Published by The Boston Globe
By Kathleen Burge and Katrina Ballard
“Adam Underground,’’ a new short film produced by two Newton North High School graduates, tells the fictional story of a group of entrepreneurial students who discover a lucrative way to make money: churning out finished homework, for a fee, for their less academically talented peers.
But the film is also an ode to Newton North — not the gleaming new building that recently opened awash in controversy and acclaim, but the old, empty hulk of a school that sits abandoned beside its replacement, waiting for demolition.
The film’s two directors, Nicholas Weiss-Richmond and Rachel Cole, met at Newton North and are now in their mid-20s. When they collaborated on the movie, they decided to film it at their old high school during its final student-filled months last spring.
The pair became artists-in-residence at the school and created an apprenticeship program for the film, eventually working with more than 100 Newton North students who helped create the film during the week of April vacation.
“I had such a blast on set, on screen, and working off screen,’’ said Philip Halin, 17, who was a production apprentice and an extra on the set. “I definitely always felt like a part of the process, it wasn’t just, ‘We’re making a movie, let’s have these kids tagging along.’ ’’
Tonight, the first sneak peek of “Adam Underground,’’ as well as a documentary about the making of the short film, will be shown at the new Newton North. Tickets are $15, an attempt to pay off debt remaining from making the film, which the directors have submitted to the Sundance Film Festival.
The seed for the film came one winter a few years ago in New York City, when Weiss-Richmond and Cole were sharing a Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. Weiss-Richmond escaped to a coffee shop to stay warm and began to sketch out the idea for a television series about an underground high school homework factory. Cole embraced the idea, and then they both got distracted by life.
Last year, while Weiss-Richmond was recovering at his parents’ Newton home after a bicycle accident, his mind returned to the underground homework factory, this time in the form of a movie.
He brought in some friends, and pitched the idea to school administrators — who signed on, enthusiastically. “So we walked out a little stunned,’’ Weiss-Richmond said. “Then we had all the work of figuring out what it was going to be.’’
They hired a New York casting director and watched auditions from 50 actors before they chose the main characters. They hired crew largely through friends and previous projects. They were allowed to film for free at the high school, although they had to pay for extra custodians. In all, they spent $45,000 on the film, though much of the cost was covered through fund-raising.
Weiss-Richmond and the rest of the crew took over the high school during April vacation, working around rain and hail for an outside shot and turning a classroom into the fictional homework factory.
They painted the walls of the classroom and ran out of time to restore the paint to the original colors, but school officials told them not to worry. That was the beauty of filming in a building that would be torn down by year’s end.
“It’s been said to me in no uncertain terms in this new building, it wouldn’t ever have happened,’’ Weiss-Richmond said.
Vice principal Deborah Holman said she taught Cole and Weiss-Richmond when they were students and supported their project. “I thought it was completely within their personality as I remembered them as students — wild and outlandish, but thoughtful and artistic,’’ she said.
Holman said she did not realize the scale of the project ahead of time, but was happy Cole and Weiss-Richmond were vague on the details.
“I remember going down to one of sets on the first day . . . whole rooms were utterly transformed,’’ she said. “I sat there gawking, so glad they didn’t tell me they were going to do this, but I just laughed and said, ‘This is totally Nick and Rachel.’ ’’
It was also a way for students to get a feel for a real film set, as well as an example of how recent graduates were pursuing their creative passions, she said.
The crew and the student apprentices worked every day from morning until midnight, barely finishing their filming before school reopened at the end of April vacation ended.
As they filmed, the old building began to play a role in the film.
“In a way, the building was decomposing around us,’’ Weiss-Richmond said. “It definitely lent an end-of-days feeling to us.’’
Now Weiss-Richmond has been preparing for this week’s debut in an office in the new building. This gleaming Newton North feels sterile to him, much like a hospital, he said. “I’m very attached to the old building.’’
No comments:
Post a Comment