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 THIS AMERICAN SO-CALLED LIFE Newcity talks to producer-director R. J. Cutler about "American High," PBS' Highland Park High-shot nonfiction epic
Teenagers are cliches. Why? They're trying on identifies, shedding roles like fads, taking on the protective coloration of the world around them. Writing convincing teenage characters is something most American fiction filmmakers don't seem even to take a spirited stab at, which is what makes the saved-from-cancellation "American High" a sweet singularity. A thirteen-part series, drawn from 2,800 hours of video capturing the lives of fourteen students, their teachers and family, over the 1999-2000 school year at Chicago suburban Highland Park High School, it surpasses its creators' claim that they've made the nonfiction equivalent of "My So-Called Life." The teenage protagonists represent voices that cover a captivating range of intelligence, athletic acumen, creativity, sexuality, family conflict and hope for the future--once it begins. Creator-co-executive producer-director R. J. Cutler was a producer on 1993's Academy Award-nominated "The War Room," which captures the behind-the-scenes events of Bill Clinton's run for the White House. In addition, he directed (with David van Taylor), the sharp "A Perfect Candidate," which skewered the hubbub surrounding Oliver North's run for a Virginia U.S. Senate seat. Working with an unusually large post-production crew and an even more unusual deadline, "American High," was produced as a primetime show for Fox, which canceled it after only three airings, despite superb reviews. Recognizing their inability to promote the show, Fox allowed PBS to purchase the show, and will broadcast it, beginning April 4. A slightly edited version of my Friday, March 23 telephone conversation with Cutler follows. PRIDE: Did you shoot on film, then supplement it with the kids' video diaries? CUTLER: We did not. Nor did we want to. we're very proud of the fact that we used all forms of digital video for this. It's a pretty amazing kind of technological achievement because, as you look at the series, it's hard to tell it wasn't shot on film. A lot of people have asked that question. When you look at it, it really does look just like a filmed television show. It doesn't have that flat kind of non-filmic look of video. We were really excited that we were able to shoot it, twenty-eight hundred hours of footage, within our budget. Which is a massive amount, using all threes sizes of digital video. I feel like the who is in and of itself a breakthrough in terms of the technology that was used to record it. The kids were using these tiny HandiCams to record their video diaries. We were using three different size cameras in the field. PRIDE: So you could select whichever camera was most appropriate to the moment you meant to capture. CUTLER: Absolutely. We were using the equipment that fit the situation. PRIDE: Blown up to 35 [mm], you'd probably be able to see the difference, but the look on an average TV screen is impressive. CUTLER: I think you'd feel the same way if it were shown onSigma I've seen it projected. We go through a film look process with it, I think all of these things have advanced technologically to the point where it no longer is a burden if you're doing it the right way with the right people shooting stuff and with the right equipment. It's no longer a burden to be limited to video, which is a great thing. PRIDE: When Atom Egoyan was transferring video for "Felicia's Journey" a little while back, he said it was tough to find someone who could make the transfer actually look grainy and bad. CUTLER: Yeah. It is hard now. But if he's really looking for someone to do a lousy transfer, there are a couple of places I could recommend. When you're doing feature films, it's probably hard to find someone who can do a lousy transfer. When you come from the documentary world, you know the names, addresses and serial numbers of every lousy transfer [concern] because you have to deal with them. PRIDE: I think it was Barbara Kopple who first used the word "longitudinal" to describe her approach--dig as deep as you can for as long as you can. What were your forebears or exemplars, things you've seen? Or how your experience working with Pennebaker and Hegedus on "The War Room" or your own prior shooting? I mean, this is a bear of a project. CUTLER: It was. It was a huge undertaking and I don't think anyone has ever worked with this amount of material and turned it into finished product in this short a period of time. I mean, I know that nobody has. We, as I say, shot twenty-eight-hundred hours of footage over a ten-month period and within three months of our finishing, of our wrapping of the shoot, we had completed thirteen episodes, totaling seven hours of completed material. It can frequently take up to a year just to cut a ninety-minute feature documentary. We cut, as I say, thirteen episodes, seven hours of complete storytelling and shot it all over a thirteen-month period. That was a pretty massive undertaking. But that certainly, those who came before us provided great inspiration and guidance in doing this. You mentioned "The War Room" and D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, they're enormous influences on all of our work and certainly on my work and the principles that go into this. But there are a lot of other documentary filmmakers whose work has had a great influence on us. PRIDE: Can you throw out-- CUTLER: The Maysles are certainly included in that list. The folks that did "An American Family" laid out a great model for this kind of storytelling and filmmaking. And then I have to say we were equally influences by narrative storytellers like the folks who made "My So-Called Life." We always said, y'know, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, we always said that we imagined this show being a nonfiction version of "My So-Called Life." It was important that our influences, I mean, it's important to point out that our influences were not just y'know those whose work we admire in the nonfiction field, but also those whose work we admire in fiction storytelling. And if you look at the way the shows are structured, if you look at the way we use music, if you look at the way, we y'know, the kind of packaging of the show, all of those things, you see great influence from hour drama storytelling. PRIDE: Sometimes the way journalists bring up "An American Family," you wonder if they've seen it recently or at all. But for yourself, you said it provided a kind of model for this type of storytelling. Could you elaborate on that? CUTLER: Absolutely. I mean, it's cinema verite storytelling that focuses around personal stories of people. Now, they were looking at the state, their question was, what's it like to be an American Family in the early 1970s. Our question is, what's it like being a kid coming of age at the end of the twentieth century? Y'know, at the end of the 1990s. So, it's a similar question. But there's also the form of it. Theirs, "An American Family," was a continuing drama, with regular characters but it was all nonfiction, y'know. It worked the way any primetime drama worked, but except for the fact that it was not scripted. Each episode was self-contained, but each episode also carried its characters from one episode to another, and each episode resolved things from previous episodes even while it was setting up things for future episodes. The way a primetime drama works. There aren't too many documentary series that emulate that model, but ours certainly did. PRIDE: What gave you the bravado to do this? It's a great enterprise, but it also sounds like an insane amount of work in that period of time. CUTLER: [laughs] Well, um, y'know, that's probably accurate. Maybe we didn't know better than not to do it. Like with all of these [documentary] things, y'know. There were certainly two major motivations. One was subject, and one was form. In terms of subject, we had all been out of high school for between fifteen to twenty years and it was something we felt that was on our minds. Y'know, I was gearing up for my twentieth high school reunion and didn't know a lot of kids who were in their late teens and kind of imagined that if I did know them, we would look at each other the way E.T. and Elliot look at each other the first time they meet. But the truth is, what we discovered was, is that the experience they're going through and the experience I went through when I was in high school, for all its differences, had a tremendous amount in common. There was a lot of common ground there. But what motivated it was curiosity, the same thing that motivates you when you're doing any of these films, you want to know what it's like, what's it like to run a presidential campaign, what's it like to be a kid coming of age at this moment? Of course, those questions, what's it like to be a kid today, are very much a part of our cultural zeitgeist. I don't think it's a big surprise that filmmakers at this moment would be asking those questions. Then in terms of form, there was a clear ambition to explore this kind of storytelling, nonfiction storytelling, in an episodic manner. We generally spend a year filming something, then another year cutting it, and we put a tremendous amount of our lives into these, many , many hours into these projects and they wind up resulting in a ninety-minute product. A lot of amazing stuff winds up on the cutting room floor, and a lot of stuff we would otherwise like to include in the stories we tell, we can't, because of time constraints I think a lot of documentary filmmakers are starting to say, hey, wait a second, we can do more with material we gather, there's lots of opportunity here. There are so many different outlets in the television universe that are looking for these kinds of things, that you start to think, well, why can't the work and the kind of storytelling that we do, address the needs that these distributors have? So the motivation was really twofold. It came from different directions, form and content. Like I say, I don't think that I and my colleagues on "American High" are the only people who are doing this in the nonfiction world. There's another series coming up on PBS coming up called "Local News," which is an episodic series that tells the story of a local news station. there are a number of people who are doing these kinds of things. PRIDE: I assume it takes an enormous backroom of people, a whole post-production factory behind you, to get through 2, 800 hours of footage. A logging and database factory-- CUTLER: Absolutely. It's a nonfiction story-digesting machine. There were half a dozen loggers who were working around the clock, inputting material, watching every frame of footage, we had a story department that had another half-dozen people in it, we had a half dozen edit rooms operating, each edit room having an editor , an assistant editor and other support people. There's a senior staff that was made up of myself, and Dan Partland, the supervising producer [among others]. And there was also a kind of story producer who we worked very closely with. There were people in the field who were collecting the material but who were also starting the digesting process while in the field. After every day of shooting, they would submit reports and they would participate in weekly story conferences as well. There's this kind of ongoing process. I wish you could--the office is no longer up and running on this particular show, but it basically required designing this kind of cinema verité factory to make stories. To process them. Since we were doing it all simultaneously with the shooting, every day of filming actually had the potential to ripple through everything else we had done. It was kind of like a Rubik's cube of figuring out what each episode was going to be. PRIDE: You weren't exposed to all of the footage, of course. I talked to Kirby Dick about "Chain Camera," the documentary he and Dody Dorn did that will be on Cinemax this fall, passing cameras along through a series kids in one L.A. school, and their screeners brought footage down from 700 hours to 250, and he saw a much, much smaller amount of that, he said. CUTLER: [The difference] is we were shooting a lot, they didn't shoot anything. Their footage, each kid collected their footage for them in one week, and that was it. then they moved on to other characters. So you could digest one character's material. With our stuff, every day you were getting more material on a particular kid over a ten-month period. So it's difficult to break that down. Also, it was important because we were developing an episodic series, not just a one-off, and we needed each of our shows to have a relationship to the shows that came before and after. Which is this model of primetime drama that I'm talking about. In a given episode, what happens to Morgan has a relationship to what happened to him in the pervious episode and also is preparing you for what is going to happen to him down the road. You're telling the story of a year in his life. the same with Kaytee, the same with Brad, the same with Robby and Sara. No episode tells their complete story, it's part of a narrative arc. And also you're juggling fourteen characters. If you haven't seen Pablo in a couple of episodes, we want to make sure you don't lose touch with him. You don't lose track of his storyline. You're dealing with this huge ensemble whose stories you also have to tell as well. So it's a very different thing. Again, we're operating in this organic way. When you do a normal film, it's like there are three of you. You go out with your shooter and your sound guy and you collect a lot of footage and then you go back into the edit room, you're working with an editor, an assistant editor and you watch everything yourself. but when you're doing a project that's this huge, you have to kid of give over to allowing your job, what be your normal job, to be sliced up into lots and lots of different pieces. Your job is then to make sure that all those different slices are working together and that you have an overall picture of what it is you're accomplishing. No human being can watch 2,800 hours of footage and oversee production and post-production simultaneously. It can't really be done. PRIDE: Michael Apted describes something interesting with each of the "UP" films, where a new thread in someone's life prompts them to go back to older installments, and perhaps use footage from 14 or 21 or whenever that hasn't been seen before. CUTLER: Sure. Sure. PRIDE: Why Highland Park? Was it similar to your own background? What about Chicago or the Midwest made this-- CUTLER: A few different reasons. One was, absolutely, it was similar to my own background. It's always hard to identify what motivates you to follow a particular subject or set of subjects. But definitely, one of them, to the extent that this project was driven by my curiosity about how the world I was familiar with had changed. I grew up in a suburban community outside of New York that was not all that dissimilar to Highland Park. There was something I recognized in that, which was terrific. On the other hand, we as a team felt that we really didn't want to work in our hometown, which is Los Angeles. And we really didn't want to go back to New York. We kind of wanted to stay away from the coasts, and since this was the first installment of what we hope to many years of doing this, we felt, let's go into the heartland. And also Fox, which was our network at the time, felt that a suburban environment would be ideal for them and the kind of programming that they do. That was the only encouragement they gave us, or direction they gave us. I said and I continue to say, you can do "American High" in any high school in America. any high school in America can carry this show. I think there will be a lot of things that it shares with the first season, and a lot of things that would be different. But for season one, we felt like we were going to go to the heartland, we were going to do a suburban community and we of course needed to find a place that was enthusiastic about having us but also had a healthy skepticism about it so they would ask the right questions and be prepared once we came to town. PRIDE: Casting in nonfiction work seems to matter--whether it's choosing the right kids, running on instinct without truly knowing why, like the makers of "Hoop Dreams' did. The Maysles had Paul, the failing main subject among the Bible salesmen in "Salesman," or even in the utter contrivance of "Survivor." You had your town meeting with the seniors and their parents, a kind of open call, I guess. CUTLER: Yes. PRIDE: Where does a kind of "casting" fit into this film? CUTLER: Unfortunately, there's a nebulousness.... I think if y'know, the folks, Steve James and Fred Marx and those guys who did "Hoop Dreams" would say that it was just good luck, they would be selling themselves short. I wouldn't, I challenge them on the assertion that they just happened to follow some guy who was shooting hoops one day. They had an instinct and that instinct was probably based on a number of things-- PRIDE: Right-- CUTLER: --Which they were exposed [to] in the time they had with those guys they wound up following. PRIDE: I meant that more in the way that they could have chosen kids who dropped out of basketball very early, their kismet could have been different, and it would have been a different film altogether, if one they'd have wanted to even finish. CUTLER: Sure. Well, that is the case and is always the case and was the case with us. But y'know, you're going on some gut feeling. We met with every kid who wanted to do this. We spent at least an hour with every single kid who wanted to do this project. PRIDE: And how many were there? CUTLER: In the senior class at Highland Park? There were about 120 kids who were interested in doing this. PRIDE: Wow. CUTLER: At least interested in learning more about it, interested in sitting around with us and talking. that doesn't meant that they at the end of the day would have felt that this was the right thing for them. We wanted everybody to know it was OK not to want to do it, and that we didn't feel this was necessarily for everybody. This was a project for people who felt they had an important story to tell and wanted to tell it. That's all we really required of them. Then you're trying to put together a group that you feel represents a, y'know, an accurate cross-section of this group of kids that you're dealing with, this community, this high school. And also as many different points of view as possible, that can provide the answer--an answer to the question, what's it like to be a kid right now?" All of those things are the things you can say. But then there are the things you can't talk about, like, "Well, I'm going to spend a year with this person, so I gotta be interested, in a way that I perhaps can't even articulate the reasons why. they have to appeal to me in some way, they have to resonate with me, or with one of my colleagues who feel strongly about it in a way that says, "you know what? This is someone whose story we want to tell." It's gotta be a match. You couldn't make "the War Room" if D. A. Pennebaker thought that James Carville was a, y'know, loudmouthed yahoo. He had to, Penny and Chris, their own passion had to resonate with James' and George's [Stephanopoulous] passion. The same is true in "American High." there is something you can't describe about what it is when you're putting together a group of subjects. And I do think that kismet has a lot to do with it... and dumb luck has a lot to do with it... but I think that that's part of what it is that we do. We look for stories that we want to tell that we care about telling. And we also look for something that I always talk about, people who care a tremendous amount about what they are doing and are doing it as well as they can under high-stakes circumstances. I think every single one of our kids, y'know, Kaytee, Pablo, Morgan, Robby, Sara, Brad, all fit into that description and what it is that they're doing that they care so much about is figuring out who the hell they are at this crucial moment in their lives? PRIDE: A question people are still asking in their lives at 38. High school is almost inevitably a microcosm of rivalries, competition, self-doubt-- CUTLER: Sure, sure. I don't think that the stuff that these guys are going through is going to be foreign to anybody, and not just from their own high school experience, but from the thoughts that they have when they're lying down at night. Y'know? PBS made a postcard that I'm looking at right now, and it's Kaytee lying in her bed with her headphones on and above her head they've written in words that are meant to be I guess a window into her thoughts, she's saying, "What will I be doing in ten years? Can I make a difference in the world? Will I go to college? What's for lunch? Will I get married? How about kids? Do people like me? Am I attractive? Who am I?" I've got to imagine that's what's running through everybody's head, who takes the time. Kids, at the age of 17, that's what they do, that's what they do for a living. PRIDE: I was about to say, it's their profession. CUTLER: Exactly. PRIDE: We're also at this moment in time nowadays where teenagers are used to being videotaped, no one really feels like having to show off. They're ubiquitous. CUTLER: Absolutely. This is not a foreign instrument. I can't, I can't think of an instance where we had the proverbial kid jumping up and down in front of the camera, waving his arms and saying, 'hi mom.' when we were in that high school. It has a lot to do with who we are and what we look like and the equipment we use. We're not showing up with trucks and lights and Diane Sawyer, we're just hanging out and filming. But still, we were no more foreign to these kids than we would have been without the cameras in our hands. PRIDE: One of the great, astute things about what Zwick and Herskovitz and their writers brought to "My So-Called Life" is remembering, oh, the idea that when you're 17, you... are... very... serious. I don't mean just melodramatic thoughts of suicide or violence. Many people seem not to want to recall just how much serious thinking they had to do. CUTLER: Absolutely. PRIDE: Were there any particular instructions about what it would make the show supposedly attractive to a Fox audience. Any cautions about content? CUTLER: You know what, I have to tell you, they really-- Even Fox didn't say, find a suburb, that really came from the studio, which was y'know, I mean, they're all owned by the same megalopoly, but the studio, which supported the development and the production of the show from day one, just felt like a suburban environment would be the best thing. I wouldn't call it instruction, I'd call it a point of view. The truth is, they just, they looked at the show, y'know, good constructive notes in terms of storytelling and stuff like that, and responses to rough cuts of episodes, but nothing that any thoughtful caring viewer with a perspective wouldn't have said if I had shown a rough cut to them. No limitations. Of course you're dealing with the FCC and there were some language restrictions but they were fairly minimal. Subject matter? We told them what we were doing, they said, great, go do it. And then they really embraced it every step of the way. As has PBS. this is much more a story of PBS coming along and taking a show that the Fox broadcasting company couldn't support on their air or made a bunch of bungles, in crucial ways, so that this show that had gotten better reviews of anything they had ever done before was suddenly put up against a juggernaut on a competing network, that consisted of "Survivor" and "Big Brother." It was bone-headed programming and then they weren't supporting it with any marketing budget whatever. And I don't even [mean a] small marketing budget, they didn't put a penny into the marketing of the show. The combination of those two things really doomed us. And along comes PBS and says, well, we see the potential of this, and we're going to support this with marketing and give it a great time slot. And we're going to make it a centerpiece of our spring programming lineup. PRIDE: I assume Fox did the right thing and worked out a fair deal with PBS, that there wasn't any arduous haggling. CUTLER: No, they were terrific about it. Listen, I think they felt bad. I think they knew they blew it and they felt bad that they blew it. And I do think they did believe in it. It's hard now to remember, but last summer was a very difficult time for Fox. They had had a couple of different heads of the network over the course of a year, and a new one came in at the beginning of July. Nobody was watching them and it was a very tough time for them. They had had an abysmal year up until then. So it was just a tough, tough moment in the history of that network. They've really turned it around wonderfully this year and they seem to have their footing. Gale Berman is doing a terrific job and so is Sandy Grushow and it's all going well over there. But last summer, they just did not have the breathing room to provide the patience and support a show like ours needed. You know, we just needed some time. We needed some time and we needed some marketing to let the world know that this incredible show that had these amazing reviews was there. They just didn't have the time to do that. My experience of it is that they felt terrible about it, and when PBS came along and said, well, we'd like to give it a shot, they said great, please do. They really made it possible for the show to live on. PBS begins broadcasting "American High: on April 4; check local listings. For more preview material, check the "American High" Website: www.pbs.org/americanhigh.
Also by Ray Pride COLOR BIND
WORDS ON PICTURES
OFF CAMERA
MANNY FROM HEAVEN
RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
MEET JOE BLOW
KNOWING DICK
CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
WATERY, GRAVE
SLIPPERY SLOPES
SLY CONCEPT
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