Summit High Teacher's Novel Debuts on Silver Screen

Summit High School English teacher Robert Kaplow is uniquely qualified for his position.

“(My students) have an English teacher that’s not only teaching writing, but wrote something and got it published and made into a movie,” he said. “I think that gives me a little more street cred.”

Kaplow’s novel, Me and Orson Welles, which was published in 2003, is about a week in the life of 17-year-old Richard Samuels, Westfield High School senior. In 1937, a chance encounter leads Richard to Broadway and Orson Welles’s groundbreaking production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theater. Along the way, he encounters the gravitational pull of Welles’s rising star (and galaxy-sized ego) and finds love, betrayal and his own dormant courage.

The film, which opens on November 25, stars Zac Efron as Richard, Christian McKay as Welles, and Claire Danes as Sonja, the beautiful and ambitious production assistant for whom Richard falls. The film is directed by Richard Linklater of Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise fame, who optioned the novel with his own money. Linklater has some good news for fans of the book.

“(The movie) is very faithful to the book,” he said on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC radio on November 24.

Kaplow agrees.

“Almost all the lines in the film are in the book,” he said, “and that’s very satisfying to me, that the dialogue was playable and actable enough that it would translate easily.”

Kaplow said that the movie was made by chance.

“Vince Palmo (one of the film’s screenplay writers) saw it in a bookstore in Austin, Texas,” said Kaplow. “He liked the title, bought it, read it, and gave it to his friend Rick Linklater and said ‘I think you should read this.’ That’s how it got made into a movie, not because of an agent or anything else, but because somebody loved the book.”

Kaplow did extensive research for the book. He read magazines, plays and screenplays, and listened to popular music at the time.

“The book takes place during a specific week in 1937, the week of November 11, and I really made sure that the songs I was using were the songs that would have been on the Hit Parade that specific week,” he said. “To recreate this lost period of time was artistically challenging to me, and fun, too.”

Despite his success, Kaplow, who has taught in Summit for almost 30 years and has published seven novels, has no plans to stop teaching. Although he always knew he wanted to write, Kaplow worked briefly on Wall Street after graduating from Rutgers University before substitute teaching.

“I immediately liked the environment of a school,” he said. “I liked the interplay of teachers and students, and it was a world which I instantly had an affinity for.”

Kaplow says he loves the “sense of surprise, the sense of discovery, the sense of watching young people invent themselves right in front of your eyes” in teaching, and that he loves teaching in Summit.

“(Summit is a) very supportive community, supportive administration,” he said. “I took a year off to finish Me and Orson Welles, and I was allowed to do that. The school supported me in taking a sabbatical to do that, which is probably pretty rare for a school to do.”

For movie times, check moviefone.com.