Tagline: Everyone is dying to be with her. Someone is killing for it.
A group of high schoolers invite Mandy Lane (Amber Heard), a good girl who became quite hot over the summer, to a weekend party on a secluded ranch. While the festivities rage on, the number of revelers begins to drop quite mysteriously.
Mandy Lane. Beautiful. Untouched. High school royalty waiting to be crowned. Since the dawn of Junior year, men have tried to possess her. Some have even died in reckless pursuit of this 16 year-old Texas angel.
Chloe and Red invite Mandy out to Red’s family ranch for the weekend. Mandy sees it as an excellent opportunity to cement her new friendships. The boys see it as an opportunity to finally get with Mandy Lane. Driving across the Texas landscape, the kids begin to gently chip away at the wall that surrounds her. Joints are smoked. A keg is stolen off a beer truck. Pills are crushed to fine powder and inhaled. Mandy observes it all with the gentle interest of a foreign tourist. And they love her for it.
At the ranch, all the boys start to make their move – each one hoping to be the first to attain the unattainable Mandy Lane. However, as night falls and the booze, drugs, and hormones take over, things are said and advances made which can never be reversed.
Suddenly, sweet Mandy finds herself pit in a brutal struggle for survival against someone whose interest she has rejected. Forget reading, writing and arithmetic. In high school, learning to be yourself and not succumbing to peer pressure is the ultimate test. And this is one exam that Mandy is determined not to fail.
About the Production
Development
The film had initially been conceived in 2003 when writer Jacob Forman, producer Chad Feehan, and production designer Tom Hammock were all students at the American Film Institute. “I actually started it as my thesis at AFI,” Feehan told Twitch Film.[16] “The writer, Jacob Forman and the production designer Tom Hammock and I did it as our thesis together at AFI. We started working on it in 2003, then graduated and got it financed and were able to hire our friends that we graduated with to make the movie. It was obviously quite a journey from 2003 to 2006 when we sold it to the Weinstein Company, and after that it’s been pretty trying.”
Levine later told the Austin Chronicle that he and screenwriter Jacob Forman had drawn inspiration from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) as well as the NBC television series Friday Night Lights and John Hughes films.[15] According to Levine, he and cinematography Darren Genet had also drawn inspiration from The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Dazed and Confused (1993) when developing the film’s depiction of teenagers.
Lead performer Amber Heard said that when she received the script for the film in Los Angeles, she felt it was noticeably “different”. In an interview, she said, “There are so many [scripts] you get where it feels like you’re reading the same girl over and over again. And then I read this script and I thought it was truly different and that it could be done well. This was a movie that was really under the radar; no one was really talking about it. It didn’t have much money and subsequently it didn’t get much attention right off the bat.”
Filming
Principal photography began on location in Austin, Texas, and nearby Bastrop in 2006, on a budget of $750,000.[19] According to Amber Heard, she spent little time with the rest of the cast when filming wasn’t taking place in order to maintain a distance necessary to her character. She also said that the shoot was very low-maintenance, saying, “Everyone has these expectations, whether they’re subconscious or not, of the glamour and how much fun that you can have in L.A. and I went with those same expectations. This was my first shoot, my first leading role. I fly to my hometown, funnily enough, to film and I stand out in this field waiting for my hair and make-up. Instead of the chair, instead of the lights, I stand in the middle of a field and have, literally, a bucket of freshly-dug mud dumped on my head.”
Production notes provided by Senator Entertainment.
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
Starring: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Michael Welch, Aaron Himelstein, Edwin Hodge, Whitney Able, Melissa Price
Directed by: Jonathan Levine
Screenplay by: Jacob Forman
Release Date: May 9th, 2008
MPAA Rating: R for strong disturbing violence, pervasive drug and alcohol use, sexuality / nudity and language.
Studio: Senator Entertainment
Box Office Totals
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