5

Hollywood Will Try To Make Some Disastrous Changes To Your Real Life

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

It's easy to see why Johnson's story was movie material. She's a former Navy journalist and Marine Corps officer who took an English teaching job with at-risk students from East Palo Alto. Unless you're a skydiving cop who polices the air for free-falling criminals, you can't have a more movie-worthy biography. But that was still not enough for jaded Hollywood screenwriters.

Take one memorable anecdote, for instance. After one of Johnson's students was shot in the leg by a gang member, he called her in the middle of the night to tell her that the rest of the gang was waiting for him outside. So Johnson got into her Fiat Spider ...

dave_7 / Wiki Commons
Another awesome detail cut from the movie.

4

Hollywood Will Cut Out The Entire Point Of A Story

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

3

Sometimes, Hollywood Takes Out The Most Interesting Parts

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

In the film, on the first day of class, one of the students confronts and sexually harasses Pfeiffer. Like a well-behaved female protagonist, she runs out of the room crying. Not only did that never happen, but it's completely insane, because Johnson spent her pre-teaching years as an officer in the freaking Marine Corps. "If that kid had said to me what he said in the movie, I would've cold-cocked him," she told us. "Real fast. He wouldn't have known what happened. And I would've been fired! But I still would've done it.

"One time, a screenwriter called me and asked about that scene, and I explained what really happened: A kid threw a dictionary at me, and I confronted him. The writer said 'That's better than what I have here!' and I said 'Yeah, you should read my book!' He replied 'I don't have time to read the book. I have to write the movie.'"

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
"This awkward montage of a fun-park field trip that never happened won't write itself, you know."

That's not the only change. Pfeiffer teaches one class for one semester, and then tries to quit teaching forever because of how intense it is. Johnson taught a full load (because no teacher in the world only teaches one class per semester) for five years, and became a department chair. In fact, she's still teaching, in a classroom, right now, as you're reading this (depending on the time and your position on the Earth). It's like if they made a movie about Batman training exhaustively for his career as a vigilante, only to have him step out into the night for the very first time, punch a single mugger, scream "Parents avenged!" and then give up fighting crime forever.

2

Nobody Is Safe From Hollywood Rewrites

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

At one point in the movie, Pfeiffer lends a kid named Raul $100 and makes him promise to pay her back on the day he graduates. Then, at the end of the movie, she reneges on the deal by quitting teaching. The real Raul was kinda pissed when he saw the movie, because he did in fact pay her back. Overall, Johnson's students (whose real names were used in the movie) were pretty upset, because Hollywood had made them out to be assholes. "They said, 'We never disrespected you like that. Never called you 'whitebread,'" she told us. "They were hurt."

LouAnne Johnson
Clearly, the story of a teacher who earned enough love, respect, and trust to be allowed to hold her student's children wouldn't be complete without a little artificial racism.

There's another scene in the movie in which a student, Emilio, bursts into the principal's office to ask for help because a gang member is going to kill him. But he's rebuffed by the stuffy villain, so he goes out to face his enemy, and dies. The real Emilio did approach the principal and was rebuffed, but then a police officer found out and followed Emilio home. As he was walking up the steps to his house, the gang member appeared behind Emilio and put a gun to his head. But before he could pull the trigger, the cop stepped forward and arrested him.

In reality, Emilio understandably freaked out after this. He started driving around drunk with a gun on his dashboard, intending suicide by cop if he got pulled over. We know this because he called Johnson and told her. She talked him down from potential suicide and convinced him to join the Marines, and today he lives in California with his wife and children. So with the Hollywood way, you get yet another at-risk kid tragically gunned down and forgotten, while in reality, our protagonist saves a life in one of the most dramatic ways possible. We're not screenwriters here, but isn't that usually the other way around?

1

If You Need To Understand Gangs, Consult A Gangologist

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

In real life, the one rule in Johnson's classroom was that the kids had to respect both themselves and everyone else in the room. But the people involved in the movie "didn't believe it could be that simple" and decided to make her, well, let's be honest, a complete poser.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
"Word to your mother. Which reminds me, parent-teacher conferences are next week."

"No, I never wore a leather jacket," she told us. "I didn't want the students to see a peer. I wanted them to see an adult. I tried to signal through my clothing that we were serious. That meant wearing serious clothing."

LouAnne Johnson
And doling out serious hugs.

But the worst part is what they did to the kids. In the film, all of her students are minorities, and all of them are criminals or have drug-addicted parents. "I told the producers, 'Ya know, there are black kids who don't have a crackhead for a mom, and there are Hispanic kids who don't speak Spanish.' Their response was that their on-set gangologist said the script was accurate."

What ... what the hell is a gangologist?

Google
"Gangus: something gross/bad." Yep, sounds like a gangoloist to us.

"You know what I thought at the time? Some gangster got off the street and was smart enough to market his knowledge in Hollywood. Good for him. After all, the movie has its upsides. It had the greatest song. 'Gangster's Paradise' is a beautiful song. If nothing else, we have that."

Brenda Chase/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Speaking of having that song and nothing else: Hi, Coolio!

She's right, of course. We should look at the upsides here. Dangerous Minds potentially helped a gang member get off the streets and finally earn his degree in gangology, and granted us all a great gift of music. Why, if not for "Gangster's Paradise," we wouldn't have "Amish Paradise," and that's no world we want to live in. Thanks, Hollywood.

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