Archive for the ‘documentary’ Category

Hometown on the Big Screen: A Prologue to my Screencast

Friday, November 12th, 2010

Traintracks…The Amish…A shooting during a pee-wee t-ball game…The Orthopedic Capital of the World…Rick Fox (yes, the NBA basketball star)…all will be mentioned in my pending Google Streetview Screencast.

In the meantime, as sort of a prologue, I’ve posted a movie trailer for a very “Breakfast Club”-esque (ripoff) documentary that was filmed in my hometown, Warsaw, Indiana. It competed at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Directing Award in the Documentary category. Paramount released the movie the summer following the festival. It never showed at a theatre in Fredericksburg, but I remember it appearing at theatres in D.C. and northern Virginia.

I was long-gone from Warsaw during filming, having moved to Fredericksburg about 10 years before the film was shot, but I knew some of the kids and their families who were profiled. Some scenes were shot in the high school where my mom taught, and some kids spent their elementary school years with my dad as their principal. My family watched the movie together once it was released on DVD and at various points in the film pointed at the screen screaming, “OHMYGOD THAT’S _______!”

It was an odd feeling to watch the small town where you spent half your life depicted in film with a national release. The movie itself wasn’t that great-typical teenagers complaining about life-but I’ve embedded the trailer below.

Warsaw’s city limits appear at 4 seconds into the preview.

Here’s a picture from the trailer that shows why I will never relate to people who say there is nothing to do in Fredericksburg.

(Warsaw’s City Limits)

“American Teen” trailer: