Not Just Gofers and Girls Friday
At Shooting From the Hip Casting in Studio City, the “cattle call” is on. This day, actors are auditioning for a Lincoln Navigator commercial that revolves around a wedding scene. In tuxedos and sleek gowns, they line up as a smiling and cheerful LuAnne Tyzzer snaps Polaroids of each hopeful. “People think the business is really fake, but here it’s like real people,” all hoping to beat the odds and get the gig, she observes.
The 18-year-old answers phones for the agency, sits in on auditions and keeps in touch with the actors’ agents. “The agents can be a bit tedious,” Tyzzer says. “You don’t want to tell them their client didn’t do a great job.”
Meanwhile, at Element Music & Soundesign in Santa Monica, the soundtrack from Jennifer Aniston’s upcoming comedy, “The Good Girl,” is playing upstairs in the recording studio. Tyzzer’s schoolmate, 18-year-old Adam Somers, has just checked in for his shift organizing the studio’s hundreds of CDs on a computer database so the company can quickly retrieve “any genre, any year, any title, any artist.” He’s also been digitizing Element’s library of sound effects.
But, Somers says, he really wants to be a composer. “Music is all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
And at Temple Ahavat Shalom in Northridge, another classmate practices with the junior choir for a musical tribute to the rabbi educator, Barry Lutz, on the occasion of his 18th year at the temple. In a clear, sweet soprano, Shira Saltsman, 17, leads the singing, with cantor and mentor Patti Linsky at the piano.
“Tradition is a huge part of what I am,” Saltsman says. While she’s not convinced she wants to follow in her mentor’s footsteps, she’s glad she’s had the chance to see how much a cantor must learn about Judaism. “You need to be there for your community in times of celebration and in times of sadness.”
The three teens are among 29 seniors at Milken Community High School of Stephen Wise Temple in West L.A. who, for five hours each week, head off to social science class.
The classroom may be a foreign consulate or the orthopedics department of a hospital. They are enrolled in the Wise Individualized Senior Experience program, in which second-semester seniors earn class credit by completing unpaid internships in their areas of interest, which range from fashion design to computer gaming and from restaurant management to real estate.
Milken, a private Jewish school, and Berkeley High School in Berkeley are the only California schools in the program, which was started in New York in 1973. Under auspices of the New York-based not-for-profit WISE Services since 1991, the program has spread to 50 schools, most of them in the Northeast.
“It makes education come to life,” says Milken Head of School Rennie Wrubel. “I really believe 12th-graders need to be treated differently. This is kind of a bridge from high school to the real world.” And, she adds, they learn real life lessons--if they don’t perform well on the job. “It’s not like not doing well on a quiz.” At the same time, they are learning to meet and solve workplace challenges “in a safe environment” and with backup support from their school mentors.
The program requires students to keep a journal and to make a presentation at school, where they are evaluated by their faculty mentor, two other teachers, two students and a parent. The grade is either pass or fail; three years into the program, no one has yet failed.
The interns’ final presentations wrap up this week. The first of the 29 was by Michael Richman, 18, whose placement was with Al Rantel, a nighttime talk radio show host on KABC, where he was an assistant producer. Richman had prepared an elaborate slide show, with audio, to augment his talk, in which he describes such duties as helping scout and sign guests and screen callers.
Richman, who hopes for a career in politics after attending George Washington University, seems a natural for that arena: He concludes his presentation by thanking in advance his evaluators, all of whom “look great tonight. I just wanted to mention that.” He earns high praise from his evaluators, though one suggests if he is serious about running for public office one day, he might regret some of his O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake jokes.
Aliyah Phillips, 18, was assigned public affairs duties with the Israeli consulate. It’s a perfect match for Phillips, a dedicated Zionist who says, “My mom says I came home in first grade and said I wanted to go into the Israeli army when I grew up.”
She helped organize a program wherein Jewish schools in L.A. and San Diego counties nominate 11th-graders as ambassadors to Israel, with the goal of planning two programs each year at their school to benefit Israelis. “I’ve learned how important it is to gain the knowledge to support the things you believe in and to get involved in the community,” says Phillips, who will study in Israel next year.
Yoni Blau, who’s bound for USC, had a little inside track landing his placement at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills. His father is a surgeon on staff. Blau, 18, wants to be a doctor and got to watch 10 orthopedic surgeries. “The last surgery, I was [just inches] away, right over the doctor’s shoulder.” The most valuable thing he’s learned: “How the doctors and nurses work as a team. It’s amazing. The scrub nurse knows what the doctor’s going to do next.”
In addition to the five-hour commitment, each student must attend weekly meetings with the teacher-mentor. Because some businesses are reluctant to take on high schoolers, Milken networks by sending out letters to parents seeking leads. A few students are doing independent projects rather than traditional internships. One is making a video satire on applying for college; another is at a real estate office and will take the licensing exam as her project. In the past, several girls designed their own clothing lines and are now studying fashion design in college.
Nancy Schneider, a Milken teacher and program coordinator, tells of one student who, while planning a business career, was interested in an internship in the medical field. “They sent him home with suturing stuff and he sutured oranges. Now, he’s going to be a surgeon. It changed his life.”
Not all placements turn out ideally. One student, who landed with a stockbroker, was relegated to making the cold calls to prospective clients. Others have been used as gofers, or taken advantage of by supervisors who demanded many more than the agreed-upon hours of work. The program is open to all students in good standing. They must write their own resumes and initiate their interviews. Dealing with rejection is part of the learning experience.
Education First,
Then Hollywood
Working at the casting agency has helped Tyzzer, who has been taking acting lessons since she was 6, decide she likes being behind the scenes better. But first she’s going to get away from it all. Living in Los Angeles, she says, “I need a reality check.” She will major in communications and business at Wheaton in Massachusetts.
Francene Selkirk, who owns Shooting From the Hip, thinks a carrer as a casting agent should be no problem for Tyzzer. “She came in and she could do everything. She could probably direct the talent some day soon,” Selkirk says.
Selkirk, who has cast commercials for clients such as Footlocker, Cadillac and McDonald’s, has made sure to include her intern in the whole process--”If you don’t let them see what you’re doing, how are they going to learn?” When Selkirk had some teenage casting to do, she turned to Tyzzer and asked, “Who are the cute guys? Pick the hip kids” and, she says, “she was right on in her choices.”
Because the music-loving Somers wants to get a good liberal arts education, and “be around people who aren’t just musicians,” he is headed to the University of Michigan, where he hopes to “learn to produce electronic music.” His supervisor at Element, executive producer Jack Purvis, says, “We jumped at the chance” to have him as an intern, a first experience for them. “He’s been keeping us, from a musical perspective, organized.” That’s important, says James O’Brien, who started Element four years ago, because of the capricious nature of commercial clients. “We could get a call tonight to change everything and they need it tomorrow morning in Chicago. This way you’re not digging through hundreds of sounds” to find the right one.
Somers laughs as he tells about his “one chance to really be creative”--and how he blew it. When a student brought in a short film for scoring, Purvis, appreciating Somers’ technical knowledge, suggested he take a crack at it. Somers took the video home, watched it over and over, and had no idea where to begin.
“I was thinking, ‘How badly could I ruin this movie?’” Everything he tried on his synthesizer was out of sync with the film and finally he just threw up his hands. “I have a lot more learning to do about the overall philosophy of music for films. There’s a lot more to [it] than just sitting down and opening up and being creative.”
During her internship, Saltsman has sat in with Linsky on bar and bat mitzvah training, a counseling session with a troubled teen, and is learning to chant the Torah. For her, it is the perfect opportunity to combine her interests in music and psychology. She’s headed to UC Berkeley and is thinking of becoming a child psychologist, “but I definitely want to do musical theater on the side.”
Linsky, who has known Saltsman since she was in preschool at the temple, says, “I like how she combines her mind, her heart, her soul, her spirit. She’s outspoken but sensitive, a born leader. She takes risks and chances. She’s an extraordinary young woman.”
And would she be a good cantor? Linsky smiles and says, “She’d be amazing.” After Saltsman’s solo at a recent Friday night Shabbat service, fulfilling one of the goals of her internship, Linsky told her, “We need to have a serious talk about your career path.”