American High

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Also, some of the clips below contain (mostly bleeped) strong language.

Today we're going to talk not about a movie, but instead a television series. The series in question is American High, a show that was briefly aired on Fox in the summer of 2000 (who airs a show about high school in the summer?) but canceled after only four episodes. Created by R.J. Cutler (who later went on to produce Morgan Spurlock's FX show 30 Days), American High was a documentary series presented in 30 minute episodes, in which we follow fourteen Illinois high school students (mostly Seniors) throughout a single year. Sound ambitious? Just wait, there's more... Along with the obligatory camera crew following the kids around, Cutler made the decision to equip each kid with their own DV camera, with which they would shoot their own footage. Originally meant only for shooting "Video Diary" segments which would be used later in editing for a narrative framing device, eventually the kids went off on their own and shot additional, non-"Diary" footage. The result was one of the most captivating, intimate, and honest looks into teenage life ever captured on film. I present to you the beginning of the first episode:

Wow. Brilliant, right? That has got to be one of the most amazing openings for a show, ever. Talk about setting the tone for a series...
So, anyway, Cutler produced 13 episodes of the show (including a one-hour finale), although only four ended up airing on Fox that summer. I was one of the few who watched those first episodes on Fox (it was the lowest-rated program on the network that year - ouch), and man, was I disappointed when it was canceled... Luckily, however, a year later PBS picked up the show and broadcast the entire 13 episodes over a several-week period (although they only aired it during those weeks and never re-aired it). Fortunately, I was able to record the entire series on videotape. Since it's never been officially released on DVD or any other format, this past week I started backing up my old tapes to DVD, and so I figured now would be a good time to share it with you all.
Each half-hour episode usually focused on 5-8 of the kids, and the opening credits were subtly different in each show, crediting the ones who appeared. The main subjects included:

• Morgan (featured in the video above) - A somewhat childish, reckless teen suffering from ADD, who constantly struggles to pass his classes in his Senior year.
• Brad - A gay Senior who has kept his sexuality secret until only six months previous, when he decided to "come out" in the middle of his Junior year. He's also the only openly gay student in the entire school.
• Robby - Brad's straight friend, also a Senior, known around school for being a "jock", but who has much more going on underneath the surface.
• Sarah - Robby's girlfriend, who, in her Junior year, struggles with the fact that Robby is graduating at the end of the year and moving away for college.
• Allie - A Senior who ditched four months of school last year and may not graduate. Her home life is also in turmoil, with parents who are divorcing and her father set to marry the woman he left his wife for.
• Kiwi - Kicker on the school's football team, who is looking forward to playing for a college team next year.
• Anna - Kiwi's long-time friend, who, despite being beautiful and single, is perpetually boyfriend-less, mostly due to an overprotective father - who is also pressuring her to attend his alma mater, Brown University, next year.
  
• Pablo - Born in Ecuador and moved with his mother to the U.S. when he was young. His mother's been divorced twice, and he lives with her and his young half-sister. A talented writer, poet, and photographer, he's also well-known amongst school administrators for his frequent troublemaking and drug involvement. In a surprising turn of events, near the end of the series, he considers enlisting in the Marines instead of going to college next year.
• Suzy - A shy, insecure Senior whose one joy in life is singing. With ambitions of one day becoming an opera singer, and her fluctuating weight a constant damper on her self-esteem, she decides to basically give up on a high school "social life" and spend her Senior year refining her craft and pursuing her dream.
  
• Kaytee - One of the few Juniors chronicled in the series. A talented singer and songwriter, she really hasn't pursued this avenue seriously until this year, when she starts recording demos and performing in small gigs around town.

These are the main kids in the series, and the last four - Tiffany, Scott, Abby, and Jon - are really just background characters, and/or friends of the others. So, from that list above, you can see there really is a true diversity in the kids that were chosen, and an opportunity for viewers to find at least one person they can identify with.
From just a basic filmmaking perspective, there must have been an insane amount of footage to go through. The two film crews alone shot several hours of footage a day, seven days a week, for the entire school year (9 months). Then, add in the fact that you have an additional 14 cameras out there in the field, also shooting several hours of footage a day. That's over 75,000 hours of footage in total. Wow. That's crazy.
But it was also totally worth it. Take the scene below, for example. Morgan, using his "video diary" camera in a decidedly different way: walking around the house as his parents yell at him.

This is the show at its most unique, cinéma vérité best. People tend to clam up when a professional camera crew is around; whether it's intentional or not, it's completely natural. But that's not the case when it's just "a kid with a camera". Because of this, the show is full of great moments like the one above, whether it be nice little moments of happenstance, or late-night confessions by the kids, lying in their bed and lit only by a flashlight.
The professional crew was also able to capture great footage; just check out this scene below:

Immensely relatable, completely honest, and very, very funny.
And one of my favorite moments from the series - Allie singing along to Steve Miller's "The Joker" in her car. She follows right along, but trails off during the line "I sure don't want to hurt no one..." I'm probably reading too much into it, but I love it:

Because PBS airs programs with no commercials, and the episodes don't quite fill up an entire half-hour block (they're 22 minutes) when the series was picked up by them the following year, we also got a great bonus: R.J. Cutler filled up the extra time by producing new five-minute segments that aired after each episode. Titled "Stories From the Field", each segment deals with certain behind-the-scenes aspects of the show, including interviews with many of the producers and some never-before-seen footage. Here's the first segment, which aired after the first episode:

So, yeah... a wonderful, criminally underseen show that deserves to be rediscovered (and hopefully released one day on DVD - although I think music-rights issues will prevent that from happening for a while; there's lots of contemporary, popular music on that show). I will eventually post all the episodes up online in their full form, and post a message here to let you guys know when that happens.
I should also mention that American High won the Emmy for Best Non-Fiction Program, based solely on the four episodes that aired, and not the complete thirteen. It was nominated again the following year for the same award, this time for the rest of the episodes that had finally aired on PBS. (Unfortunately, this award has been re-named "Best Reality TV Program", and now counts shows like Extreme Makeover among its winners.)
It's not perfect - it sometimes suffers from "TV-itis", with melodramatic music and longing shots of teens looking at the horizon... and the middle episodes sometimes suffer from character overload, but for a 6-plus hour documentary production, it really is an amazing achievement, and one of the best programs ever produced for American television. It deserves, in my opinion, to be mentioned right up alongside Hoop Dreams as one of the best documentaries ever made.

(Postscript: R.J. Cutler returned to similar territory in 2003 with Freshman Diaries for Showtime, which followed first-year college students. Good program, but not as memorable.
Also, even though PBS only aired it once, its website for American High is, amazingly, still up. It's located here. Also, the AH page on Cutler's official company website, Actual Reality Pictures, is here.)