PROJECTS & CREDITS




“With Sharper Focus, Fox ‘Yearbook’ Could Be A Winner”
By John Koch, The Globe

Fox TV, the little network that will try almost anything, deserves credit for its gambling ways, which have brought us the fresh "Simpsons" in prime time and the unholy "Married with Children" on Sundays. Its latest roll of the dice is a Saturday-night series called "Yearbook," a documentary chronicle of life at a Glen Ellyn, Ill., high school, coming up on its fourth episode.

A small video crew has been roaming the halls, offices and playing fields of Glenbard West since the beginning of school in September, shooting thousands of feet of tape. Six days a week, they train their cameras primarily on members of the class of '91 and their families, gathering material for half-hour episodes that are shot, edited and broadcast often in only a matter of a few weeks.

This is a comparatively inexpensive way to produce television entertainment—"Yearbook" writer and coproducer Lou Gorfain estimates the show costs about half of what a theatrical series would, primarily because there aren't any professional actors involved. So Fox will rightly be considered very shrewd if ratings are strong enough to justify keeping "Yearbook" on the air. But in a highly risky business, Fox is still to be commended: It is the first commercial network to base a weekly entertainment series entirely on documentary materials.

High school as a subject is so rich with strong emotion, not to mention sharply defined and important social issues, that I supposed "Yearbook" would be a provocative addition to the Fox lineup. For that reason I asked veteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman to view the first two episodes with me and to comment on them.

The 61-year-old Cambridge filmmaker has made more than 20 full-length documentaries, including "Titicut Follies," the acclaimed, controversial and once-banned 1967 study of conditions inside Bridgewater State Hospital. His films, all coolly focused on American institutions, include portrayals of a police department, a military boot camp, an urban hospital, an upscale department store . . . and a high school.

Typically, Wiseman's 1968 "High School"—filmed in black and white at a school in northeast Philadelphia—is presented without narration or any other obviously editorial device. His unobtrusive camera exposes a deceptive ordinariness, generally involving the interaction of teachers or administrators with students—moments that out of context can seem mundane. But the impact of what is seen and heard builds to a sad, stark revelation about the uses of authority. It's as pertinent today—this window on the ways education can stymie imagination and impose conformity— as it was over 20 years ago, and almost as fresh, too.

Like so many of Wiseman's films, "High School" depends for its power on a slowly rhythmic accumulation of images and information. Which perhaps explains why Wiseman so readily commented on what he considered "Yearbook's" fast ''MTV cutting." In fact the editing of the first two episodes seemed more random than rapid, and lacking the nervy syncopation of music videos.

"There is a lot more to these people's lives," Wiseman said after viewing ''Yearbook's" glib treatment of the three Glenbard homecoming queen nominees and the predictable account of the crowning event itself and the inevitable football game replete with leggy cheerleaders. The early shows included brief, melodramatic allusions to teen pregnancy and catastrophic illness. But Wiseman observed that "Yearbook's" approach to these issues seemed "exploitative," ripped out of the naturally dynamic context of family life that he said we should, but never do, sense in the documentary.

Wiseman rightly considered the first two chapters of "Yearbook" to be themeless and shapeless, lacking "any attempt to see the subject in a fresh way" and devoid of "anything particularly visually interesting."

Perhaps because "Yearbook" is continuously being shot and edited—"evolving" is the word writer-producer Gorfain uses—the third and fourth episodes show measurable improvement. In the context of the then approaching Middle East conflict and the clashing opinions it generated at Glenbard, last week's "War and Peace" focused on two sympathetic, interesting and paradoxical seniors.

One is a a dedicated Marine reservist, a big crewcut boy enthralled by weapons. But in simple, direct strokes, "Yearbook" also portrays him as a tender member of a white family that includes a younger adopted black son and another black foster child. There is warm, easy devotion among them and within the tough-looking senior an unfaked gentleness all the more touching for seeming somehow out of character. The rest of the half hour is dedicated to an original, animated girl outspokenly opposed to war but whose boyfriend, a recent Glenbard graduate now in the Army, is liable to be sent to the Persian Gulf at any moment.

Like "War and Peace," the upcoming and engaging "I'm Seventeen" is loosely shaped around an idea and driven by closely watched characters. This weekend's show ("Yearbook" is now repeated on Sundays) is about the dreams that sustain a couple of highly motivated seniors, a curiously singleminded girl who plays goalie on the boys' hockey team and a talented boy who sheepishly confesses he prefers dancing with his hip-hop group to playing basketball or even dating.

''Yearbook" appears to have found a format: straightforward snapshots of young people lurching toward the shadow line of adulthood. If the pictures remain clear and unretouched, "Yearbook" might yet work.

In the wasteland of entertainment programming on the networks, honesty and simplicity would be distinction enough. Gorfain says that Fox is committed to five more episodes of the show and that ratings will determine whether the network commissions any beyond that.

Should "Yearbook" succeed, all of a sudden TV might become a showplace for documentaries that are not necessarily pegged to breaking news. Some worthy films would get made and widely shown. An undersupported art form might thrive.