Disturbia (film)

Disturbia is a 2007 American neo-noir psychological thriller film directed by D. J. Caruso and written by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth. Starring Shia LaBeouf, David Morse, Sarah Roemer and Carrie-Anne Moss, it is about a 17-year-old teenager named Kale Brecht, who is placed on house arrest for assaulting his school teacher and who spies on his neighbors, believing one of them is a serial killer.

Partially inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, the film was released on April 13, 2007. It received generally positive reviews, and grossed $118.1 million against a budget of $20 million.

Plot
17-year-old troubled and outcast teenager Kale Brecht punches his Spanish teacher in the face when the Spanish teacher mentions his recently deceased father while reprimanding him. A sympathetic judge sentences him to three months house arrest, with an ankle monitor and a proximity sensor.

On Kale's first day of house arrest, Detective Parker explains the monitor. The officer overseeing him, Gutierrez, is revealed to be the cousin of the Spanish teacher he had hit. Kale watches TV and plays video games until his frustrated mother Julie cancels his Xbox Live subscription and cuts his TV's cord. Bored, Kale watches his neighborhood with binoculars, including his attractive new neighbor Ashley Carlson, and Robert Turner, a solitary man. He accidentally trips his proximity sensor after chasing pranking children.

One night, Kale becomes suspicious of Turner after he returns home in a 1960s Ford Mustang with a dented fender, which matches the description of a car given on a news report of a serial killer at large. Befriending Ashley, they begin to spy on Turner with Kale's best friend Ronnie. Turner arrives home with a woman, who they later see running frantically from him, but later appears to drive away.

Kale becomes jealous when Ashley throws a party and flirts with popular people from school, prompting him to blast non-party-related music to disrupt her party. Ashley breaks into the house to turn it off, and Kale reveals he has been observing her since she moved in and is romantically interested, so they kiss.

The following day, Kale has Ashley follow Turner to the supermarket so Ronnie can obtain Turner's garage controller's code. She agrees, but Turner catches her in the parking lot and intimidates her. Shaken, Ashley stops helping in the investigation. Ronnie then realizes he left his phone in Turner's car and breaks into his garage, with Kale watching at a distance. When Ronnie gets trapped when the garage door closes, Kale tries to rescue him, but alerts the police by tripping the ankle monitor. They arrive and search the garage, as Kale accuses Turner of murder. However, they only find a bag containing a roadkill deer.

Julie goes to Turner's house to convince him not to press charges against Kale. Ronnie escapes from Turner's house and gives Kale the video he made while running through the house. Freezing a frame and zooming in, Kale sees the corpse of the woman from earlier. Meanwhile, Turner incapacitates and binds Julie. Turner enters their house, bashing Ronnie over the head with a bat. After binding and gagging Kale, he reveals he will frame him for the murders and make it appear that Kale then killed himself. However, Ashley arrives, distracting Turner and allowing Kale to club him in the face. Kale throws him from the top of the stairs before Ashley frees him. They jump out of the window into her pool as Turner resurfaces. Kale's ankle monitor again alerts the police.

Looking for his mother, Kale enters Turner's home. Inside, he finds evidence of Turner's previous murders, including the corpses of his victims and a woman's dress and wig, indicating Turner posed as the woman leaving the house the night Kale and Ashley were watching. When Officer Gutierrez arrives, Turner snaps his neck. Kale finds his mother bound and gagged in the cellar. Turner appears, slashes him in the back and pins him to a wall. Before Turner can kill Kale, Julie stabs him in the leg with a screwdriver, allowing Kale to impale Turner with gardening shears.

Following the discovery of the murders, Kale's ankle bracelet is removed early for good behavior. Kale exacts revenge on the pranking neighborhood children before kissing Ashley on his sofa, while Ronnie playfully videotapes them.

Development and writing
As Christopher Landon heard an NPR show discussing Martha Stewart being on house arrest, he started thinking on what he would do in a similar condition, "already sort of being a voyeur, I figured that I would just be spying on my neighbors all the time.” He made the protagonist a teenager dealing with his father's death to reflect his own life experiences. Landon wrote a spec script based on that, which ended up sold to The Montecito Picture Company, who brought it into development at DreamWorks Pictures.

Executive producer Steven Spielberg arranged for LaBeouf to be on the casting shortlist for this film because he was impressed by LaBeouf's work on Holes. Caruso auditioned over a hundred males for the role in five weeks before settling on LaBeouf as he was looking for someone "who guys would really like and respond to, because he wasn't going to be such a pretty boy". LaBeouf was attracted to the role because of the director's 2002 film The Salton Sea, which he complimented as one of his favorite films. Before filming started, the two watched the thriller films Rear Window starring James Stewart, Straw Dogs starring Dustin Hoffman, and The Conversation starring Gene Hackman. They also viewed the 1989 romantic film Say Anything... and "mixed all the movies together". LaBeouf says he spoke to people on house arrest and locked himself in a room with the bracelet to feel what the confinement of house arrest is like. He commented in an interview, "...it's hard. I'm not going to say it's harder than jail, but it's tough. House arrest is hard because everything is available. [...] The temptation sucks. That's the torture of it." Caruso gave him the freedom to improvise whenever necessary to make the dialogue appeal to the current generation.

Filming
Disturbia was filmed on location in the cities of Whittier, California and Pasadena, California. Filming took place from January 6, 2006 to April 29, 2006. The homes of Kale and Mr. Turner, which were supposed to be across from each other, were actually located in two different cities.

During filming, LaBeouf began a program that saw him gain twenty five pounds of muscle in preparation of his future films Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

According to LaBeouf, David Morse who plays Mr. Turner, did not speak to LaBeouf or any of the other younger actors while on set. LaBeouf said, "When we finished filming, he was very friendly. But he's a method actor, and as long as we were shooting, he wouldn't say a word to us."

Soundtrack
Disturbia: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is a soundtrack to the film of the same name, released on March 4, 2007 in the United States by Lakeshore Records.

Score
Disturbia: Original Motion Picture Score is a score to the film of the same name. It is composed by Geoff Zanelli, conducted by Bruce Fowler and produced by Skip Williamson. It was released on July 10, 2007 in the United States by Lakeshore Records.

Home media
The film was released on DVD and HD DVD on August 7, 2007 and on Blu-ray Disc on March 15, 2008.

In the "Making of Disturbia" section of the DVD's special features section it is revealed that LaBeouf and Morse did not have much contact off-set, so as to make the fight scenes at the end of the movie as realistic as possible.

Lawsuit
The Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed a lawsuit against Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks, its parent company Viacom, and Universal Studios on September 5, 2008. The suit alleged that Disturbia infringed on the rights to Cornell Woolrich's 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder" (the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window), and that DreamWorks never bothered to obtain motion picture rights to the intellectual property and evaded compensating the rights holder for the alleged appropriation. (Ownership of the copyright in Woolrich's original story "It Had to Be Murder" and its use as the basis for the movie Rear Window was previously litigated before the United States Supreme Court in Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990).) Contrary to some media reports, the claim was based on the original Woolrich short story, not the movie Rear Window.

This claim was rejected by the U.S. District Court in Abend v. Spielberg, 748 F.Supp.2d 200 (S.D.N.Y. 2010), on the basis that the original Woolrich short story and Disturbia are only similar at a high level of generality and abstraction. "Their similarities derive entirely from unprotectible elements and the total look and feel of the works is so distinct that no reasonable trier of fact could find the works substantially similar within the meaning of copyright law." Disturbia contained many subplots not in the original short story.

After the dismissal of the copyright claim in federal court, the Abend Trust filed another lawsuit in California state court against Universal Studios and the Hitchcock Estate on October 28, 2010, for a breach of contract claim based on earlier agreements which allegedly restricted the use of ideas from the original Woolrich short story and the movie Rear Window whether or not the ideas are copyright protectable, that the defendants had entered into with the Abend Trust after the Supreme Court's Stewart v. Abend decision.

Box office
Disturbia grossed $80.2 million in North America and $37.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $118.1 million, against a budget of $20 million.

The film was released in the United States on April 13 and opened first at the box office with $22.2 million. The film remained number one at the box office for the next two weeks, grossing $13 million and $9 million, respectively. In its fourth week, it earned $5.7 million and finished second behind the record-breaking Spider-Man 3 ($151.1 million).

Critical response
On Metacritic, the film has a score of 62 out of 100 based on reviews from 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.

The film earned a "two thumbs up" rating from Richard Roeper and A.O. Scott (filling in for Roger Ebert), with Roeper saying, "This is a cool little thriller with big scares and fine performances." William Thomas of Empire gave it 3/5 stars and wrote: "despite the 'edgy' title, Disturbia is content to be a multiplex-friendly teen thriller with a higher degree of slickness and smarts than most of its contemporaries."

David Denby of The New Yorker judged the film "a travesty", adding: "The dopiness of it, however, may be an indication not so much of cinematic ineptitude as of the changes in a movie culture that was once devoted to adults and is now rather haplessly and redundantly devoted to kids." Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it 2/5 stars, writing: "Despite the interesting set-up, the action degenerates into obvious implausibility and silliness - fatal for a suspense thriller - and boredom sets in."