On the Shelf
Hollywood Excessive: A Completely Epic, Method Opinionated Historical past of Teen Films
By Bruce HandyAvid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster: 384 pages, $30If you purchase books linked on our website, The Occasions could earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges help impartial bookstores.
Someday Bruce Useful was watching a teen film — it might have been one thing new or possibly a classic John Hughes, he doesn’t keep in mind — when he was struck by the similarities between highschool hallways and the wild frontier of traditional westerns. “It’s this kind of lawless arena where people are trying to eke out their own ideas about justice,” he just lately mentioned over espresso close to his dwelling in New York Metropolis. “Then I started thinking about teen movies as a genre that you could use to tell an interesting social history and how they reflected different eras.”
This was the inception of “Hollywood High,” Useful’s incisive new historical past of not simply teen films, however youngsters themselves. Tracing the style from the times of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy, the aw-shucks, girl-crazy hero of an enormously common film collection that began in 1937, to the dystopian adventures of Katniss Everdeen within the “Hunger Games” franchise, Useful (class of 1976) seems on the juvenile delinquents and the seashore children, the nerds and the imply ladies.
(Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
Within the course of, he connects the post-World Warfare II buying energy of the technology that might turn into child boomers to the creation of an leisure increase designed to serve and depict teenagers. Youngsters, after all, at all times existed. However they didn’t actually turn into a definite demographic till the twentieth century. As highschool enrollment steadily elevated, labor was more and more left to adults, and teenagers created peer teams separate from both their households or the streets. As Useful writes, “Teenagers and teen movies would come of age hand in hand.”
Useful grew up in Palo Alto (and went on to attend Stanford College), underneath the sway of “American Graffiti.” George Lucas’ pre-“Star Wars“ 1973 hit, set amid the car culture of the Central Valley, tells the story of fresh high school graduates in the summer of 1962, played by actors including Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Cindy Williams, staring at their future with uncertainty. Handy was a high school sophomore when the movie came out; even though he wasn’t about to graduate, he says he remembers “this kind of tension of being in this sort of bubble phase of life that was about to end. I think that spoke to me subliminally.” However principally he dug the wall-to-wall rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, that includes Chuck Berry, the Seashore Boys, Buddy Holly and different interval stars.
The creator of a number of kids’s books, a journalist for magazines together with Vainness Honest and the New Yorker and a former author for “Saturday Night Live,” Useful focuses on key movies, moments and figures in teen films beginning with Rooney, who got here to resent being outlined by a personality he performed properly after his teenagers (and whose hyper-libidinous exploits have been most un-Hardy-like). There’s James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), which broke floor by that includes teenagers largely outdoors the context of grownup supervision (and tapped into the youth-run-wild panic sweeping the nation within the ‘50s). There’s Jeff Spicoli, the archetypal stoner performed by Sean Penn within the sexually frank and deceptively darkish “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), and Cher, Alicia Silverstone’s Beverly Hills matchmaker dwelling a modern-day Jane Austen novel, in “Clueless” (1995).
Bruce Useful’s new ebook, “Hollywood High,” is an incisive historical past of not simply teen films, however youngsters themselves.
(Phoebe Jones)
“Hollywood High” additionally makes its manner out of the white middle-class milieu the place so many teen films are set. The comedy “Cooley High” (1975) helped pave the way in which for different films about Black teenagers, together with “Boyz n the Hood” (1991), John Singleton’s searing drama a couple of group of mates attempting to outlive in South-Central Los Angeles. With followers starting from conservative former California Gov. Pete Wilson to Oscar-winning “Moonlight” filmmaker Barry Jenkins, “Boyz” struck a cultural nerve by depicting a teen world that audiences had scarcely ever seen onscreen. (With its man-to-man talks between Laurence Fishburne’s Livid Types and his teen son, Tre, performed by Cuba Gooding Jr., it might additionally bear an unlikely resemblance to the Hardy films).
Teen films don’t move as quick and livid as they did even within the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, a period that brought titles including “She’s All That,” “Cruel Intentions,” “Mean Girls,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “Scream,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” and the appropriately titled spoof “Not Another Teen Movie.” In a way, nonetheless, the complete summer season film slate is now designed with teenagers — particularly teen boys — in thoughts. Useful says he thought of together with a chapter on superhero films earlier than deciding they represent their very own class. As he writes, “It’s not that there aren’t still films that celebrate and explore the adolescent male mindset; it’s just that we don’t call them teen movies anymore. We call them superhero movies.” Horror too is a dependable moneymaker aimed largely at teenagers, even when the flicks not carry titles like “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957).
Film teenagers have usually been misunderstood by the adults of their lives, however in the long term they appear to have gained. Movies for grownups nonetheless exist, however they’ve a tough time making noise over the sound and fury of the stuff that finally ends up on eight screens at your native multiplex. Now greater than ever, teen films are simply … films.
