Avid Reader Press \/ Simon & Schuster: 384 pages, $30
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One day Bruce Handy was watching a teen movie \u2014 it could have been something new or maybe a vintage John Hughes, he doesn\u2019t remember \u2014 when he was struck by the similarities between high school hallways and the wild frontier of classic westerns. \u201cIt\u2019s this kind of lawless arena where people are trying to eke out their own ideas about justice,\u201d he recently said over coffee near his home in New York City. \u201cThen I started thinking about teen movies as a genre that you could use to tell an interesting social history and how they reflected different eras.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was the inception of \u201cHollywood High,\u201d Handy\u2019s incisive new history of not just teen movies, but teenagers themselves. Tracing the genre from the days of Mickey Rooney\u2019s Andy Hardy, the aw-shucks, girl-crazy hero of an enormously popular movie series that started in 1937, to the dystopian adventures of Katniss Everdeen in the \u201cHunger Games\u201d franchise, Handy (class of 1976) looks at the juvenile delinquents and the beach kids, the nerds and the mean girls.<\/p>\n
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(Avid Reader Press \/ Simon & Schuster)<\/p>\n
In the process, he connects the post-World War II purchasing power of the generation that would become baby boomers to the creation of an entertainment boom designed to serve and depict teens. Teenagers, of course, always existed. But they didn\u2019t really become a distinct demographic until the 20th century. As high school enrollment steadily increased, labor was increasingly left to adults, and teens created peer groups separate from either their families or the streets. As Handy writes, \u201cTeenagers and teen movies would come of age hand in hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Handy grew up in Palo Alto (and went on to attend Stanford University), under the sway of \u201cAmerican Graffiti.\u201d George Lucas\u2019 pre-\u201cStar Wars\u201c 1973 hit, set amid the car culture of the Central Valley, tells the story of fresh high school graduates in the summer of 1962, played by actors including Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Cindy Williams, staring at their future with uncertainty. Handy was a high school sophomore when the movie came out; even though he wasn\u2019t about to graduate, he says he remembers \u201cthis kind of tension of being in this sort of bubble phase of life that was about to end. I think that spoke to me subliminally.\u201d But mostly he dug the wall-to-wall rock \u2018n\u2019 roll soundtrack, featuring Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and other period stars.<\/p>\n
The author of several children\u2019s books, a journalist for magazines including Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and a former writer for \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d Handy focuses on key films, moments and figures in teen movies starting with Rooney, who came to resent being defined by a character he played well after his teens (and whose hyper-libidinous exploits were most un-Hardy-like). There\u2019s James Dean in \u201cRebel Without a Cause\u201d (1955), which broke ground by featuring teens largely outside the context of adult supervision (and tapped into the youth-run-wild panic sweeping the nation in the \u201850s). There\u2019s Jeff Spicoli, the archetypal stoner played by Sean Penn in the sexually frank and deceptively dark \u201cFast Times at Ridgemont High\u201d (1982), and Cher, Alicia Silverstone\u2019s Beverly Hills matchmaker living a modern-day Jane Austen novel, in \u201cClueless\u201d (1995).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bruce Handy\u2019s new book, \u201cHollywood High,\u201d is an incisive history of not just teen movies, but teenagers themselves. <\/p>\n
(Phoebe Jones)<\/p>\n
\u201cHollywood High\u201d also makes its way out of the white middle-class milieu where so many teen movies are set. The comedy \u201cCooley High\u201d (1975) helped pave the way for other movies about Black teens, including \u201cBoyz n the Hood\u201d (1991), John Singleton\u2019s searing drama about a group of friends trying to survive in South-Central Los Angeles. With fans ranging from conservative former California Gov. Pete Wilson to Oscar-winning \u201cMoonlight\u201d filmmaker Barry Jenkins, \u201cBoyz\u201d struck a cultural nerve by depicting a teen world that audiences had scarcely ever seen onscreen. (With its man-to-man talks between Laurence Fishburne\u2019s Furious Styles and his teen son, Tre, played by Cuba Gooding Jr., it could also bear an unlikely resemblance to the Hardy movies).<\/p>\n
Teen movies don\u2019t flow as fast and furious as they did even in the late \u201890s and early \u201800s, a period that brought titles including \u201cShe\u2019s All That,\u201d \u201cCruel Intentions,\u201d \u201cMean Girls,\u201d \u201c10 Things I Hate About You,\u201d \u201cScream,\u201d \u201cCan\u2019t Hardly Wait\u201d and the appropriately titled spoof \u201cNot Another Teen Movie.\u201d In a sense, however, the entire summer movie slate is now designed with teens \u2014 especially teen boys \u2014 in mind. Handy says he considered including a chapter on superhero movies before deciding they constitute their own category. As he writes, \u201cIt\u2019s not that there aren\u2019t still films that celebrate and explore the adolescent male mindset; it\u2019s just that we don\u2019t call them teen movies anymore. We call them superhero movies.\u201d Horror too is a reliable moneymaker aimed largely at teens, even if the movies no longer carry titles like \u201cI Was a Teenage Werewolf\u201d (1957).<\/p>\n
Movie teens have often been misunderstood by the adults in their lives, but in the long run they seem to have won. Films for grownups still exist, but they have a hard time making noise over the sound and fury of the stuff that ends up on eight screens at your local multiplex. Now more than ever, teen movies are just \u2026 movies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On the Shelf Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies By Bruce HandyAvid Reader…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[48615,48620,6342,3444,48619,77,48611,48614,48612,48616,48621,34470,48618,48617,48622,48613,18263,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-106025","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-adult","9":"tag-age-hand","10":"tag-book","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-boyz-n","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-handy","15":"tag-high-school-hallway","16":"tag-hollywood-high","17":"tag-key-film","18":"tag-kind","19":"tag-los-angeles-times","20":"tag-mickey-rooney","21":"tag-peer-group","22":"tag-superhero-movie","23":"tag-teen-movie","24":"tag-teenager","25":"tag-uk","26":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114517047042740415","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}