s e r e n i t y

Didn't the very first class take place in a classroom? or have I watched so many shows that they're all just blending together now

but ... that's not real life, is it? a lot of important stuff happens during class, Skins has quite a few class scenes

wolkenfuehlen

Did it? I'm sure it was at the lake/somewhere in nature...or was it? I remember Will wrote the essay about who he is to impress Finn with in Finn's classroom.....

oh wait. Wasn't there a lyric on a board in a classroom? Finnegan? Or was that in the Will-essay-scene? Or in the unaired pilot? I really must break out those YA copies I have and watch them again once the exam of doom is over...

s e r e n i t y

Yes the lyric on the blackboard is the same thing Im thinking about though Im not sure if it's a class scene or just Finn talking to someone

wolkenfuehlen

We're both such competent mods.

s e r e n i t y

We really should call for Finnegans help right now

wolkenfuehlen

I've called, look! *points up at post #152* Just give me two days until after exams and I'll break out my copies and check

Finnegan

(1) Earlier story-line interaction: considered but rejected?

Almost everybody who's posted (seriously) on this thread seems to agree that the most conspicuous way in which YA could have been been improved is by having more and earlier (or less purely symbolic) interaction between the Jake-Hamilton story-line and the Scout-Will-Bella storyline.

Bella's seeing through Jake's disguise is the event with which the story-lines first interact substantially (on a non-symbolic level). In YA as aired, that happens at the end of episode 6, and is revealed by Bella to Jake in episode 7.

But notice: A shot of Jake talking with Bella at Bella's garage, although from that Bella-tells-Jake-she-knows scene, included in episode 7 in YA as aired, is the "credits" shot for Katherine Moennig from the very first episode of YA. That means that the Bella-tells-Jake-she-knows scene was filmed wekk before July 12, 2000 -- earlier than the rest of episode 7.

That suggests that Antin may have considered having the two story-lines interact earlier than they do in the drama as aired.

When else might the "Bella and Jake at the garage" scene have been inserted into YA? The obvious time for Jake to meet Bella is in episode 2, when Jake needs a safe place to keep her bike, isn't it? Why not stash it at Bella's garage?

The use of a shot from the "Bella-tells-Jake-she-knows" scene for the credits as early as episode 1 seems to suggest that Antin considered starting substantial story-line interaction in episode 2 -- which, as aired, is the only episode with absolutely no (non-symbolic) interaction at all between the two main story-lines.

So if Antin considered a pre-cotillion interaction, why did he reject it? Perhaps to underscore Jake's emotional neediness and isolation before Hamilton goes for her? The dramaturgical question, then may be: would one or more friends who know really have lessened Jake's need to be loved by Hamilton? For me, at least, the answer is a resounding: NO!

(2) First "class" in classroom or on lake?

Sheida,

In the unaired pilot, the first class is in a classsroom. What becomes Finn's "lecture on the lake" in episode 1 of YA as aired in an indoor class in the unaired pilot. The scene's vastly better in YA as aired.

However, for YA as aired, the answer to your question depends how you define "class." Finn seems to combine a lit class with crew practice for the junior division rowing team, but whether it's a real class or not is never clear. A literature class that seems to include 20 rowers and not rowers, boys and girls, sometimes (episode 4), but to be just for the boys' rowing team at other time, seems odd -- until one remembers that the rowing and the lake in "YA are highly symbolic. It's one of the many things in YA that make little sense when viewed naively.

The first instruction we see in YA in Finn's lecture on the lake to the rowing team in episode 1, but it's very general, about what the kids (and the viewers) should try to get out of being at Rawley, although it does allude both overtly and covertly to Shakespeare. Later in episode 1, when Will approaches Finn to ask for a second chance despite having cheated on his entrance exam, he does so in Finn's classroom, after classes are over for the day. And yes, Anja, that's when we see "My love she speaks like silence," the first line of Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," scrawled on Finn's blackboard.

There's nothing "class"-like in episode 2.

The next "class"-like event we see is the discussion of Thoreau's Walden on the lake at the start of episode 3 -- that seems to be just for the junior division rowing team. Later in episode 3 Finn asks Will to stay after class, in Finn's claassroom, to discuss Will's apparent theft of the video camera. That's when we see "I go and come with a strange liberty," a line from Walden, scrawled on Finn's blackboard.

Both class scenes in epiosde 4, at the beginning and at the end, are outdoors, the first in the garden, the second lakeside. The next "class" is Ryder's, outside on the lawn, in episode 6. The last is the discussion of determinism vs. free will, for the rowing team on the lake, in episode 7. If memory serves, those are all the "class"-like scenes in YA. Most of the classes we see are outdoors, any way one looks at it.

wolkenfuehlen

Wasn't YA already finished with shooting once the first episode aired? That was always my impression. I'll have a look around, I'm pretty sure I have info on this somewhere.

Personally, I don't find it that unusual that scenes from later episodes are used in the credits for a show.

I remember that. It looks completely different than "normal" Rawley rooms would (because it was a different location) and there was Finn/Kate kissing.

Finnegan

No. One of the cast -- Bosworth, I think -- said in an interview during the week of July 12, 2000, that they were shooting episode 6 that week. Then, too, the candid photo of Somerhalder snogging Moennig at the gas station -- the one about which Somerhalder insisted that they were just rehearsing, even though the two of them never kiss at the gas station in any scene -- has a date stamp on it, and that date is, if memory serves, around July 22. All that material is already posted on this forum in one of my discussions of the incredibility of Somerhalder's remarks about that photo, and of his having been "just good friends" with Moennig.

I'm pretty sure they didn't finished filming YA until the end of July. They started filming the second week of May -- one can tell from the flowers in bloom at the time, quite apart from some articles that suggest that -- and ended at the end of July for a series aired from the second week in June until the end of August. In sum, YA seems to have been filmed episode by episode one month before it was aired. Except for the Bella-talks-with-Jake-at-the-gas-station scene, which seems to have been shot at least seven weeks before it was aired.

I don't know whether it's unusual, but it does seem to imply that the Bella-talks-with-Jake-at-the-gas-station scene was shot earlier than the rest of episode 7.

wolkenfuehlen

The pilot episode had no credits sequence, did it? Then I guess if they filmed episode 7 the next week, starting on say July 17, and filmed that scene first, they still would've had two days to put it into the credits that then first aired during the second episode on July 19.
Or maybe they did film it before because they knew they couldn't have the inside location during the week they'd actually film episode 7.
Either way, even if it was shot before the rest of episode 7, I think it was purely for logistical reasons and not for creative reasons. That scene was never meant to be in any other episode imho.

Finnegan

This post follows up some thoughts I've posted here, on this board's "Comparing YA to other shows thread," about the Jake-Hamilton story-line's relationship to the rest of Young Americans. The gist is that the Jake-Hamilton "true love" story interacts far more with the Scout-Bella and Will-Rawley love stories on a symbolic/metaphorical/adult viewing of YA that it does on a naive/surface/teen viewing.

Despite that, I still think that YA is structurally flawed. YA rewards the effort needed to appreciate it on the symbolic/metaphorical/adult level. It actually has something new and important to say --or, rather, something ancient that hasn't been said credibly for moderns -- that true love, passion born of compassion, ruled by compassion, and expressing compassion, is possible. And it says that inspiringly well. But it's so hard to understand, so subtle, so too-clever-by-half, that few viewers get its message. YA fails in the same way that Joyce and Proust fail -- almost nobody reads them. It also fails in another way -- the people who like serious, artful criticism don't watch teen dramas, because they don't expect to find that in them. Proper packaging and marketing could solve the latter problem, but the former problem is structural.

In YA as we have it:

-- Far too much time is spent, too repetitively, showing how the incest allegation helps Scout and Bella understand that they don't love one another. Scout and Bella contrast usefully with Jake and Hamilton, but the incest allegation could be shown to be false much earlier in the drama, and we could move much earlier on to letting Jake and Hamilton inspire Bella to understand that she loves Will and always has.

-- Not nearly enough time is given to the way Hamilton helps Jake heal after the cotillion, to his the ironic masking of compassion as passion. It's hard to see, and it's a pity that scenes showing that were cut. Also, we never see Hamilton even thinking about the need for Jake to stop cross-dressing, and how that's best done. We have to believe that he understands that she can't continue to cross-dress, and is planning to help her stop, otherwise he's either a blind fool or a selfish jerk -- either of which is totally out of character. But we need to see that, Hamilton's ambiguity is excessive.

-- There's no "in-drama" effect of "true love," which is supposed to change the world when it erupts into it. That paucity of direct interaction between the Jake-Hamilton story-line and the other story-lines deprive us of that, and the point of doing that -- that the effect is supposed to be on us, the viewers -- is way too subtle. Some in-drama effect could help us understand that better. But we never see anybody observe or learn of or hear the story of Jake and Hamilton. All we get is hints, in the last episode, that the story has been told to Scout, Sean, Will and Bella on their walk to Carson, and that the story, as well as being around Jake and Hamilton, has helped Bella start to understand that she really loves Will, not Sean or Scout.

With very little loss, YA could be cut down to movie length, focused on the Jake-Hamilton story with a more fully developed post-cotillion part, and on how that story affects others.

-- Many secondary characters are redundant: Caroline and Paige clearly are. Sean could be cut back to Will's friend and, symbolically, his past; we don't need Sean to make Scout jealous, Will could do that better, and force Scout to grow more in the process. We also don't need the tangential symbolic-level point that Bella shouldn't love merely what Will is or has been.

-- Many events would be better omitted:

(A) The lake lake run, the hazing, and Scout and Will lying to each other in the woods in episode 1. it's not clear enough that all that is "that from which we are to be redeemed," we don't need the hazing for Scout to willfully ignore that Will's waiting for Bella, and we can find a briefer context for the "gotta love tradition" line.

(B) The townie fight scene and its aftermath in episode 2; the only good thing about that is the scene of Will looking at his parents through their windows afterwards, which we don't need a fight to get.

(C) The whole gambling and letter-to-my-real-dad thing from episode 6. Episode 6 actually weakens Ryder's character by making his malice seem motivated by money, and that YA was, for Antin, "a letter that I really wrote just for myself" is precisely what needs to be changed.

Nikki K

I disagree about Caroline. And there is still an elephant missing. And it seems like you would have written a completely different show, Finnegan. So how would you lay out the series? Perhaps you can write up synopses for your ideal episodes?

Finnegan

I love the actress - for my taste, the prettiest girl on the YA set, although there's something about Moennig ... And I like the character -- so much that I can even overlook her falling for Ryder. But I don't think the character's plot-essential. Will does need a love interest less abstract than Rawley (if only to keep him from jumping Scout). But I think the Bella-Scout story-line could be wrapped up half-way through the drama, leaving plenty of time in the second half for Will and Bella to interact with Jake and Hamilton and for have Bella to reciprocate Will's obvious interest. Little or no Sean/Bella, of course, but that's not plot-essential either.

Same drama, I think, just more focused on its emotional and thematic core, the "true love" story. And I started the other day to work on what you've suggested. If it goes well, I'll share. Meanwhile, a I've posted some ideas a few pages back on this thread, a year or two ago.