Filmmaker’s Search for Real Teens Ended at L.A. School

When he chose John Marshall High School in Los Feliz as a setting for his documentary “Chain Camera,” producer and director Kirby Dick set out to find 16 students whose life experiences could collectively present a realistic cross-section of urban teenage life.

And his search paid off.

“I think it really portrays their high school experience in a way that we so rarely see,” Dick said. “The humor, the openness, the frankness that exists that is always couched or redirected by the media in some strange way. . . . I really feel like people are getting a glimpse into a generation.”

The film, which opens today, was shot entirely by the students and their friends and relatives in a bumpy, often rough amateur style and divided into alternately powerful and comic segments focused on one or two teenagers. Through their eyes it explores the adolescent themes of family relations, keeping traditions, sexual experimentation and racial tension.

Although Marshall’s neo-Gothic facade has appeared often on the big screen, housing mock schools such as Rydell High in “Grease,” the makers of “Chain Camera” sought out the high school in large part for the ethnic diversity within its walls.

Looking at the students featured--the film was shot in the 1999-2000 school year--it’s difficult to imagine a more diverse or more complex reality. Rosemary dishes about her bouts of bulimia, running away and her tongue-in-cheek thoughts about becoming a stripper, while Academic Decathlon team member Manuel’s video diary shows him striking out as he tries to woo a crush. In another segment, Silva is frustrated with her mother’s insistence that she marry another Armenian and tries to balance tradition with modernity. Sent away to L.A. from his native Chicago, Winfred cries because his failing grade in math is preventing him from playing football. And in another segment, Alan and Lisa are on a bed laughing uncontrollably as Lisa tries to put a condom on a banana with her mouth.

“While Kirby didn’t choose many people, I think he chose a lot of those who speak for many others,” says Amy, one of the students featured, joking that as a white student who “had rarely kissed her boyfriend” she was probably the least representative of the group. (Like all the students in the film, Amy is identified only by her first name.) “For me, what is captured is my insecurities, about how I am not pretty, and how my boyfriend and I don’t kiss. I was very much the innocent part of it. And that’s just fine, it’s very true. When you watch lots of stuff from Hollywood about teenagers, they are using 30-year-old actors portraying 15- to 18-year-olds and it’s not real.”

With an adult-like self-assurance and assertiveness, Cinammon focuses her segment mostly on her relationship. One of two openly gay students featured, she says she took the camera to make a statement to other gay or bisexual students “in the closet that there is a comfortable environment for everyone.”

“The experiences Jen and I had were two totally different experiences--I didn’t get a lot of hostility at school,” she explains in an interview, referring to her girlfriend who attended a less tolerant school in Valencia. “She really hid her sexuality from her peers, just completely afraid and trying to live her life in the closet because these activities had these connotations.”

On campus, Cinammon served as an active voice for gay rights. Although she believes that Marshall and most of “my generation” are very tolerant, she says there are still misunderstandings about homosexuality that “Chain Camera” tries to correct.

Cinammon is not Marshall’s only political activist. From the metallic Pokemon action stickers decorating his cell phone--he bought those from a deaf woman--to his proclivity for eating food discarded and wasted by others, everything about Jesse makes an “in-your-face” political statement. He once wore a black robe and collar to school for a week “just for the hell of it.”

Reclining lazily outside a cafe in Silver Lake recently, with his peroxide-blond and blue-tipped hair and a heavy silver ankh necklace, Jesse greets every passerby as a potential constituent of District 13, where he says he plans to run for City Council in eight years. “I belong to anti-police brutality and corruption groups. I’m always on some list because I cannot stand by and see injustice.”

In his video diary segment for “Chain Camera,” Jesse, then a high-school senior, describes the burden of cleaning up for and living with an alcoholic mother when he was in middle school. He matter-of-factly details his own past using and selling drugs.

“I’ve always been a very open person, but it’s kind of a personal moment when you plop down with the camera. It feels like you are talking to yourself because you get no feedback from the camera,” he says. “And at Marshall, people don’t care what you do as long as you are not annoying or disrespectful of others.”

One of “Chain Camera’s” more memorable characters is Ethan, the school’s homecoming prince.

On tape his mother explains that several childhood illnesses have left Ethan speaking more slowly, which diminished his ability to interact socially with peers. Ethan’s video journey through his school life reveals some mockery behind his back, but mostly there’s good-natured fooling around among the staff of the school’s TV newscast, for which he is an anchor.

Ethan’s original footage included shots of him responding to and deflecting another student’s ridicule with his characteristic overdose of kindness and positive energy, Dick noted. “The way he handles the ridicules engenders a great deal of respect in those same people who are ridiculing him. And so, somehow he turns it around into a strength.”

In a telling home scene, his mother asks Ethan if he is a virgin. His reply: “Well--what exactly does that mean?” and his parents erupt in laughter.

“Ethan’s is a situation that gets overlooked a lot,” says Amy, who has known him since seventh grade. “He’s a boy who has had lots of medical problems and he’s done so well and has made friends, he’s not outcasted by people. And I love when he says that at Homecoming he realized that people liked him, because ‘how could they meet me and not like me?’ ”