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      The Stories of Teen Punks That Ruled New York In the Late ’70s

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      High school students spent their nights forging a colorful late-night scene marked by big choruses and few rules. The bands didn’t last, but the taste of art and freedom shaped their lives.The year was 1977, and the first generation of New York City punk and alternative bands had moved on to larger venues and the international touring circuit. The thrash of hardcore was still a few years down the pike. Yet the storied music venues of Manhattan were alive and aloud with excited, underage patrons.They passed their days at Stuyvesant High School. They came from the High School of Performing Arts and Murrow. They went to Friends Seminary, Walden and Dalton, and to Brooklyn Friends, too. Some were dropouts and runaways; some were even from the suburbs. Almost all of them were under 18.Over the next four years, they spent their nights creating their own rock scene, playing aggressive, witty, sophisticated and intense pop and punk for fellow teenagers in places like CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, Hurrah and TR3. These weren’t the all-ages shows that would become commonplace in the city a few years later. This was a unique moment in the city’s musical history that changed the lives of many of the artists and audience members who were there, though their stories have gone largely untold. Imagine an upbeat “Lord of the Flies,” styled by Manic Panic and Trash & Vaudeville.Their ranks included Eric Hoffert, who did four hours of homework from Bronx Science each weekday, then practiced his guitar for four hours; weekends belonged to his band, the Speedies. Arthur Brennan, a 16-year-old from Groton, Conn., who regularly hitchhiked 20 miles to the only newsstand where he could buy magazines that covered new music; he renamed himself Darvon Staggard and ran away to New York City to join a band. And Kate Schellenbach, a ninth grader at Stuyvesant who had heard a rumor that groups her age were playing the most famous music clubs in the world, just blocks from where she lived.In September 1979, Schellenbach was 13 and starting high school in an outfit assembled to express her interest in new wave music: overdyed painters’ pants from Unique Clothing Warehouse, white go-go boots from Reminiscence in the West Village, a bowling shirt and an Elvis Costello pin.“I remember going into the girls’ bathroom,” she said cheerfully, speaking via video chat, “and this girl, Nancy Hall, who was the coolest, was sitting on the sink.” Nancy suggested that Kate go see a band playing at CBGB later that week called the Student Teachers. The arty pop combo included a female rhythm section featuring some kids from Friends Seminary and, somewhat improbably, the rather distant Mamaroneck High School.“If I hadn’t seen the Student Teachers that fateful night, I might never have been a drummer,” said Schellenbach, who helped found the Beastie Boys in 1981 and went on to form Luscious Jackson. “Seeing Laura Davis play drums, seeing Lori Reese play bass and how exciting the whole scene was, everything about it made me think, ‘Oh, maybe this is something I can do,’” she added. “These people were still in high school — it seemed attainable.”From left: Joe Katz, David Scharff and Lori Reese of the Student Teachers, onstage at Trax in 1980. The band inspired Kate Schellenbach, who went on to help found the Beastie Boys the next year.Ebet RobertsThe timing was perfect: This was the first generation to grow up with punk as the status quo, not the exceptional rebellion. “Part of the call of history was that you weren’t supposed to just listen and take it in, you were supposed to listen to the conversation and form a band yourself,” the Student Teachers’ keyboardist, Bill Arning, now a prominent gallery owner and curator, said via video chat. “Of course you were supposed to form a band; it didn’t even seem like it was an ‘out there’ idea.”The key groups in the movement were the glam bubble gum Speedies, a high-concept bunch of overachieving teens (plus two very slightly older members) who “wanted to be the fusion of the Beatles, the Sex Pistols and the Bay City Rollers,” according to the founding guitarist Gregory Crewdson; the Student Teachers, who played art pop with elegiac touches reminiscent of Roxy Music and the Velvet Underground; the Blessed, who were the first, sloppiest and most fashionable group on the scene; and the mega poppy mod group the Colors, who like the Speedies were enamored with bubble-gum music and were mentored by Blondie’s drummer, Clem Burke. (Other bands on the edges of the movement included the Stimulators and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan.)If the core bands in the teen punk scene had anything in common, it was an affection for big choruses, flashy, colorful clothes and a near-arrogant certainty that the empowerment promised by punk rock was now theirs to inherit.From left: Nick Berlin, Billy Stone and Howie Pyro of the Blessed onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus,” Berlin said.Eileen Polk“We didn’t know any better,” said Nicholas Petti, who, in 1977 at age 13, started calling himself Nick Berlin and became a co-founder of the Blessed. He spoke to The Times via video chat just before attending the funeral for another founding member of the band, Howie Pyro. Last month at the Bowery Ballroom in Manhattan, Pyro’s inheritors, including D Generation, Theo Kogan of the Lunachicks and Brian Fallon of the Gaslight Anthem, paid tribute to the New York mainstay with a memorial show.“We thought this was how you lived. We would watch John Waters movies and, yes, of course we would understand they were actors, but we thought, this is what you are supposed to do,” Petti said from his home in Fort Bragg, Calif., where he works as the head of the Culinary Arts Management program at Mendocino College. “This is your life, this isn’t how you dress up, this is all of it,” he added. “We wanted to be a three-ring circus. When we played an early show and a late show at Max’s, we would bring two complete changes of clothes for each set. This certainly isn’t how we would have expressed it at the time, but it was living life as a performance art piece.”The Blessed (pronounced as two syllables) were the band that Arthur Brennan ran away from Groton to join; after two weeks the money he had saved from his paper route ran out, and when private detectives came to retrieve him, he was happy to leave his new identity as Darvon Staggard behind. “After the first night, it’s really not that much fun sleeping at the all-night Blimpies on 6th Avenue,” Brennan, now a public-school teacher in Los Angeles, said via video chat. “But it was such a sense of relief to meet people who were like you. In your own hometown, you’d be considered a loser-slash-weirdo. We were kids learning how to act in a crazy, artsy adult world.”The author Jonathan Lethem, who wrote about his affection for the Speedies and Miller Miller Miller & Sloan in “The Fortress of Solitude,” noted that childhood was different in New York at that time. “The city was chaotic, in a way, but it was really easy for us to operate,” he said in a video chat. “You couldn’t convince a taxi driver to go back to Brooklyn if your life depended on it, but you could always walk over the bridge! I do feel that we essentially owned the city, that we were the actual ones it belonged to at the time.”Jill Cunniff, a scene patron who later founded Luscious Jackson with Schellenbach and Gabby Glaser, said the city seemed like a nonstop event. “Night was freedom,” she said, “and it felt like we were really safe. If you were a parent, you might think the opposite — those kids are going out to nightclubs, they are only 13, that’s so dangerous. No. My daytime at I.S. 70 was really dangerous,” she added, referring to her public middle school. “My nighttime was safe.”How did the scene keep going? None of the well-traveled downtown venues — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, TR3 or Studio 10 — regularly checked IDs, the musicians recalled, and they said the ones uptown, like Hurrah and Trax, only loosely enforced age-based alcohol restrictions. (The legal drinking age in the city was 18 until late 1982.) In fact, the CBGB owner Hilly Kristal and Peter Crowley, who managed and booked Max’s, seemed to welcome the wave of underage New Yorkers eager to discover music.“Kids, generally, like to drink,” said Crowley, laughing via phone. “But we tried our best to make sure people were safe — though I did wear a badge that said, ‘I am not your mother.’”But was the safety an illusion? “For a long time, I looked at this period of my life nostalgically and sentimentally,” the author Christopher Sorrentino said in an email. “Only recently have I begun to recognize how vulnerable we all were, how many risks we were exposed to with absolutely no one to apply the brakes. This goes double for the girls, who at 15 or 16 often had ‘relationships’ with men in their late 20s and early 30s.”Laura Albert, who was in the scene from age 13 and later achieved fame (and notoriety) writing under the nom de plume JT LeRoy, agreed. “Access still came with a price, especially for girls and queer boys,” she wrote in an as-yet-unpublished memoir. “That said, there was a sense of possibility, age was not a barrier, I was a teen in foster care but I still had access to the musicians I admired, calling them on pay phones and interviewing them for fanzines.”The Stimulators onstage at Max’s Kansas City in 1978.Ebet RobertsBy 1980, the teen punk scene was simultaneously evolving and dissolving as its members grew up and moved on. Some of its participants went on to play prominent roles in the local hardcore punk movement: Hoffert and Crewdson of the Speedies produced the first Beastie Boys demo, and the Stimulators became a foundational band of the local hardcore punk scene. Others went to college or took jobs that required leaving their dalliance with late nights at Max’s Kansas City and shopping for brothel creepers on St. Marks Place in the rearview mirror.“As cool as I thought the scene was, I realized I just didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be in college,” Laura Davis-Chanin, the Student Teachers’ drummer, said via video chat. “That was a big thing for me, given the incredible, shocking, thrilling world of rock ’n’ roll that I was a part of.”While the punk scene that preceded this moment has been exceptionally well documented, far less has been written about the teens who ran the night as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s. None of the groups were signed by major record labels and only one of the bands, the Colors, released an LP within the initial span of its career. (The Speedies put out an archival collection in 2007, largely to take advantage of the use of one of their songs, “Let Me Take Your Foto,” in a Hewlett-Packard ad campaign).With only spottily distributed independent 45s to spread the word outside the five boroughs, what was a potent local scene never gained a national or international profile. But several of its members have had notable careers inside and out of the arts world. Crewdson, the Speedies’ guitarist, is an acclaimed tableau photographer; Hoffert, his bandmate, became a data technology pioneer who helped develop the QuickTime media player and is now the senior vice president of video technology at Xandr; Allen Hurkin-Torres played in the Speedies, too, and is a former New York State Supreme Court justice.“There was a magical empowerment from what we did that has carried us through life,” Hoffert said via video chat. “The photography Gregory has done, my work in digital media, is directly related to that.”Schellenbach had a similar outlook: “It spawned so many cool things — art, authors, hip-hop. A magical time in New York City!”Eli Attie, who began going to Max’s before he had even hit puberty, became a speechwriter for Al Gore, then a writer and producer on “The West Wing” and “Billions.” “It made me unafraid,” he said of the scene. “It made me realize your life can be anything you want. If you want to know these people, if you want to experience this music, even if it seems out of reach or not allowed, you can just do it. You can write your own story.” More

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      Modern Love Podcast: First Love Mixtape, Side B

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      Listen and follow Modern LoveApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhat’s the song that taught you about love as a teen?Brian ReaWhen we asked this question at the start of the season, the responses came pouring in. We heard from present-day teens streaming their anthems on repeat, and we heard from listeners who have been with their partners for over 50 years. There were stories of jazz and rap, adrenaline rushes and loneliness, and many lessons in matters of the heart. (“Don’t let your friends choose your boyfriends,” Amy from St. Louis said.)On our season finale, we share more of these songs and stories. Then, we fast-forward to an essay about the end of love. After more than 50 years of marriage, Tina Welling decided that she wanted a divorce — a decision that turned out to be liberating.Thank you to all of the listeners who sent us their teenage anthems. We’ve compiled them into one glorious Spotify playlist. Take a listen below.Hosted by: Anna MartinProduced by: Hans Buetow, Julia Botero, Anna Martin and Mahima ChablaniEdited by: Sara SarasohnExecutive Producer: Wendy DorrEngineered by: Elisheba IttoopOriginal Music: Hans Buetow and Dan PowellTheme Music: Dan PowellEssay by: Tina WellingRead by: Suzanne TorenFounder, Modern Love: Daniel JonesEditor, Modern Love Projects: Miya LeeSpecial thanks: Mahima Chablani, Renan Borelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Julia Simon, Lisa Tobin, Sam Dolnick, and Ryan Wegner at Audm.Thank you to so many listeners who shared their teenage songs and stories, including Kate Mitchell, Ankit Sayed, Helen Coskeran, Michal Vaníček and Sara Molinaro.Thoughts? Email us at modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com. More

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      How Do You Make Teen Comedies Today? Buy a High School.

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      LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The teenage couple is lounging on the lawn outside a high school, taking advantage of a free period between classes in that age-old way: making out on the quad. A friend runs over, clearly agitated by a drama unfolding elsewhere, and asks for help. The duo reluctantly gets up and follows, dragging their backpacks behind them.Then there’s another interruption to their moment. The director, Sammi Cohen, yells cut. An actor, Tyler Alvarez, asks for another take. “One more, real quick,” he says.This is an early fall day, back to school at American High. The school has not had actual students in the halls for years, but it is once again home to high school drama of the sort generally captured in R-rated teenage comedies.Sitting inconspicuously in the far corner of that grassy area is Jeremy Garelick, 46, a writer/director/producer and the maestro of the American High experiment. Wearing an American High baseball cap, red-tinted sunglasses and a pair of headphones slung around his neck, he watched the scenes on an enormous iPad for this latest American High production, an untitled lesbian love story about an aspiring young artist who’s forced to join her high school track team.He nodded along with the action and laughed as the jokes landed. (“If you go down, I’m going down with you … like the Titanic,” generated a particular chuckle.)Jeremy Garelick, right, with his producing partner Will Phelps, on the school bus they purchased after Mr. Garelick bought the school for $1 million several years ago.Libby March for The New York TimesMr. Garelick, best known as the director of “The Wedding Ringer” and the screenwriter of “The Break Up,” is betting that the time is right now for a surge in hormonal high jinks captured on film: teen stories for the sensibilities of the Gen Z streaming generation. After all, it has been roughly two decades since tales of love, sex and related high school humiliations had created financial and cultural hits like “American Pie” and “Can’t Hardly Wait,” films that themselves were grabbing the baton from 1980s John Hughes classics.Studios, focused on special effects-laden blockbusters that make going to the movie theater into an event, don’t share his conviction. They now shy away from this kind of mid-budget-range film because of the marketing costs needed to help turn it into a box office success — and the risky proposition of selling something to the fickle teen audience. Back in 2007, the comedy “Superbad,” starring then-relative unknowns Jonah Hill and Michael Cera, became a significant hit, earning $170 million in worldwide grosses. Yet fast forward a decade to the female version of that gross-out comedy, the Olivia Wilde-directed “Booksmart,” which was beloved by critics and also featured an up-and-coming cast, but only earned $25 million in box office receipts. It all looks a bit too perilous for the big studios.Chris Weitz, the co-director of “American Pie” and one of the producers of Ms. Cohen’s film, attributes the shift to technology that puts audiences in control.“It was one thing when the gatekeepers, usually old fogies, controlled what kind of content was going to be put out about teens,” he said. “Now teens can get all kinds of content about themselves made by themselves, which gives them a greater sense of truth to them than something that any feature film producer would cook up.”With that landscape in mind, Mr. Garelick decided to make the films really inexpensively on his own. If done correctly, they could easily be funneled onto streaming platforms, which are constantly on the hunt for new material, especially content that attracts the ever elusive teen audience.He figured out if he shot two movies back-to-back in one location he could save one-third of his production costs. If he shot three, he could save half. He could be like the now begone film studio New Line, applying the “Lord of the Rings’” cost-savings method to the world of teen comedy. Peter Jackson relied on the verdant landscape of New Zealand for his Hobbit-driven epic.Mr. Garelick would have an abandoned school.“That’s when I had my ‘aha moment’” he said. “This is how I’m going to make my high school movies. Nobody out there is making them. Now is the time to get into it.”In today’s complex content ecosystem, studios are spending more and more to lure general audiences to theaters with blockbuster franchise films while the streamers are primarily trying to keep their fragmented audiences glued to their services by offering niche content. Teen comedies might not have enough consistent commercial potential for the studios, but Mr. Garelick thought that if he could offer a consistent flow of films, surely a streaming service would bite. And if he were to find a location where he could take advantage of the tax incentives given by local governments, his dollars would go further and he could benefit from the support of the local community.First, he needed a school, something brick and stately, at once lived-in but also easily adaptable for any high school scene. He thought of the basic settings in almost every teen comedy: a school gymnasium, a cafeteria, classrooms, hallways, an auditorium.It also had to be located in a state offering significant tax incentives. After some Google searching, Mr. Garelick and his then assistant and now producing partner, Will Phelps, 30, flew to Syracuse and drove to Liverpool, where Mr. Garelick saw the 89-year old A.V. Zogg School, a regal-looking institution that occupies an entire block in a tree-lined neighborhood. Over the years, it has functioned as both a middle school and a high school, a community church and had been most recently owned by a Thai businessman.For $1 million in 2017, it was Mr. Garelick’s.Mr. Garelick with the actress Teala Dunn. Before beginning production, Mr. Garelick held town halls where residents could ask questions and voice concerns.Libby March for The New York TimesSelling American HighTo sell his idea to investors, Mr. Garelick made a sizzle reel of his favorite high school films (“American Pie,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) — to show that every high school movie has the same basic locations — and took his pitch to the studios, independent financiers, anyone really who was willing to listen to his proposal. He was going to make three movies that looked as if they cost $30 million each but would only cost $8 million. The producer Mickey Liddell and his LD Entertainment bit, and American High was in business.He also had to sell it to his new neighbors. Early on, Mr. Garelick discovered the area wasn’t zoned for filming and the only way he was going to get the city’s approval was if he offered a trade school in addition to a production office. He also had to get buy-in from the community, so he and Mr. Phelps held town hall meetings where residents could voice any and all concerns: Would there be a lot of noise? What about the lights? One man was worried that the production would snap up all the barbers and he wouldn’t have a place to get his hair cut. After sifting through a year of red tape, American High was a go.“Plan B,” with Kuhoo Verma, right, and Victoria Moroles, was an early success for American High.HuluThe first two movies were small. “Holly Slept Over” cost only $500,000 while “Banana Split” was done for $1.2 million.Then American High produced “Big Time Adolescence” with Pete Davidson and Jon Cryer. The raunchy comedy made it into Sundance in 2019 and was sold to Hulu, the start of a partnership with the streaming service. The companies now have an eight-picture licensing deal. The latest film being directed by Ms. Cohen marks American High’s fifth production for Hulu. Others include “Plan B,” which debuted this year to strong reviews; “The Binge,” which Mr. Garelick directed; “The Ultimate Playlist of Noise”; and “Sex Appeal,” which has yet to come out. (A sequel to “The Binge” is set to begin production in January. “It’s our first franchise,” Mr. Garelick joked.)Mr. Garelick’s belief in the potential of this particular slice of American movies is based on his study of the Strauss-Howe generational theory — the notion that distinct groups throughout history share characteristics and values that cycle anew every 18 to 20 years. But audiences are more fragmented today than they were when “American Pie” came out and caught the cultural zeitgeist. And major studios long ago abandoned genre films for the surer bets of big blockbuster action titles.“At Hulu, we know that audiences still really want those genres, so something like a young adult title or a romantic comedy — that is something the audiences are still really clamoring for,” Brian Henderson, Hulu’s senior vice president of content programming and partnerships, said in an interview. “That’s a perfect place for Hulu to step in and bring those kinds of films to streaming audiences.”The new class“How many American High productions have you worked on?” Mr. Garelick asks every crew member he runs into while showing guests around the American High campus. “Nine,” said the costumer Celine Rahman. “Seven,” the location manager Emily Campbell said. In between working on the scripts and putting the films together, Mr. Garelick takes a lot of pride in having transformed his ragtag crew of recent college graduates into a professional operation that can handle bigger budgets and more complex shoots.Some actors have appeared in multiple films, like Mr. Alvarez, 23. “They make it so much fun, and I think that’s when you get the best work,” said Mr. Alvarez, whose previous production, “Sid is Dead,” about a social outcast who gets the class bully suspended has yet to debut. He mentioned the traditional end-of-production parties, which include a ritual where people attempt to throw a fire extinguisher through a wall. Not all the actors were as enthusiastic.“Love the people. Love the script. Hate the location,” quipped the YouTube content creator and actress Teala Dunn. “Terrible food. Terrible bugs.”This all gives the American High set the feel of a well-run summer camp more than a high-stress production environment. Part of that is the slew of young people traipsing around, part is the environment that Mr. Garelick and Mr. Phelps have cultivated where the majority of the work is done before shooting begins. Once the cameras roll, they let the directors do their job.Several of the movies have provided crucial experience for people like the first-time feature director Sammi Cohen.Libby March for The New York Times“There is a reason why Sam was given $7 million to make a movie,” Mr. Garelick said of Ms. Cohen, a veteran television director who is making her feature directorial debut with the current production, which is still untitled. “The biggest challenge for us is getting the script and the movie to a point where it’s awesome enough for somebody to say, ‘Here’s a lot of money to go make it.’ Once everything is put together, it’s really the director’s choice to do what she wants to do, especially on a movie like this. I don’t want to have a lot of input.”Natalie Morales confirms Mr. Garelick’s approach. The actress best known for her role as Lucy Santo Domingo in TV’s “Parks and Recreation” directed “Plan B” in 2020 after enduring six months of delays because of Covid. What she found surprised her, especially since, she said, Mr. Garelick and Mr. Phelps can initially come off more as “fun-loving bros” than serious businessmen.“Jeremy and Will were so trusting of me and so willing to support me,” she said in a recent interview. “That’s not the experience you typically get with men who consider themselves more experienced than you.”“Plan B” stars Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles as two teenagers who must cross the state lines of South Dakota to find a Plan B pill after a regrettable sexual encounter. And it represents the epitome of the American High ethos: the high school experience told from a different point of view. In this case, it involves a strait-laced Indian girl who’s always expected to do the right thing, and her friend Lupe, a wild child whose sexuality may not align with her family’s expectations. Hulu said that “Plan B” was a hit not just with younger audiences, but with older women as well.High school movies rarely deviate from a specific formula. Most chronicle the agony and ecstasy of adolescence: falling in love, tasting your first sip of alcohol, realizing your parents aren’t perfect, discovering what kind of music you love. Those themes play out in American High’s movies, too, but through a new lens.“We all grew up loving John Hughes movies,” Mr. Garelick said. “And we loved them because they’re universal high school stories but when we look back at them, they’re all about a white guy who wants to get laid by the prom queen and winds up with their best friend, or something like that. And the people of color or people from different backgrounds were either in the background or were the butt of the joke. In our movies, they are our leads, and they’re often the ones who wrote these stories.”Of the 11 American High movies that have been shot at the school since 2017, seven have been made by first-time filmmakers, three of them women.“They could have done the thing where they buy the school and they set this all up for themselves,” Ms. Morales said. “That’s not what they’re doing.”A different kind of film schoolThe Syracuse film commission estimates that each film shot at American High leaves 70 percent of its budget in the region, between the local crew members it hires to the money spent in restaurants and hotels.Libby March for The New York TimesBefore American High’s arrival, the Syracuse film commission struggled to attract productions to the area, despite offering sizable tax credits. The inclement weather and meager crew base were major obstacles.Since Mr. Garelick entered the picture, things have changed.“It was a total 180,” the Syracuse film commissioner Eric Vinal said. “We went from very much a gig economy with people working pretty sporadically in the industry to really having full-time, secure positions.”Mr. Vinal estimates that each film shot leaves 70 percent of its budget in the region, between the local crew members it hires to the money spent in restaurants and hotels. American High’s movies initially cost $1 million to $2 million and have now expanded to the $7 million to $9 million range, with roughly 70 crew members, and going from nonunion crews to almost all union employees.Pulling from local colleges like Syracuse University, Onondaga Community College, Ithaca College and Le Moyne College, American High and Syracuse Studios, the company’s production services operation, employs 10 students on each production — students who might otherwise have to move to Los Angeles or New York for film jobs.Costumes for Ms. Cohen’s new movie.Libby March for The New York TimesA scene from Ms. Cohen’s as-yet untitled film.Libby March for The New York Times“It was a fantastic idea for the kind of thing that we’re doing here, which is educating storytellers of the future,” said Michael Schoonmaker, the chairman of the television, radio and film department at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. “One of our advantages here in the frozen tundra of the snow capital city of the world, is that, you know, we’ve got them captive but also we’re pretty far away from everything. Jeremy’s program connects the two.”Will Sacca, 24, first met Mr. Garelick in the spring of 2017 when the director came to his intro to screenwriting class and pitched American High directly to the students. Mr. Sacca became one of the first summer interns and was charged with reading and analyzing comedy scripts for what could be American High’s first features. After graduation, Mr. Sacca returned to American High and worked in a variety of different departments: locations, production, accounting. He then became Mr. Garelick’s assistant before moving back into development, where now, as the head of the department, he manages a team of readers, including college interns who provide initial reaction to scripts.“I’m really fortunate,” Mr. Sacca said. “If I was at any of the mini-majors in L.A. or one of the big studios, I would be, at best, an executive assistant.”Ms. Rahman’s trajectory was similar. A recent graduate, she was living in New York City trying her hand at acting when she made a decision to return home to Syracuse. First she got a job as a background actor on American High’s second feature, “Banana Split.” That resulted in a move into the costume department, where she’s been ever since.“We’ve got Syracuse University and this really great film school there and you would think that this kind of thing would have been done a long time ago,” she said. “It seems that people are just kind of realizing, ‘Oh wait, there’s a place to make movies here and it’s sustainable.’”‘The Rah-Rah of it all’A classroom at American High. The company employs 10 students on each production, pulling from local colleges like Syracuse University.Libby March for The New York TimesNear the end of a long day of filming, Mr. Garelick sat in American High’s gym, watching a scene unfold and ruminating on his own high school experience. Not surprising, he loved it. Growing up in New City, N.Y., he was a football player, a member of the school’s theater troupe and president of the class. “I loved the Rah-Rah of it all,” he said.Now he gets to relive that feeling every day.American High has the bandwidth to shoot five films a year. Mr. Garelick and Mr. Phelps have also trained enough crew members that they can hand the reins of a production to others and get to work on the next American High film or other projects they’re involved with. (Mr. Garelick recently decamped to Hawaii to begin preproduction on the sequel to the Netflix film “Murder Mystery.”)What weighs on Mr. Garelick now is just how big of a beast he’s created. “We both feel responsible for a lot of people, and it’s definitely a lot of pressure,” he said. “But it’s also incredibly rewarding.” He acknowledged that things have become easier in the last year as more production has come to the area and his crew members have become experienced enough to get jobs on non-American High projects.Mr. Garelick with Mr. Phelps have trained enough crew members that they can hand the reins of a production to others.Libby March for The New York TimesIt also helps that immersing themselves in the world of R-rated teen comedies has made them experts.“We’ve gotten really good at knowing all the talent in this age range and in this space,” Mr. Phelps said. “We know all the scripts that are floating around because we’ve probably read them all.” More

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      in Music

      JoJo Siwa Wants to Be ‘a Role Model for People Who Love Love’

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      At 18, the “Dance Moms” and internet star is returning to reality TV as half of the first same-sex partnership on “Dancing With the Stars.”A few years ago, JoJo Siwa emerged as a tween wonder on the reality show “Dance Moms,” known for her brassy one-liners, rapid-fire pirouettes and rainbow-hued ensembles topped with huge hair bows.Today, Siwa, 18, is about to return to dance reality TV — as a budding queer idol. After coming out earlier this year, she will be part of the first same-sex partnership on “Dancing With the Stars.”Her wardrobe hasn’t changed much.“When I came out, people were like, ‘How did you not see this coming? She’s always literally been a walking Pride flag!’” Siwa said. “It’s the best compliment.”In many ways, Siwa remains the same playfully outrageous person fans first encountered on “Dance Moms.” But during the intervening years, she has built an empire on her glitter-and-rainbows star power.Siwa on tour in Queensland, Australia, in 2018.Dan Peled/Rex, via ShutterstockSiwa now has 36.4 million followers on TikTok, 10.9 million on Instagram and 12.3 million on YouTube, where her song “Boomerang” is approaching 1 billion views. She has headlined an arena tour and appeared in TV series and movies, most recently “The J-Team,” a film she also executive produced. She was named one of GLAAD’s 20 Under 20 for 2021, and one of Time’s Most Influential People of 2020. She has sold more than 80 million of her signature hair bows.From the beginning, legions of preteen girls bought into Siwa’s positive, anti-bullying messaging. Since coming out, she has begun to speak more directly to people her age, who tended to dismiss her as kid stuff. She heads to the 30th season of “Dancing With the Stars,” which premieres on Monday, with all those fans — a.k.a. Siwanatorz — in tow.“She’s like a living, breathing Mirrorball Trophy,” said Andrew Llinares, an executive producer of “Dancing With the Stars,” referring to its top prize. “She’s colorful in the way she looks, but she’s also colorful in her personality and her aura. She’s just an amazing sort of — being.”Siwa grew up immersed in dance. Her mother, Jess, owned a dance studio in the Siwas’ hometown, Omaha. Jess had JoJo in competitions when she was just 2, the toddler’s costumes concealing her diaper. “She could turn like nobody’s business, and her presence was unreal,” Jess said. “She would just captivate people.”JoJo Siwa with her mother, Jess, at her 13th birthday party at Madame Tussauds in Los Angeles in 2016.Paul Redmond/WireImage, via Getty ImagesMaking JoJo a star in the mold of Hannah Montana, the Disney Channel character played by Miley Cyrus, soon became the goal. “I didn’t know that Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana were two totally different people,” JoJo said. “Hannah Montana was the only human that existed for me, and she was glittery and sparkly and a rock star, and I just wanted to be that human.”In 2013, the 9-year-old JoJo earned a spot on the “Dance Moms” spinoff “Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition.” Soon, JoJo and Jess joined the main “Dance Moms” cast. Though not the strongest dancer on the show — she routinely landed at the bottom of its trademark pyramid ranking — JoJo’s outspokenness and unapologetic confidence made her a reality TV natural.“Dance Moms” offered JoJo a degree of fame, but limited control over her image. In 2015, she started a YouTube channel, which she described as a way to showcase her truest self. “As a 12-year-old, I was editing 10 videos a week, which is wild,” JoJo said. “But it was just my favorite, because I was in charge and I had freedom.”Millions of followers beyond the “Dance Moms” universe began tuning in to see her share the contents of her taco-print dance bag and make pink slime without using her arms. It was a celebrity rooted in her own eccentricities and enthusiasms, without the shaping of a teen-idol-generating corporation. “In traditional media, there’s kind of a manufacturing of stardom,” said Earnest Pettie, who is the culture and trends insight lead at YouTube. “But by coming to social media, JoJo was able to claim her voice for herself, to tell her own story.”An early version of Siwa style.via JoJo SiwaAs her audience ballooned, JoJo became an anti-bullying crusader, encouraging her young fans to be themselves, haters be darned. That positivity, in its shiny, bow-topped packaging, proved highly marketable. And JoJo proved a savvy businesswoman, taking a hands-on approach to her lines of bows and dolls and clothing. (Jess proudly described 13-year-old JoJo holding court in a room full of Walmart executives.)But despite earning the adoration of 6- to 10-year-olds, she faced increasingly venomous harassment online from fellow teens. “I’ve never really had kid friends my own age,” she said. “But teenagers hated me. I mean, literally hated me.” From her detractors’ perspective, she looked like a phony, forced to perpetually inhabit a lucrative persona created when she was 9.She wouldn’t have been the only “Dance Moms” cast member to feel trapped in amber. Zackery Lennon Torres, who identified as a boy when she was on “Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition” and “Dance Moms” as a young teen, came out this spring as a transgender woman. Now 22, she said she “hit pause” on her feelings about gender and sexual identity during her years with the franchise, which had specific ideas about what gender roles Torres would play.“I didn’t have time to think about where I was in my growth as a person,” Torres said. “After I left the show and went back to high school, I had to figure out that, like, Oh, I wanted a boyfriend. What does it mean to come out? Who am I?”Siwa, who overlapped a bit with Torres on “Dance Moms,” is quick to express sympathy for her. But Siwa maintains that her “Dance Moms” experience didn’t stifle or alter her, and neither did her ensuing fame.“Nothing I’ve ever done has been something I didn’t want to do,” Siwa said. “If I wanted to create an alternate identity, I could do that — it’d be easy. I didn’t. This is me.”Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“Nothing I’ve ever done has been something I didn’t want to do,” she said. “If I wanted to create an alternate identity, I could do that — it’d be easy. I didn’t. This is me.”Since quarantine, however, there has been a new sense of vulnerability and transparency to Siwa’s online presence. On TikTok her posts became winkingly self-aware. “I started showing people, like, hey, I know you make fun of me, but guess what? I’m game!” she said. “They got to meet a human that maybe they actually like.” After turning 18 in May, she began experimenting with slightly toned-down looks, giving the hair bows a rest.Siwa came out and introduced her girlfriend, Kylie Prew, in a series of posts in January and February — an undeniably honest moment met, overwhelmingly, with cheers. (She is still figuring out how best to describe her sexuality; for the moment, she said, she’s going with “queer, because it covers it, and it’s cute.”) She has disavowed her homophobic trolls.“I want to be a role model for people who love love,” she said. “I don’t want to be a role model for people who think being gay is wrong. I don’t need those people in my corner.”Siwa with her girlfriend, Kylie Prew. “When I came out, people were like, ‘How did you not see this coming? She’s always literally been a walking Pride flag!’” Leon Bennett/Getty ImagesThough Siwa’s ambitions extend to music, acting and production, her “Dancing With the Stars” turn comes at an especially dance-focused moment in her career. Her new film “The J-Team” centers on a dance team, and she is the choreographer in the coming streaming series “Siwa Dance Pop Revolution,” a collaboration with her mother. “Dance has always been home for me,” she said.“Dancing With the Stars” will help twine Siwa the dancer and Siwa the queer role model together in the public imagination. (There has been some grumbling online about her dance background giving her an unfair advantage on the show, but “Dancing” frequently includes trained dancers in its star lineup.) When the “Dancing” team first approached her earlier this year, they asked whether she’d like to perform with a male or a female pro. “I immediately chose female,” she said. “How awesome is it that I get to be the first, that I get to make history and inspire people this way? That is huge.”It is huge. And, in some encouraging ways, it isn’t. “Dancing” follows in the footsteps of its BBC cousin, “Strictly Come Dancing,” which featured its first same-sex partnership last year, and the Danish “Dancing With the Stars,” which has already awarded its Mirrorball Trophy to a male-male duo. Since 2019, the National Dance Council of America, the official governing council of traditional ballroom dance in the United States, has defined a couple in ballroom as “a leader and follower without regard to the sex or gender of the dancer.”Siwa, once seen as stuck in time, is now helping network TV catch up with the times. And her Siwanatorz? They’re already caught up.“I think the best part,” Torres said, “will be for these young kids to see her dancing with a girl on TV, and not even bat an eye.” More

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      ‘Changing the Game’ Review: Fighting for the Right to Play

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      Three transgender high schoolers confront the fraught world of student athletics in this documentary that takes a controlled approach.In 2017, Mack Beggs, then 17, won a state girls’ wrestling championship. Mack, a transgender boy from Dallas, had wanted to wrestle in the boys’ division. But in Texas, state policy mandates that students compete according to their sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. So his options were to wrestle girls or to not wrestle at all.Mack is one of three young athletes profiled in the documentary “Changing the Game,” which offers an earnest look at the way transgender teens around the country are fighting for self-actualization in the fraught world of student athletics.The documentary (streaming on Hulu) illustrates how rules differ from state to state: The skier Sarah Rose Huckman, who lives in New Hampshire, describes a policy that hinges on gender confirmation surgery; whereas at a high school in Connecticut, the runner Andraya Yearwood is able to compete on the team she wants.Outcry over transgender kids in sports manifests as a conservative talking point and in waves of discriminatory bills from Republican lawmakers. But rather than deconstruct the politics, history or parameters of this furor, “Changing the Game” hews closely to Mack, Sarah and Andraya. We see the ways in which bullying and outsized media attention gnaw at these teens, who face the public eye with astounding courage.As it follows its subjects, the documentary takes a conventional and controlled approach. The director Michael Barnett intercuts interviews with competition footage, training montages and slow-motion action shots. Throughout, a synth-heavy score insists on a motivational mood.A frequent right-wing argument is that transgender athletes make sports unfair. The documentary’s best and most challenging through-line shows where this claim falls short — particularly how, for young athletes, building confidence is more important than wins and losses. “Changing the Game” could have gone further, analyzing how fairness in sports is a myth to begin with. But the movie isn’t interested in rewriting the rules; it would rather introduce us to the brave young people who are.Changing the GameNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Mae Martin Embraces Ambiguity in ‘Feel Good,’ and in Life

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      In an interview, the creator and star of the Netflix comedy discusses the hazy line between fact and fiction, the value of uncertainty and the joy of finally getting to be a leading man.Mae Martin didn’t set out to confront a throng of personal demons with the semi-autobiographical tragicomic Netflix series “Feel Good.” That’s just how it played out. More

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      ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy

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      A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.” This was the personal tech of the early-to-mid-1990s, in the years before AOL Instant Messenger provided an internet on-ramp, which means it was pretty much the last time an American teenager could behave with some expectation of privacy.Still, camcorders existed back then and Soleil Moon Frye, the child star of “Punky Brewster,” rarely turned hers off. In “Kid 90,” a documentary now streaming on Hulu, an adult, manicured Moon Frye — filmed in the kind of all-white room usually associated with near-death experiences — revisits her endless home movies, as well as related ephemera: diaries, voice mail messages and photographs. If you are a young Gen Xer or an old millennial, “Kid 90” may provide the uncanny and not entirely welcome experience of having your childhood returned to you — the syntax, the celebrities, the fashions that haven’t come back around (the backward baseball cap, the vest as a bustier). Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.In the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster,” Moon Frye starred as a girl being raised by a foster father.Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesBefore I clicked play, I asked an editor how many drinks I might need to make it through the documentary. “A 40 of Mickey’s malt liquor,” she wrote.The early ’90s also reappear on “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a Paramount + show that reunites the cast members from the first season of MTV’s flagship unscripted series. Seven people, strangers no more, return to the New York loft (well, one is waylaid by a positive Covid-19 test) where their teen and 20-something lives were taped for a few months in 1992. It wasn’t the first reality show, but its wild popularity and subsequent franchise profoundly influenced what came after. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”To watch the series and the documentary is to dilate, helplessly, on what has changed (or not) in the past 30 or so years. It’s to realize that Moon Frye, by cheerfully surveilling her own life, and those first Real Worlders, by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.“The Real World Homecoming: New York” reunited the cast of the hit reality show, which premiered on MTV in 1992; from left, Norman Korpi, Kevin Powell, Julie Gentry and Heather B. Gardner, with Andre Comeau looking on.Danielle Levitt/MTVMoon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more. These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell. Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings. A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance — trying on different outfits and identities — and seeing if they feel OK. (The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another.)I was a teenager in the ’90s, and I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,” and a grunge-adjacent look that my high school bestie still calls the Lumberjack Sexpot — persist only on the bloopers reel in my head. Until young adults achieve some reasonable sense of self (and style), why get the internet involved?When Moon Frye moved to New York, she fell in with a group of skaters, some of whom were in the movie “Kids.”Soleil Moon Frye/HuluThe kids in “Kid 90” are filmed during their off hours: poolside, at house parties, high on mushrooms in a field somewhere. They sometimes perform for the camera — winking, pontificating, flashing a don’t-tell-mom pack of cigarettes — but they perform confident that almost no one will ever see it. “We never thought, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to use that in a way that’s going to come back and haunt us,’” Gosselaar says in the documentary.Back in 1992, those “Real World” participants knew that MTV would eventually air the footage, but not how that footage would be organized. They didn’t know that the producers would fabricate a will-they-or-won’t-they story line for Julie Gentry and Eric Nies, or that Kevin Powell would be edited to seem like a “politically angry Black man,” as he said in a recent interview. “We all thought it was a documentary about seven artists,” Rebecca Blasband says in “Homecoming.” If she and her loftmates didn’t act entirely naturally, they don’t seem to have spent the series trying to build a marketable brand.The producers and editors did the building for them, giving each a type (naïf, himbo, rock god, firebrand), which the cast members then spent years trying to live up to — or live down. “I had this notoriety, but I had no idea how to utilize it,” Gentry says in “Homecoming.”Moon Frye as a teenager; she is now appearing in a “Punky Brewster” reboot on Peacock.Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMoon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s. In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles. Peers called her Punky Boobster.“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,” a teenage Moon Frye says. “I just want people to see me for the person I am inside.” Here’s a thought: What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery. But the serious roles never came. After years in the entertainment wilderness, she is now starring in a “Punky Brewster” reboot, now streaming on Peacock. “Kid 90” presents this comeback as a chirpy capstone, but it feels darker. The documentary honors a slew of friends who didn’t make it to their 40s (including Jonathan Brandis and Justin Pierce, a star of the movie “Kids”) and mentions the addictions suffered by those who did. Some of that pain must have originated in the space between what the industry (and the fans) told these actors they had to be and who they felt they were. Maybe Moon Frye is Punky once more because “the business” wouldn’t let her be anyone else.I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me. But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in. More