The Million Dollar Question (that I asked myself)
So you make a movie about teenage girls having sex. And not surprisingly people are very wary about helping you promote it. Which is how I ended up spending this evening talking to myself. Or interviewing myself, more specifically. See when you head to a film festival you have to bring a lot of stuff. The print, posters, postcards, press kits, basically everything starting with a P. I have a pony ready to take through security at LAX along with the postcards and posters I designed myself.
One of the things a press kit has is an "interview" with the filmmaker. Usually conducted by the press rep, since Pilar DeMann (producer) and I are doing our own press, I interviewed myself. I found myself to be hostile at times and frankly a little defensive. Who did myself think she was, asking myself all these questions? I would set myself right.
But it did give me a chance to formulate an answer to the million dollar question: do kids really have sex clubs? Or put more crassly, "dude, why didn't I go to THAT school."
The story in Normal Adolescent Behavior isn't exactly autobiographical. The high school I went to was a lot like the school in the script - lots of open classrooms, very few rules, I think that the only dress code was you had to wear shoes, which we must have ignored since I remember being barefoot for much of 10th grade. It was part of a response parents had to the school system they had experienced in the sixties. They wanted to create a place where learning happened organically. For me, I discovered other GFUs - gifted fuck ups.
So are teen sex clubs real? And did I participate? Well, they are real and no, I didn't have sex with my five friends. I did have a group of friends where the lines between friend and sex partner were rather fluid, and there wasn't a lot of worry about labels like boyfriend and girlfriend. That is a really common experience today. Girls are hooking up more, and being owned less.
I spoke to a lot of kids and groups like this exist, in some form or another, all over the country. Like a lot of movies, I cherry picked from my life and research and imagination; I started out trying to adapt Spring Awakening, the groundbreaking play by Frank Wedekind (which is now a ground breaking musical, also produced by the DeMann's but more on the play and musical later.) All of the personal, the theatrical, the research, all of it gets shuffled together and re-dealt into the script. There is no holding onto "reality" and once you get over that part, you find it is really a lot easier to make up stuff about the guy you crushed on in high school.
