The Bling Ring

This article is about the film. For the real-world crime ring upon which the film is based, see Bling Ring.

The Bling Ring
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Sofia Coppola
Written by	Sofia Coppola
Produced by	Roman Coppola Sofia Coppola Youree Henley Francis Ford Coppola
Starring	Israel Broussard Katie Chang Taissa Farmiga Claire Julien Georgia Rock Emma Watson Leslie Mann
Cinematography	Christopher Blauvelt Harris Savides
Edited by	Sarah Flack
Music by	Brian Reitzell Daniel Lopatin
Production companies	American Zoetrope NALA Films Pathé StudioCanal TOBIS Film Tohokushinsha Film
Distributed by	A24
Release dates	May 15, 2013 (2013-05-15) (Cannes) June 14, 2013 (2013-06-14) (United States)
Running time	90 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$8 million
Box office	$8,432,251

The Bling Ring is a 2013 American crime thriller black comedy film based on actual events. Directed, written and produced by Sofia Coppola, it features an ensemble cast including newcomers Israel Broussard, Katie Chang and Claire Julien, as well as Taissa Farmiga and Emma Watson, the movie's main marketing scheme.

Filming began in March 2012. It opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and released in the United States on June 14 (limited) and on June 21 (nationwide).

Plot

Inspired by actual events, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers, Rebecca (the ringleader), Marc, Nicki, Sam and Chloe, known as the Bling Ring, use the Internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to rob their homes. Victims included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Rachel Bilson, Audrina Patridge, Orlando Bloom and Miranda Kerr.

Cast

• Katie Chang as Rebecca Ahn (Rachel Lee)
• Israel Broussard as Marc Hall (Nick Prugo)
• Emma Watson as Nicky Moore (Alexis Neiers)
• Claire Julien as Chloe(Courtney Ames)
• Taissa Farmiga as Sam Moore (Tess Taylor)
• Leslie Mann as Laurie Moore (Andrea Arlington-Dunn)
• Georgia Rock as Emily Moore (Gabby Neiers)
• Carlos Miranda as Rob
• Gavin Rossdale as Ricky
• Stacy Edwards as Mrs. Hall
• G. Mac Brown as Henry
• Marc Coppola as Mr. Hall
• Janet Song as Mrs. Ahn
• Annie Fitzgerald as Kate (Nancy Jo Sales)
• Doug DeBeech as Adam
• Erin Daniels as Shannon
• Patricia Lentz as Judge Henley

Cameo appearances

• Paris Hilton as herself
• Kirsten Dunst as herself
• Lindsay Lohan as herself (archive footage)

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Production

Development

Sofia Coppola took a stab at Hollywood's notorious Bling Ring burglaries, reported TMZ in 2011. The celebrity gossip column announced: "Coppola is developing a film based on the infamous Burglar Bunch. We're told the film, which would be produced by daddy Francis' Zoetrope studio, does not have a start date or even a script yet. Coppola is no stranger to controversial stories. She's covered the 15-year-old Queen of France in Marie Antoinette, an empty-hearted movie star's friendship with a newlywed stranger in Lost in Translation, Jeffrey Eugenides' dream-like high-school suicide fantasyland in The Virgin Suicides and the depressed halls of the iconic Chateau Marmont through an Eloise-like tale in Somewhere. After the film opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival Coppola said she’s never really followed the tabloid and Internet side of pop culture, so she hadn't noticed the stories about a rash of home burglaries in 2008 and 2009 against stars like Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Miranda Kerr, Brian Austin Green, Megan Fox and Lindsay Lohan. The group stole more than $3 million dollars worth of high-end possessions from designer labels like Chanel, Gucci, Burberry, [[Marc Jacobs, Cartier and Tiffany. Later, on a flight, she read Nancy Jo Sales’s 2010 Vanity Fair feature, The Suspects Wore Louboutins, about a group of Los Angeles teens who burglarized their idols’ homes, stole their clothes and jewellery and spent their money at the same clubs where the stars hung out. “When I read the article, I thought it sounded like a movie and so I checked [who had] the rights. The more I talked to the journalist and read the transcripts, I thought the whole thing was so fascinating and so contemporary and said so much about our culture today.” The Bling Ring, she says, follows her Somewhere and “this idea of wanting to achieve celebrity and what happens when you get there. This is the development of that same thought on another level. You’re seeing it more and more emphasized in our culture.” The idea was “to try to show the story from their perspective, in the collage style of social media…. It’s a story that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago.” The five perpetrators, four girls and one fashion-forward boy went on “shopping” trips, and were both canny and dumb. (Coppola joked, “They were 16 and perhaps their brains hadn’t formed completely yet.”) They tracked the celebrities’ schedules via Google and gossip sites, and cased the homes with Google Street View. Then they posted self-incriminating pictures of their trophies on Facebook. Three of the real girls even starred in a 2010 reality show, Pretty Wild, which follows three young girls - Tess Taylor, 21, Alexis Neiers, 19, and Gabby Neiers, 16 - as they make their way into the Hollywood social scene. The girls and their family initially reside in Westlake Village, California, but eventually move to Hollywood. In summer 2009, after the pilot was filmed, Alexis was arrested for being involved with a group known as the "Bling Ring" that broke into the homes of many celebrities. Pretty Wild partly chronicled Alexis's trial. The show was not renewed for a second season.

Casting

Emma Watson as Nicki

Emma Watson's character, Nicki, is closely based on Alexis Neiers. "Twitterers meet Nicki, Nicki meet twitterers," Watson tweeted. "Nicki likes Lip Gloss, Purses, Yoga, Pole Dancing, Uggs, Louboutins, Juice Cleanses, Iced coffee and Tattoos." Alexis Neiers wasn't particularly impressed. "Close but I've never&would never wear that," she tweeted about Watson's wardrobe—but she was quick to add, "It has been a blessing to work with Mrs Coppola & I'm still in shock that Emma is playing me. I am sure she will be fantastic." Watson said that she prepared for her part by watching The Hills and Keeping Up With the Kardashians to “understand the psychology” of her bling- and celebrity-obsessed character. Her assessment of reality television is diplomatic: “It’s a different kind of story-telling. I think there are celebs who create a brand and create a business and a whole life out of other people’s interests, and there are people who don’t – who have a craft and a trade. It’s a very different kind of acting. I think as long as people know the difference, it’s okay.” She said that she listened to Britney Spears' Femme Fatale album to get into the mind-frame of her character. On her character in Bling Ring: “Nicki is so different from me. How do I try and understand a young woman who loves these things so much that she is prepared to commit crimes to have them?…With Nicki, I was really taking on a character. Some of her lines are so crazy and absurd—making sure she wasn’t a parody was a challenge.”

American Horror Story star Taissa Farmiga joined the ensemble cast, and THR reports that Leslie Mann, Israel Broussard (Flipped), Katie Chang, Claire Julien and Georgia Rock have been added. Mann will play a mom of two of the girls involved in the thievery, and Broussard is set as the male lead. Besides Watson and Farmiga, Coppola seems to have gone with relative newcomers to play the group of teens. Production is set to begin this spring in Los Angeles.

Filming

Prior to shooting, Sofia Coppola got the cast to fake-burgle a house to see what mistakes they'd make. Production primarily took place in and around Los Angeles, California in March and April 2012; notably in West Hollywood, Lynwood, and Venice. Paris Hilton, who was a victim during the actual Bling Ring robberies, has been confirmed to make a cameo appearance in the film, while Kirsten Dunst and Gavin Rossdale were also spotted on set of the film. Some scenes were shot in the celebrity victim's homes and at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood, California.

For added reality celeb authenticity, Paris Hilton appears for a quick moment in a nightclub scene, but more significantly, she lent Coppola her actual house to film in for two weeks so that the director could re-create the burglaries onscreen. She told Vulture Magazine: "I was really emotional watching it. "During some parts of it, I literally had tears in my eyes and I wanted to cry. I knew what happened with the burglaries, but I had never actually seen it — so watching it happen, I was like, 'Oh my God, this really happened to me. These kids were really in my house and did this to me.' It's so violating. It just made me really angry and upset, and when I see these kids, I want to, like, slap them.""It was like we have to get this into the movie," says Coppola, recalling walking through the house. "It was so unique. It would be hard to recreate that. She is larger than life and her house is like Paris World.

Music

"I spent a few months listening to everything that is out now, and then going back a bit to when the story actually happened. So the Kanye stuff was fair game, as well as the newer stuff. The Can stuff is interesting, because the other side is the score, the sound of L.A. at night when they're driving around. I thought that it would be really cool to use Klaus Schulze and some of the German stuff that I really, really love, and it's amazing how well those tracks fit next to each other."

—Reitzel, on the variety of music

The film's soundtrack was supervised by frequent Coppola collaborator Brian Reitzell. Entitled The Bling Ring: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, the soundtrack album was released on June 11, 2013 by Def Jam Recordings. It contains a mix of music ranging between such genres of hip-hop/rap, krautrock, and electronic. The musical score for the film was written by Reitzell in collaboration with Daniel Lopatin, known mostly under the recording name of Oneohtrix Point Never. In addition, Reitzell worked closely with Coppola to find contemporary music that would fit within the film's setting. After being contacted for song contributions, rapper Kanye West recommended Reitzell using Frank Ocean's then-unreleased "Super Rich Kids". Coppola's husband's band Phoenix also contributed the title track off of their most recent album Bankrupt!.

Track listing

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Performer	Length
1.	"Crown on the Ground"	Alexis Krauss, Derek Miller	Sleigh Bells	3:49
2.	"9 Piece"	Lil Wayne	Rick Ross (feat. Lil Wayne)	5:17
3.	"Sunshine"	Rye Rye, Maya Arulpragasam	Rye Rye (feat. M.I.A.)	3:22
4.	"212"	Azealia Banks, Jef Martens	Azealia Banks (feat. Lazy Jay)	3:26
5.	"Ouroboros"	Daniel Lopatin	Oneohtrix Point Never	2:02
6.	"Money Machine"	Tauheed Epps, Christopher Gholson	2 Chainz	4:42
7.	"Bad Girls"	Mathangi Arulpragasam, Nate Hills, Marcella Araica	M.I.A.	3:48
8.	"All of the Lights"	Kanye West, Jeff Bhasker, Stacy Ferguson, 'Malik Yusef El Shabbaz Jones', Scott Mescudi, Warren Trotter	Kanye West	4:59
9.	"Drop It Low"	Christopher Maurice Brown, Esther Dean, Jamal F. Jones	Ester Dean (feat. Chris Brown)	3:14
10.	"Gucci Bag"	Gemar Akoto, Kwadwo Boateng, Reem Oweti	Reema Major	3:54
11.	"Halleluwah"	Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Irmin Schmidt, Holger Schweizer, Kenji Suzuki	Can	5:36
12.	"Power"	Kanye West, Larry Griffin Jr., Mike Dean, Jeff Bhasker, Andwele Gardner, Ken Lewis, Francois Bernheim, Jean-Pierre Lang, Boris Bergman, Robert Fripp, Michael Giles, Greg Lake, Ian McDonald	Kanye West	4:52
13.	"Freeze"	Klaus Schulze	Klaus Schulze	6:39
14.	"FML"	Joel Zimmerman	Deadmau5	6:35
15.	"Super Rich Kids"	Frank Ocean, Malay, Earl Sweatshirt, Kirk Robinson, Nathaniel Robinson Jr., Ray Hammond, Mark Morales, Mark Rooney	Frank Ocean (feat. Earl Sweatshirt)	5:04
16.	"Bankrupt!"	Thomas Mars, Deck d'Arcy, Laurent Brancowitz, Christian Mazzalai	Phoenix	6:56

Release

Emma Watson at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival

The film opened the Un Certain Regard section of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. The film is Coppola's third film in a row that deals heavily with the famous. Following Marie Antoinette and Somewhere, a drama about a renowned actor and his 11-year-old daughter. About the premiere in Cannes she said: "It seems like the perfect setting for The Bling Ring when you see people walking around in their heels". "It's a glamorous place, so it feels appropriate." The film will close 39th Seattle International Film Festival on June 9, 2013.

The film has already drawn comparisons to the recent, day-glo debauchery of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers which is also under the new distributor, A24 Films. Though Coppola hasn't seen Spring Breakers, she says, "I can understand that there's this sort of trash culture aspect that's in the air."

Critical reception

Sofia Coppola at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival in the premiere

The Bling Ring has received generally positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 61% "Fresh" based on reviews from 154 critics, with an average score of 6.3/10, making it Coppola's second lowest rated movie after Marie Antoinette. Metacritic gives the film assigned the film an average score of 66 out of 100 based on 40 reviews from mainstream critics, indicating "generally positive reviews".

Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly had positive opinion: "Watching The Bling Ring, the audience is invited to understand the impulses of these child-woman thieves, even as Coppola stands firmly apart from their craziness and sees them for who they are". Others like Robbie Collin from The Daily Telegraph said: "Everything comes together for the good here: visuals, performances, raucous soundtrack, Coppola's teasing flirtation with, yet ultimate lack of commitment to, some kind of concrete morality." Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter said: "Coppola's attitude toward her subject seems equivocal, uncertain; there is perhaps a smidgen of social commentary, but she seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it."

Emma Watson's performance as Nicki has received widespread acclaim, with some critics sighting her as a potential Academy Award nominee. William Goss from MSN praised her saying "Watson stands out given Nicki's especially artificial persona (when addressing the media, she flippantly claims that 'I might want to be the leader of a country someday, for all I know')", and Gleiberman judging Nicki to be "a real mean girl", saying Watson "does a remarkable job of demonstrating that glassy-eyed insensitivity doesn't have to be stupid. Wearing a brown shag that transforms her into a look-alike of the young Marilyn Chambers, [she] proves that her willingness to take chances is only growing, and that she's an actress serious enough to turn a line like 'Your butt looks awesome!' into something that reveals character". Joe Neumaier from the New York Daily News, who gave the film an otherwise negative review, reserved praise for Watson saying "Watson, though, does a great imitation of hollow-eyed gaze; her character is the one who tries to parlay notoriety into success (everyone else can, she figures). The one-time Harry Potter star captures the slack-jawed fan only too well."

Box office

In its debut weekend in the United States, the film opened in five theaters with $210,001, averaging $42,000 in its debut this weekend for distributor A24. “We are thrilled with the results,” said A24’s Nicolette Aizenberg. “Sofia Coppola's latest and greatest has certainly entered the zeitgeist and we look forward to capitalizing on this great success as we expand nationwide next weekend.” It was Coppola’s best opening, beating out Lost in Translation's take in of $40,221 from 23 locations in 2003.

External links

• Official website
• The Bling Ring at IMDb
• The Bling Ring at Box Office Mojo
• The Bling Ring at Metacritic
• The Bling Ring History vs. Hollywood
• 12 Things You Didn't Know About Katie Chang Make It Better