By 
The year was 1987. John Hughes ruled the teen market, and multiplexes were dominated by the glossy, earnest high school angst of The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Audiences seeking lighthearted escapism could easily turn to National Lampoon’s Vacation or Weird Science. Into this landscape stepped director Phil Joanou’s Three O’Clock High, a teen comedy that swapped pastel-hued coming-of-age tropes for something altogether darker, more anxious and stylistically frantic.
Based on the genuine high school anxieties of screenwriters Richard Christian Matheson and Thomas Szollosi, the film follows a meek student named Jerry Mitchell (Casey Siemaszko) who accidentally offends a menacing, unstable new transfer student. The verdict? A parking lot showdown at exactly 3:00 PM.
To make this ticking-clock thriller work, the production needed a human hurricane to play the antagonist, Buddy Revell. They found that raw energy in a recent Cornell University Master’s graduate named Richard Tyson. But while Buddy Revell terrified his classmates on screen, Tyson was fighting a very different, desperate battle for survival behind the scenes.
Living on the tailgate
When Tyson landed an audition at Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, he wasn’t retiring to a Hollywood apartment after his reads. He was quite literally living on the margins of Los Angeles.
“I had fourteen callbacks. I was living in my truck. I had a couch in my pickup truck. It was an old truck,” Tyson recalls of that desperate period in an interview with Flickering Myth. “I also had a barbecue grill. I would take it to Malibu and put the tailgate down, and the couch would be level. I would cook chop steak or something, and that’s how I lived.”
The contrast between the prestigious casting rooms at Universal and his actual living situation forced Tyson to deliver the performance of his life before the cameras even rolled. Walking out of the high-stakes auditions, he knew he had to project the effortless confidence of a burgeoning movie star.
“The best acting I did was walking out after they said, ‘Okay, you can go home now,'” Tyson admits. “I acted like I was going to jump into my Porsche and zip up to Malibu. Once I got to my truck I was already home. It was a raw time and I was playing a raw character.”
That unvarnished grit was exactly what the filmmakers were looking for. “They cast Casey Siemaszko first, and they were matching us up,” says Tyson. “Finally, they picked me.”
The Spielberg and Spelling connection
Filmed on location at Ogden High School in Ogden, Utah, Three O’Clock High boasted heavy hitters behind the camera. It was shepherded by television mogul Aaron Spelling along with Spielberg. Though Tyson never met the Jaws director personally, Spielberg’s presence loomed large over his breakout moment.
“It was at Spielberg’s production company, Amblin. I never met Spielberg, but I was told he loved all the dailies. He loved me. I wish I could meet him today,” Tyson says.
The industry footprint of the film followed Tyson for years to come. Reflecting on a meeting with co-producer Spelling years later, Tyson remembers the jaw-dropping moment the legendary producer singled him out: “I auditioned for him years later, and there were like 25 people in the room, and he got up and walked over to me and whispered to me and shook my hand and goes, ‘Buddy Revell!’ It was real cool.”
For a young guy living in his truck, the immediate aftermath of booking the job felt like a fever dream. Tyson went from flipping burgers on a tailgate to being flown across the country.
“They flew me to New York,” Tyson remembers. “I called all my pals from the Master’s programme at Cornell. I was a year out of school. I called them and said, ‘Look – I’m in Spielberg’s movie! Come and see me at the Plaza!'”
The sudden whiplash of Hollywood success resulted in a celebratory blur. “I stayed up all night with those guys in my suite,” Tyson says. “I was telling one of my friends how it all happened, but he finished my story and said, ‘You told me that story years ago in school!'”
A cult legacy born from box-office dust
Despite the pedigree of its producers and the fierce dedication of its cast, Three O’Clock High struggled heavily upon its release on October 9, 1987. Opening in 849 theatres nationwide, it scraped together a meagre $1,506,975 on its opening weekend. It eventually stalled out at a lifetime domestic gross of roughly $3,685,862, failing to recoup its modest $5,000,000 budget.
The contemporary critical response was equally brutal. Famed critic Roger Ebert slapped the film with a dismal one-out-of-four stars review. Ebert dismissed the story as “pretty stupid,” though he ironically lamented that Tyson’s character — whom he labelled “the most interesting” — was ultimately underdeveloped. Metacritic reflected a dismal aggregate score of 36 out of 100 based on nine reviews, indicating a generally unfavourable reception.
Part of the friction lay in the movie’s aggressive, kinetic style and pitch-black tone. It felt completely alien to the comforting, earnest teen landscape of the late 1980s. In fact, the tone was so aggressively dark that Spielberg ultimately removed his name from the final credits.
Yet, time has been incredibly kind to Joanou’s high school nightmare. Over the decades, the film bypassed its box-office failure to secure a passionate cult following. Modern critics have completely reassessed its place in cinema history, with reviewer Rob Hunter writing in 2016 that the film is “a wildly inventive and energetic look at the failures and successes of a typical high school day, and it shapes the daydreams and anxieties into an exaggerated delight.”
Ultimately, Three O’Clock High remains an indelible staple of 80s cult cinema, anchored entirely by the terrifying, imposing presence of Buddy Revell. And for Tyson, the trial by fire of fourteen callbacks, a pickup truck apartment, and a faked Porsche exit resulted in a performance that defined an era — and a career.
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