One of Hollywood's Worst Movies Was Shot at This Michigan High School

Howell — This is the story of how Jennifer Granholm, Adrien Brody, and the Howell Public Schools district teamed up to make one of the worst movies in Hollywood history. Sit back and enjoy it, because it’s a good one.

The movie is called “High School,” a stoner comedy filmed in Howell back in 2008, soon after Gov. Granholm spearheaded an initiative to offer millions of dollars in tax credits to the film industry to make movies in Michigan.

The program turned out to be a disaster, costing the state about $500 million, but it did result in scores of Hollywood producers rushing to Michigan to film movies in the late 2000s. Hell yes, they said. We’ll take your money, Michigan.

Some of these films were good, like Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” which was filmed in Highland Park and other sites in the Detroit area, and the Ed Helms comedy “Cedar Rapids,” which was filmed in Ann Arbor.

But a lot of them were bad. Like “High School.”

Whether or not it’s one of the worst movies in Hollywood history is up for debate, of course, but there’s no disputing that it was a commercial and critical failure. It made all of $139,000 at the box office on a $10 million budget, and the reviews were almost universally awful. The only ones who appreciated the stoner comedy were stoners, and even they had to admit that it was no “Up in Smoke.”

You’re welcome to watch it for yourself—it’s available for viewing free on Tubi—or you can just take my word for it. If you’re also wondering why you’ve never heard of this movie, that’s why. It’s bad.

The plot of “High School” involves two high school kids, a valedictorian named Henry and a stoner named Travis. Right after Henry smokes marijuana for the first time in his life, courtesy of Travis, they discover that the principal is going to conduct school-wide drug testing the next day. Anyone who fails the drug test won’t be allowed to graduate.

That’ll wreck Henry’s future, of course, so the two of them devise a plan to get the entire school high by mixing high-potency cannabis in all the brownies that will be sold at the school bake sale. If the entire school is high, the drug test will be invalid.

Hilarious, right?

Adrien Brody plays a drug dealer named Psycho Ed who Travis and Henry plot to steal the drugs from. This was, ahem, not the highlight of his film career.

In any case, the story of how the movie came to be made in Howell is much funnier than the movie itself, so let’s start with that.

When the producers of “High School” found out that Michigan would give them millions of dollars to film the movie here, they went looking for a vacant high school in the state that they could rent out for a couple months to use as a location.

Thanks to some classic small-town blundering and gullibility, Howell happened to have just such a high school available.

Back in 2003, the guy who was the superintendent of the Howell Public Schools convinced the community that it needed to approve a bond issue for $70 million to build a second high school in the district because it was growing so fast. (Spoiler alert: Howell did not need a second high school.)

The voters fell for it hook, line, and sinker, and the second high school was built, and the district named it William Riddle Parker High School. The reason it got that name is pretty funny, too.

When the school district went looking for a huge parcel of land on which to build the high school it didn’t need, it found 118 acres south of town that belonged to a woman named Josephine Parker. The land was worth about $1 million, so when Josephine said that she would sell it to them for $3 million, those shrewd wheeler-dealers at the Howell Public Schools said sure.

Oh, and one more condition, Josephine said. They need to name the new school after her late husband, William Riddle Parker. Once again, the district said sure.

William Riddle Parker was a fine man, a local guy who was involved in the Masonic Lodge and had served on the Howell School Board in the 1960s. No offense to him, but he wasn’t the kind of community titan who usually gets his name on a school.

He might not have had the resumé to get his name on the school, but what he did have was a widow who was one hell of a negotiator. She fleeced the school district for $3 million and made them put her late husband’s name on the school. Good on you, Josephine.

William Riddle Parker High School was completed in 2007, and it was a beautiful school, but whoops! It turns out that Howell didn’t need it. So starting in the fall of 2007, it just sat empty, a $70 million white elephant. (It’s a middle school now.)

Fast-forward to fall 2008, and when the producers of “High School” went looking for an empty high school that they could use for their drug movie, they found one in Howell.

It was only going to cost them about $70,000 to rent the school for a couple months, but first, they had to convince the Howell School Board that the subject of the movie wasn’t going to be too inappropriate.

“My concern is sending the wrong message to kids that we make light of illegal substances in school,” said School Board President Ed Literski.

So, naturally, the producers lied.

The newspaper reported, “(The producers) assured the board that the movie has an anti-drug theme, which Literski and Assistant Superintendent for Business Rick Terres said pleasantly surprised them.”

Again, I don’t want you to have to watch the movie yourself, so you’re just going to have to take my word on this. The movie does not have an anti-drug theme. It might be the most pro-drug movie ever made.

So anyway, Hollywood came to Parker High School and Howell in the fall of 2008 to film the movie, and it’s amazing how many stars they were able to get for their horrible film. In addition to Adrien Brody, who had already won an Oscar for “The Pianist,” it starred Michael Chiklis from “The Shield,” Colin Hanks (Tom Hanks’ son), Mykelti Williamson (Bubba in “Forrest Gump”), and best of all, Curtis Armstrong, the Michigan native who played Booger in “Revenge of the Nerds.” They had it all.

The filming itself went pretty smoothly, but when the film was completed in 2009, it went nowhere. They couldn’t find a company to release it, so it didn’t hit the theaters until 2012, four years after they filmed it. When it finally did hit the theaters, the dozen or so dummies who paid good money to see it, including me, found out just how bad it was.

It went straight to DVD and then straight to Tubi, where I’m guessing an occasional stoner stumbles across it late at night.

Ah, but the legacy of the film lives on. The website Ranker recently asked people to rank “Adrien Brody’s Worst Films,” and “High School” came in at No. 2. He’s been in more than 60 films, so that’s pretty impressive, but I’m still sort of stunned that he actually did something that was worse than this.

It’s a film called “Inappropriate Comedy,” in case you’re wondering. I’m guessing that Jennifer Granholm had nothing to do with that one, so at least she’s off the hook for that.