It's like The Breakfast Club meets Brokeback Mountain. The Geography Club breaks new ground and yet resonates as a relevant film of today's generation.
Twin brothers Gary (director) and Edmund (writer) created “Geography Club” as a coming-of-age and coming-out film starring “Glee’s” Alex Newell, Cameron Deane Stewart, Justin Deeley, Nikki Blonsky, Meaghan Martin, Andrew Caldwell and Allie Gonino to depict the life of contemporary gay teenagers.
The unlikely group decided to form a club meant to appear so nerdy that it keeps the curious away. The reason? So the group can openly discuss their real sexual identities.
According to several websites, Geography Club is based on Brent Hartinger's best-selling critically acclaimed novel of the same title.
As a fast, fresh coming-of-age movie that tells a real and powerful story unfolding in every high school around the US, Geography Club reveals "a story of kids hiding their true identities in plain sight, even as they feverishly pursue their hearts’ desires yet still look for something that will finally define who they are. They start out trying to protect their one big secret among themselves. Russell (Stewart) is dating Trish (Martin), a sweet but sexually motivated young lady – even as he is falling for the football jock Kevin (Deeley), who won’t ever reveal the truth to his macho teammates Nolan (Harvey) and Jared (Darden). Min (Maki) and Terese (Blonsky) tell everyone they’re really just best friends. And then there’s Ike (Newell) who is trying on every identity in the book. They know they are different, but at least they’re not in daily danger like the bullied geek Brian Bund (Olivares). Yet, when Russell’s sexual orientation is suddenly exposed to the whole school by the ultra-popular Kimberly ( Gonino), the members of the Geography Club begin to panic."
The movie aims to bust old stereotypes; create fun, relatable characters where few have previously existed in pop culture; and explore a new world – one in which tolerance is slowly growing but peril still lurks for teens who don’t quite fit into the usual crowd. Edmund Entin, who wrote the screenplay, said, “I was immediately attracted to this project because I have such an affection for the novel and jumped on the chance to work on the film. I saw in the novel, a tapestry of characters and emotions that felt specific to these times. “The best coming of age films resonates with the mainstream when someone can take the pulse of the contemporary adolescent and write something that shades them perfectly. The novel did that. And my vision for the screenplay was to accentuate those feelings. As the writer of the screenplay I felt I was borrowing the universe from the novel’s author, Brent Hartinger, and delicately molding it to exist as a narrative more fitted for the screen.”
