"Teen special: Tweenie power; As the Oscars are handed out to this year's stars, Hollywood is already nurturing future winners, and chasing the teenage dollar as never before. On screen, and in the stalls, it's youngsters who are calling the shots. Welcome the Millennium Generation." March 21, 1999. Article by Francis Grant.

It really is a star factory once more. Shiny filmstars of the future are rolling off the Hollywood production line this spring at a speed that has not been witnessed for 50 years.

Tinseltown, always fond of labelling and hyping every consumer twitch, has this time hit upon a genuinely productive seam of celluloid gold. The studio heads have rediscovered a forgotten resource, young people between the ages of 13 and 19, and they have found them exploitable, both as a cheap raw material and as a valuable marketplace.

Whether you call them the Millennium Generation, Tweenies, Generation Y, or the Echo Boomers (the children of the baby boomers of the 1960s), teenage supplies are being mined by the entertainment industry. They dominate the output of films in the US this spring and Britain is about to be washed by the second wave of the trend.

In the vanguard comes the sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer (called I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), to be released early in May. Later in that month, UIP will distribute Varsity Blues, starring Dawson Creek's James Van der Beek.

The summer brings two further teen-oriented offerings, 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed, starring Drew Barrymore. But this glut is as nothing to the flood of movies opening back in the States, each featuring a bewildering array of as yet little-known faces.

The new breed of Rank Starlet has generally gym-slipped in through the back door, taking the small-screen route. Television's successful dramas for teenagers have shown studio financiers how to win a loyal young audience without spending very much up front.

And it was a relatively bloodless coup. Nobody has been put on the scrap heap. After all, the baby boomers and the so- called Generation X age groups can still have their precious Harvey Keitels and Susan Sarandons. It is just that they are a little too creased and shopworn to woo the pocket-money punter.

While the nascent stars of the 1940s used to find their way to the top by appearing in B pictures, TV is now serving that function. The shows that score with the powerful niche market, young teenage girls, are being cherry-picked for big picture talent.

The huge appeal of television shows such as Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both carried by Warner Brother's WBTV network and now shown in Britain, have made the faces of their central characters well known throughout the States. The next step, into Hollywood proper, was inevitable.

"It is fascinating watching it develop out here," says Anthony Stewart Head, the British actor who co-stars with Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy.

"Sarah really is a film star now. Watching her on screen, it is clear that she can carry a movie. She has enough presence, even at her young age." Head, who is still probably best known to British viewers as the original Gold Blend man from the coffee adverts, goes on to point out that the young actors he works with on Buffy are significantly older than the characters they play.

"Sarah was 19 when she started the show, but she is in her twenties now and has been acting since she was four years old. She is amazingly business-like about the whole thing." Head believes the quality of the script marks the best television shows out from the rest. The same will apply with the spate of new movies.

"She's all That, which stars Freddie Prinze Jr and Racheal Leigh Cook, is, frankly, not that well written. If Buffy manages to survive this trend, it will be because the script is so very good." He has a point. The self -consciously well-read wit of Dawson's Creek and poker-faced panache of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are undeniable. And, while they don't win the ocean-like tracts of viewers that shows such as Friends and ER can pull in, they do have enormous economic clout in their own markets. As a result, advertising in the commercial breaks for some of these shows is disproportionately expensive. The list of rival TV series spawned by the teen fad is even longer than the list of forthcoming films. Head says a Los Angeles network production executive told him last week that there were now 40 pilot teen shows waiting in the wings. Already established television successes include Charmed, about three sisters (Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano) who discover they are witches, Felicity, starring Keri Russell, and 7th Heaven.

It didn't take long for American viewers to buy into the fresh and freckly faces of all the stars of these shows and, in particular, into their sassy dialogue. The scripts are entirely different to the retro nostalgia of a show like Happy Days, or of a feature such as American Graffiti. These were both memories of adolescent epiphany, lovingly reconstructed. The new fad is perhaps commercially closer to the give-the-kids-what-they-want philosophy behind Seventies and early Eighties teen movies such as Lemon Popsicle or even the execrable Porkys.

For some, the dark kitsch of Buffy might appear to be the sibling of earlier cult high school pictures such as Heathers, or perhaps of the trendy mall-rat realism of the early Nineties, but, in fact, show business has always loved a child with a preternaturally mature way of expressing itself.

This was what made Shirley Temple cute. She said serious and responsible things while wearing a petticoat and hairband. It is also what made Judy Garland's loyalty to Mickey Rooney so winsome in the Andy Hardy movies. It was entirely incongruous. No teenager is really that devoted to another, and if they are, they should be stopped. The truth is that children have always loved watching themselves behaving in a grown-up way and adults are pretty amused by it too.

When Joss Whedon, the 30-year-old creator of Buffy, tried sheepishly to explain away his ability to write for high school kids by saying it was because he was "incredibly immature," he was wrong and he probably knew it. The real answer is that only as an adult writer could he project interesting dialogue back on to his young cast.

Likewise the plots of many of the new movies plunder the adult classics. Cruel Intentions, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, is a reworking of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and She's All That is a new version of the Pygmalion/Eliza Dolittle story.

Financially speaking, it is a formula worth perfecting. The teen audience is there for the taking and represents about 10 per cent of the American cinema-going public. By definition, they don't have responsibilities such as mortgages, and entertainment is the one thing, along with the ubiquitous sneakers, that even the poorest child will save up to spend on.

And if the script is good the parent will go along too. As analysts at WBTV have candidly pointed out, while adult experience tends to vary because we are not all archaeologists or accountants, everyone goes to school at some point.

This practical approach is not the key to the whole teen phenomenon, though. Youth has never been more widely celebrated by Western culture and the entertainment industry is utterly complicit.

A few months ago, one screen writer wannabe Riley Weston infamously passed herself off as a 19-year-old to get work. She was actually 32, but Disney, lured by her apparent precosity, signed her to a $300,000-a-year contract to write new shows. Youth is king. Even the banter in adult shows such as Friends tends to ape the vernacular of the playground.

How long will it last and which stars will have staying power? Hard to say. Anthony Stewart Head says the end is not yet in view: "It is the typical Hollywood thing. When they get a good idea, they end up clubbing it to death with a blunt instrument".

"Because of the success of Buffy, and of Scream in the cinema, they have realised that there is a huge market out there and they will stick to it until it dries up." It is not even a particularly original subject matter, according to Head. "There have always been teen movies, films like Dirty Dancing or Fame. It is just that at the moment there is nothing being made but teen movies." As befits its target age group, the current surge of teen interest is likely to finish abruptly, like any pubescent crush. The race is on for the studios to reach the audience before they tire of high school high jinks.

Page created May 1999. Original material © Betsy Vera (bentley@umich.edu). This website is for information and entertainment purposes only and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.

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