Well Chicago is sure feeding the site today. Here's a cool story from the "Burbs". They need to shoot these types of Docos around the country at different mixes of high schools and capture a real cross section of modern youth. Ol' Father Geek's 1st college major 35 years ago before I took up film was Sociology, with my prime interest being teen angst. Documents like this one can go a long way towards answering important questions, especially if they take off the kid gloves and film the total story. Here's whats happening at Highland Park...
Hey Harry, how are ya. Love the site.
Anyway, I'm a junior in high school, I currently attend Highland Park High School in, well, Highland Park Illinois. It's a suburb of Chicago. For the past couple of months, our school has been bombarded with a slew of cameramen, producers, steadicams, and cranes.
Reason being: a documentary on teenage life is under way. It's being helmed by RJ Cutler, who was one of the directors creating the Academy Award nominated Clinton campaign documentary, "The War Room." One of the producers is named Ted, but I'm not too sure of his last name. He was a producer on Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse."
What they're doing is going through the entire school year with us, interviewing kids and getting to know them. They come through the halls with cameras, steadicams (damn cool looking pieces of equipment), cranes, etc. They've even picked a few seniors to record themselves on digital camcorders, Blair Witch style, documenting their lives.
I've sat down and talked with some of the filmmakers with friends. Here's what I know: they have a tentative deal with Fox to create a docu-series. They want it to be less along the lines of a new program, such as the ones on HBO all the time, and more like a real version of "My So Called Life."
In editing, they're going to make stories out of the footage. As for the footage, they're filming practically everything, from kids doing homework to our school plays.
They cannot, however, use any footage of high school students participating in the illegal actions exhibited at many parties, which I think is unfortunate, because that would be a true representation of one of the major aspects of high school. So nobody is too sure how this thing is going to turn out, but it's certainly cool.
And with these cameras prying into people's conversations and following my friends and I over the weekends, I can't help but think of "Ed TV" and "The Truman Show." It's damn similar, and people have even complained about these camera people.
they picked our school because they feel it represents a good mixture of classes and races, although most of the population are white, Jewish kids. We emphasize the arts a lot, and are pretty well known for that.
So, hope this helps! I guess you can call me...
TYLER DURDEN
