There are few rites of passage in America that have as much potential for disaster as the high-school prom.

“Bart Got A Room,” the debut feature film from Brian Hecker, which had its world premiere at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, trudges through the difficulty of finding the right date. It’s a story, Hecker says, that comes from a reliable source: personal experience.

“This is based on my absolutely pathetic existence growing up in South Florida,” the native of Hollywood, Fla., tells Metromix. “In high school, we had an assignment to do something to beautify our lives. I choose to ask the senior cheerleader out on a date. I was rejected, and I read the story about it to my class.”

Hecker quickly realized he could make people laugh using his own life experiences. Years later, he started to work on a script about a boy who is rejected at the prom. After graduating from film school in the mid-‘90s, Hecker spent years trying to get his first feature made. For this film, everything gelled when William H. Macy came onboard.

“I knew that unless we had a star, the movie was never going to be made,” he said. “Independent filmmaking is brutal.” Macy was one of Hecker’s top choices to play the character based on his own father, who in the film is recently divorced and tries to give his son dating advice. (“Of course, I went to Billy Crystal first, because he has the exact same hair,” Hecker quips.)

The film’s cast includes a few well-known actors, such as Cheryl Hines and Jennifer Tilly, as well as a few new faces, including Steven Kaplan, who plays the Hecker’s alter ego.

Debuting the film at Tribeca, Hecker says, seemed like a perfect fit. “New York has an edge to it, and I’d like to think that my movie is not a generic teen movie, but has a textured quality to it,” he notes. “We literally finished the movie a week before we premiered. Tribeca became our official deadline.”

Hecker calls the film’s red carpet premiere “insanely surreal,” but it wasn’t until he heard the audience laugh that he knew he was in the clear. “It was like, thank god, I’m OK.”


Photo: Hallvard Brain