Crime + Punishment in Suburbia

Rob Schmidt said that the film is a very loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel "Crime and Punishment." "The main character kills a terrible person, conceals the crime, is consumed by it, suffers secretly, confesses and in a spiritual way is reborn. It's just that it takes place in a California high school instead of Siberia," he said. Larry Gross had first written the script in the early 1990s, but it languished on a shelf until a run of high school films became popular in the last half of the decade. The film's original title was "Crime and Punishment in High School," but this was changed after the Columbine High School massacre happened on April 20, 1999.