The Student Teachers is a 1973 film directed by Jonathan Kaplan. It was inspired by the "nurse" cycle of pictures starting with The Student Nurses (1970). Roger Corman says it was one of the best of the cycle.[4] It was made by the same team who had done Night Call Nurses.[5]
Plot
Three new high school teachers use unconventional methods to get through to their students. Rachel teaches after-school sex education; Tracey gets involved with nude photography; Jody recruits a former drop out to help with a half-way house and gets involved with a drug ring.
Roger Corman had a big success with The Student Nurses, written by Stephanie Rothman and Charles S. Swartz and directed by Rothman. He commissioned Rothman to write The Student Teachers but Rothman left New World after The Velvet Vampire to work for Dimension.[6]
Corman financed two sequels to The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses and Night Call Nurses. The latter was directed by Jonathan Kalpan and produced by Corman's wife Julie. Kaplan later recalled, "After Night Call Nurses was done, I didn’t talk to him again for a while. Then Julie called me and said, ‘We’re a big hit in Tallahassee! Roger wants you to come out and make the same movie, but with teachers instead of nurses'."[7]
Producer Jon Davison says no one who worked on The Student Teachers ever saw the Rothman/Swartz script. A draft was written by Kaplan and Danny Opatoshu (who had helped write Night Call Nurses), but Corman asked for it to be rewritten.[1]
The film was shot in 15 days for under $100,000, including three days shooting at the Paramount Ranch. According to Davison, Corman removed a number of jokes from the final chase sequence so it was played straighter.[1]
Kaplan later said "When I looked at the filmographies of the directors I admired, I noticed that they made a hell of a lot of movies before they made a good one. And I made the decision consciously to make as many movies as I could in as short a period of time as I could"[8]
Casting
The lead was written for Patti Byrne who was in Kaplan's earlier Night Call Nurses but she did not commit and the role ended up being played by Susan Damante. Kaplan's sister Nora Heflin and mother Frances Heflin are in the cast and share a scene together. Chuck Norris plays the small role of the karate advisor.[1]
Post Production
Jon Davison invited Joe Dante out to Los Angeles to edit the trailer for the film. This launched Dante's career at New World.[9]
Critical responses
Writing in the Chicago Reader, film critic Dave Kehr described the film as "an ugly, exploitative downer," but that director Kaplan "puts some infectious high spirits into the incidental action [...] it seems a shame when the film is forced to stop every 10 or 15 minutes so the three lead actresses can take off their shirts."[10]
Critic Tyler Foster wrote in DVD Talk that the film was "a slog" and that "there's not enough of a connection between teaching and mobsters to justify shoehorning this material into the film."[11]
Chuck Norris had been told the movie was about unconventional teachers. He too his karate students to see the film and was stunned by all the sex and nudity.[12]
Roger Corman later said he thought the film "was one of the best of that series, and it was one of the most successful. I think it proves that if a film is made a little bit better than other films in the genre, it will do better."[13]
The movie led to an unofficial sequel, Summer School Teachers, which was produced by Julie Corman and directed by Barbara Peeters, who had been second unit director on The Student Teachers.
