Talkin' Teenspeak

By Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer -- I never really graduated from high school. There is a diploma with my name on it somewhere, but that has not freed me from my lifelong obsession with those four years of adolescent self-discovery. And since I became an education reporter, I have had an excuse to spend much time observing and thinking and writing about grades 9 through 12, in and out of class.

My favorite movie director is John Hughes, the Spielberg of teen-oriented cinema. I prefer high school basketball to the NBA. The best song ever written by pop legend Brian Wilson is not, to my mind, "Good Vibrations" but "Be True to Your School." To satisfy my craving for homeroom chit chat, I frequently annoy my daughter, 15, with questions about the latest in food, clothes and speech

You would think there would be a lot of television shows a high school addict like me would love. Teenagers are a key demographic group, sought after by advertisers.

But almost all the high school comedies and dramas I watch are disappointments, having little to do with what I know of teenagers, except for one wonderfully surprising show, the ABC drama "Once and Again."

I know, I know. The network markets the program as a hothouse melodrama of midlife, post-divorce angst, and as an excuse to ogle its unbelievably alluring stars, Sela Ward and Billy Campbell. But for me, "Once and Again" works because its co-executive producer is Winnie Holzman, a curly-haired, 46-year-old Long Island native who is the best writer of teen dialogue I have ever encountered.

Not many people know of Holzman. Anonymity is common for television writers. But a previous creation of hers, the short-lived drama "My So-Called Life," has led to a cult following. That show was cancelled in 1995 after just 19 episodes because ABC executives, on a day that shall live in infamy, put it up against a new NBC show called "Friends."

I am not the least bit objective about "My So-Called Life" (just "MSCL" to its hard-core fans). I am very happy that the Web sites and discussion groups and reruns on MTV have given it such a healthy afterlife. I have watched the same episodes three or four times over in as many days and not found my interest slacken. I will see something I didn't notice before -- an offhand remark, a whispered aside, a look, a gesture -- that hooks me like rereading Tolstoy or rehearing Bach does for finer sensibilities.

Twenty-first century teenage dialogue rendered by ordinary television writers sounds canned or pretentious. I gave up on the ABC Friday night comedies long before the network did. The WB's "Dawson's Creek" is what high school talk would be like if everyone had been held back for seven or eight years. The less said about Saturday morning comedies such as "Saved By the Bell" or "Hang Time," the better.

True youth speak is funny and ironic, vague where emotions intrude and thrillingly impatient with parents. Here is a teenage girl on "Once and Again," justifiably enraged at the misbehavior of the adults in her family, conversing with her mother:

Daughter: Well, I have a mock trial. After school.

Mother: Mock trial? What on earth is -- .

D: It's something I have to do, okay? I have no choice.

M: Oh. It just sounds so -- harsh.

D: Well, it isn't. It's so we'll learn about -- I mean, there's such a thing as rules, okay? There are legal -- laws, and people who break laws, who act like they can just do anything they want, with no morals, like children, and they have to be stopped.

Holzman, like Shakespeare, began her career as an actor. She has had small parts on her shows, as a guidance counselor in "MSCL" and as an social worker in "Once and Again." She grew up in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., and attended the Wheatley School, one of the best public schools in the country, a place where a very bright girl could write poetry and have offbeat friends and not be written off as a brainiac nerd. She often rode the Long Island Railroad to acting classes in Manhattan.

After majoring in creative writing at Princeton, she happily joined the Upper West Side theater fringe, spending several years with a four-person comedy troupe called "Serious Bizness."

"We did things like a skit where two kids are being told the facts of life by two parents, or we did a country western song called 'Jesus Likes Me Better Than He Likes You,' " Holzman said.

Approaching 30, she enrolled in a masters of fine arts program at New York University and became a student of Arthur Laurents, who wrote the dialogue for "West Side Story" and "Gypsy."

"I needed someone to say to me, 'You are a writer. You should be writing.' And he really understood that," she said.

With composer David Evans she produced a musical, "Birds of Paradise," which failed off-Broadway but built her confidence. In 1984 she married Paul Dooley, a character actor first widely noticed as the father in the 1979 film "Breaking Away." When their daughter Savannah was born, they decided to seek the better opportunities for steady employment in southern California.

Holzman settled down to raising a toddler in a little one-story Tudor in Toluca Lake and looking for something to write. She had watched with mounting envy as some of her New York acting friends became hits on the TV drama "thirtysomething."

Her brother, cinematographer Ernest Holzman, told her he turned down an offer to work on the show because he preferred movies. "You're an idiot," she said. "That's a great show."

So he changed his mind, and when she visited him on the set, one of the show's writers, Richard Kramer, said he had heard of her work and promised to read anything she might send him -- a rare offer in Hollywood. She took it seriously, retreating whenever she could that summer to a favorite diner, Paty's, where she smoked cigarettes and wrote dialogue on yellow legal pads.

Her brother, trying to spare her disappointment, told her the sample script wasn't very good. Kramer told her it was the best newcomer's work the show's producers had ever seen. She wrote nine "thirtysomething" episodes, and when the show died, its creators and executive producers, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, asked her to come up with another show. They agreed vaguely on something very honest about a teenage girl. "MSCL" was born.

Holzman can point to no particular secret for making that show, and "Once and Again," so real. She has her memories of the Wheatley School, her encounters with young relatives and their friends, the instincts of the actors on the set and even an occasional contribution from her daughter, only 8 when "MSCL" was first shot but now 15.

One Savannah Dooley line was used in "MSCL" when a preteen character asks if she can wear makeup on a family night out. She is told no. Her next question: "Well, can I wear it in the driveway?"

There is a key Holzman insight about teen speak. "When you are 14 or 15, you don't feel like you are young," she said. "You feel like you are old now, grown-up. It is easy for adults to forget that and write down to kids. But I remember that age."

She has been fortunate to have unusually fine young actors. Claire Danes, Jared Leto, Devon Gummersall and A.J. Langer were wonderful in "MSCL." The younger members of the "Once and Again" cast also are strong, particularly Julia Whelan, who plays 15-year-old Grace Manning. She sounds so much like our daughter that my wife and I often exchange glances when a Whelan line such as "You are so over-explaining this" punctuates a scene.

Holzman underlined her feelings about the importance of such characters as she accepted the Television Critics Association Award in 1995 for the just cancelled "MSCL." Replacing it on the ABC schedule, she noted, was the trial drama "Murder One," which focused on the spectacular murder of the very young lover of a powerful man.

"It troubles me," she said, "that people in our community are more comfortable with the image of a 15-year-old girl stripped and stabbed and destroyed than they are with one fully dressed and alive and speaking her own mind."

But she rejects any notion that she is down on television. With "Once and Again" safely renewed, there will be more adventures of Grace Manning and her family ahead.

"I am energized and excited to be working in a medium I feel passionately about," she said. "I love what I do."__Washington Post (July 30, 2000)