American Beauty is a 1999 American drama film, directed by Sam Mendes and written by Alan Ball. Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a middle-aged office worker who has a midlife crisis after becoming infatuated with his teenage daughter's best friend. The film co-stars Annette Bening and Thora Birch as Lester's wife and daughter respectively. Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley and Chris Cooper also feature. American Beauty marked acclaimed theater director Mendes' film directorial debut; it was also Ball's first produced film screenplay. The film was financed by DreamWorks, which bought Ball's spec script for a six-figure sum in 1998.
Spacey was Mendes' first choice for the role of Lester, though DreamWorks had urged the director to consider better-known actors; similarly, the studio suggested several actors for the role of Carolyn—Lester's wife—until Mendes cast Bening without DreamWorks' knowledge. Principal photography took place between December 1998 and February 1999 on soundstages at the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California and on location in Los Angeles. The film underwent several changes during editing that affected its tone and eliminated expository bookend scenes. American Beauty was positively received by critics and audiences alike; it was the best-reviewed American film of 1999 and grossed over $350 million worldwide. It won the 1999 Academy Award for Best Picture, and was nominated for and won numerous other awards and honors, mainly for the direction, writing, and acting.
Plot
Lester Burnham (Spacey) feels his office job has few prospects for advancement and despises his superiors. His wife, Carolyn (Bening), is an ambitious real-estate broker; their 16-year-old daughter, Jane (Birch), abhors her parents, has low self-esteem and is saving money for a breast augmentation operation. The Burnhams' new neighbors are retired United States Marine Corps Colonel Frank Fitts (Cooper), his dissociative wife, Barbara (Allison Janney), and their teenage son, Ricky (Bentley).
After watching a high school basketball game at which Jane is a cheerleader, Lester develops an infatuation with Jane's sexually precocious friend and classmate, Angela Hayes (Suvari). His recurring fantasies entail a sexually aggressive Angela among red rose petals. Frank controls Ricky with a strict disciplinarian lifestyle and gives him regular drug tests. Ricky, a cannabis smoker and drug dealer, evades detection through the use of clean urine samples obtained from a client. Ricky frequently uses a hand-held video camera to record his surroundings and keeps hundreds of taped videos in his bedroom. Carolyn begins an affair with a business rival, Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher). Lester is informed he is to be laid off, but blackmails his boss, quits his job and takes up low-pressure employment at a fast food chain. He buys his dream car, starts lifting weights and begins running to improve his physique and impress Angela, whom he overheard telling Jane that she would find him sexually attractive if he had muscle. He also takes up smoking cannabis, which he buys from Ricky. Lester continues to fantasize about Angela and flirts with her whenever she visits Jane. The girls' friendship wanes and Jane becomes romantically involved with Ricky; the lovers bond over Ricky's camcorder footage of what he considers the most beautiful imagery he has filmed: a plastic bag blowing in the wind.
Lester discovers Carolyn's infidelity, but reacts indifferently. Buddy breaks off the affair with the excuse that it could lead to a financially ruinous divorce for him. Frank becomes suspicious of Lester and Ricky's friendship and searches his son's room. He finds camcorder footage that Ricky had captured by chance—Lester's lifting weights in his garage while nude. Frank mistakenly concludes that Ricky and Lester are engaged in a sexual relationship after watching their drug rendezvous through the garage window. After Ricky returns home, Frank beats him and accuses him of being gay. Ricky falsely admits the charge and goads Frank into turning him out of their home. Ricky convinces Jane to flee with him to New York City. Angela protests and Ricky answers her vanity by calling her ordinary.
Carolyn loads a gun and drives home. Frank confronts Lester in the garage and attempts to kiss him; Lester rebuffs the advance and Frank flees. Moments later, Lester finds a distraught Angela; she asks him to tell her she is beautiful. He does, and she begins to seduce him. After learning that Angela is a virgin, Lester halts and the pair instead bond over their shared frustrations. Angela tells Lester that Jane is in love, and Lester tells Angela he is happy. While Angela goes to the bathroom, Lester smiles at a family photograph in the kitchen. A gunshot rings out and blood spatters on the wall in front of Lester. Ricky and Jane find him dead. The actions of the other characters in the moments before and after his death are shown: Frank's returning home, bloodied, a gun missing from his collection; Carolyn's crying in their bedroom; Jane, Ricky and Angela reacting to the gunshot. Lester's closing narration explains that despite his death he is happy, as it is hard to be mad when there is so much beauty in the world.
Production
Development
In 1997, Alan Ball signed with the United Talent Agency (UTA) with the intent of making the transition from writing for television to films. After Ball experienced frustration writing for the situation comedies Grace Under Fire and Cybill , his UTA representative, Andrew Cannava, suggested that Ball write a spec script to "reintroduce to the town as a screenwriter". Ball pitched three ideas to Cannava: two conventional romantic comedies and American Beauty . Ball had been preoccupied with the idea of writing the story behind a "lurid tabloid murder case"; he attempted to turn the idea into a play in the early 90s, but later felt it would work better as a film. Despite the story's lack of an easily-marketable concept, Cannava advised him to write American Beauty because he felt it was the one for which Ball had the most passion. While the film was in development, Ball continued to work in television, creating another situation comedy, Oh, Grow Up . His anger and frustration at having to accede to network demands on the show, and during his tenures on Grace Under Fire and Cybill , informed his writing of American Beauty . Ball noted, "My experience with the television show is that I bent over backwards to address every single note that everyone gave me, and they seemed to end up not liking it ... My experience with the movie was that I just wrote something ... I wrote it from the heart, I didn't go through development, I didn't have a lot of network executives or studio executives giving me notes, and it became this thing that seemed to really work."
Although Ball did not expect to sell the script—he believed it would act more as a calling card— American Beauty drew interest from several production entities. DreamWorks became aware of the script through producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen. With the assistance of DreamWorks executive Glenn Williamson—with whom Ball had previously worked—and Steven Spielberg in his capacity as studio partner, Ball was convinced to develop the project at DreamWorks; he received assurances from the studio—known at the time for its less edgy fare—that it would not "iron the out". In April 1998, DreamWorks acquired the script for a mid-six figure sum, outbidding Fox Searchlight Pictures, October Films, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Lakeshore Entertainment. With Jinks and Cohen attached as producers, DreamWorks planned to make the film for $6–8 million.
In the same year, theater director Sam Mendes revived the musical Cabaret with fellow director Rob Marshall. Beth Swofford of the Creative Artists Agency arranged meetings for Mendes with studio figures in Los Angeles to see if film direction was a possibility. At Swofford's house, he came across American Beauty in a pile of eight scripts. He met with Spielberg, who had seen Cabaret and encouraged him to read the script. Mendes, who was inspired early on by how the film Paris, Texas (1984) presented contemporary America as a mythic landscape, saw the same presentation in American Beauty , as well as parallels with his own childhood experiences:
All those things I ... described about discovering how contemporary American could be mythic somehow met my own experiences, my own upbringing as an only child. There are two only children in the movie. There are two basically dysfunctional families. They live in suburbia. I lived on the outskirts of Oxford in the oddest house you can imagine. With very odd neighbors, exactly in the same way as the movie. So there were all these things in the movie that chimed with my own experiences.
Several A-list directors were interested in the project, although Ball was not keen on their involvement as he believed the inevitable budget increase would lead to DreamWorks' becoming "nervous about the content". During Mendes's visit to Los Angeles, he pitched for the film with DreamWorks executives, and found support from Jinks, Cohen and Ball. The writer had also seen Cabaret and was impressed with Mendes' "keen visual sense" and they way in which he did not make obvious directorial choices—preferring to look for something deeper in the material, which Ball felt would be a good fit with the themes of American Beauty . DreamWorks offered the film to Mike Nichols and Robert Zemeckis, but neither accepted. The studio app
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