Accepted is a 2006 American comedy film directed by Steve Pink (in his directorial debut) and written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Mark Perez. The plot follows a group of high school graduates who create their own fake college after being rejected from the colleges to which they applied. The story takes place in Wickliffe and a fictitious college town called Harmon in Ohio. Plot Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) is a persuasive senior from William McKinley High School in Wickliffe, Ohio, who, among other pranks, creates fake IDs. His gifts do not extend to grades, however, and he receives rejection letters from all the colleges to which he applies, including those with high acceptance rates. To gain approval from his demanding father (Mark Derwin), Bartleby creates a fake college, the South Harmon Institute of Technology (SHIT). His best friend, Sherman Schrader III (Jonah Hill), who has been accepted into his father's (Jim O'Heir) prestigious alma mater, Harmon College, aids Bartleby and fellow reject Rory Thayer (Maria Thayer), who only applied to Yale University and was rejected due to legacy preferences; Darryl "Hands" Holloway (Columbus Short), who lost his athletic scholarship after an injury; and Glen (Adam Herschman), who has a low GPA and failed his SAT due to stupidity. To make the "college" seem legitimate, Bartleby convinces Sherman to create a functional website for the school. When his father insists on meeting the dean, Bartleby hires Sherman's peculiar uncle, Dr. Ben Lewis (Lewis Black), a former philosophy professor at Harmon College, to play that role, and he leases an abandoned psychiatric hospital adjacent to Harmon College and renovates it to look like a college campus. Their plan backfires when the website, which automatically accepts any applicant, enrolls hundreds of other rejected students. Bartleby realizes that these people have nowhere else to go, so he lets them believe that the school is real, a place where they will finally feel accepted, despite objections from his friends. After a visit to Harmon disenchants him with traditional college life, he decides to let the students create their own curriculum; this ranges from the culinary arts, sculpting, meditation, to unusual courses such as psychokinesis, a subject one eccentric kid (Jeremy Howard) wishes to study. Bartleby creates a school newspaper (the SHIT Rag) and invents a mascot (the SHIT Sandwiches), while Lewis gives lectures about life; the students primarily spend their time partying. Meanwhile,