FILM 1445: CAN'T HARDLY WAIT

TRIVIA: Film debut of actor Jason Segel.

This was Charlie Korsmo's first (and last) on-screen appearance since Hook (1991). He was attending MIT when he was offered the role.

Melissa Joan Hart's name doesn't appear in the end credits.

Filming the final scenes of the party meant a chaotic destruction of the house. Directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont gave the go-ahead to completely trash the place. This involved the cast and crew pulling out drawers, dropping food all over the floor, messing up the carpets, and someone spray painting "This Party Sucked" on the front door. This all happened in one hour.

The film takes place on Wednesday, 17 June 1998: Barry Manilow's 55th birthday.

Ethan Embry's character, Preston Meyers, confesses to be a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. at the end of the movie. His yearbook quote, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes" by Thoreau, is also featured in Vonnegut's book "Welcome to the Monkey House."

There were characters in the movie called the Crying Drunk Girl (Jennifer Elise Cox) - who has subtitles for everything she says because she is so drunk that none of her speech is understandable - and the Stoned Girl ('Amber Benson') - who is so spaced out on dope that she wanders in and out of a number of scenes - but both were cut in order to secure a PG-13 rating.

Four cast members appear in Six Feet Under. They include Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, Freddy Rodriguez, and Eric Balfour.

BOOK 111: THE RACHEL PAPERS: MARTIN AMIS

The Rachel Papers is Martin Amis' first novel, published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape.

The Rachel Papers tells the story of Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical teenager (a portrait Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university. Narrated by Charles on the eve of his twentieth birthday, the novel recounts Charles' last year of adolescence and his first love, Rachel Noyes, whom he meets in London while studying for his entrance exams into Oxford.

In preparing to write his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow, Amis revealed that he re-read The Rachel Papers for research purposes (as "the time frame is similar").

Amis's view of his debut novel has diminished considerably in recent years. Regarding what he made of the novel upon re-reading it, Amis remarked in a 2010 interview that, by his high standards the novel "seemed crude...Not the writing. That was terribly alive. The craft. The sex. The setups… [were] all incredibly cack-handed."In a subsequent later appearance at the Sunday Times Literary Festival in March 2010, he criticised his debut further, stating, "A first novel is about energy and originality, but to me now it looks so crude. I don't mean bad language – it's so clumsily put together. The sense of decorum, the slowing a sentence down, the scrupulousness I feel I have acquired, aren't there. As you get older, your craft, the knack of knowing what goes where, what goes when, is much more acute."