
“We created a shooting schedule for when they told us it would be the best time to shoot in the school. When we got up there they changed their minds. I think basically someone didn’t like the script.”
The board told a different story, though...
Frank Pugh, the school board’s president at the time, said that the filmmakers failed to fill out the proper forms and petition the school board before any promise could be made.
Pugh said: “We have 1,700 kids that need an education. [The filmmakers] want to shut down wings, shut down the cafeteria. . . . Any reasonable person knows that there’s paperwork that needs to be worked out.
Once the team did fill out the paperwork, the public still had something to say about a horror film taking place in the high school.
Pugh added: “The public became very upset that this type of film was going to be shot at a high school campus. But the board can’t really make decisions based on content issues of the film.
“Instead, the board was interested as to how this shooting would disrupt the campus climate.”
While there were attempts to make it work by changing dates and even reducing the number of filming days, it just wasn’t meant to be, and Scream was eventually filmed in the Sonoma Community Center, a former grade school.
Maddalena said: “We felt upset about it, which is why we had the credit, [but] in the end everything worked out for the best.”
Cheeky.