Just two actresses read for the role of Angela: Alicia Silverstone, 16, and Claire Danes, 13. Since they were placing a premium on authenticity, the producers looked for actual teenagers. In the 1990s, many teenagers on TV shows -Beverly Hills 90210, for example -were played by actors in their twenties or even thirties. Langer (Rayanne Graff), Claire Danes (Angela Chase), and Wilson Cruz (Ricky Vasquez) So I named the character Angela partly in honor of her.Ī.J. I remember she said something like, "Boys just have it so easy." And that's in the pilot. I had a phone conversation with and it really affected me. And a woman who worked on Thirtysomething, and became our script coordinator on My So-Called Life, mentioned to me she had a young teenage niece named Angela. These things were so evocative, and I know they unlocked some stuff for me. The feeling of being trapped in the room. When I went to this place, Fairfax High in Los Angeles, there were so many moments of sense memory that brought back high school for me: The sound of the bell. I taught high school students for two or three days. I was about to turn 40 I had a daughter who was about 7. Winnie Holzman (creator): What Marshall and Ed pitched to me was, "Let's do a show about a young teenage girl and make it as authentic as we can." When we started talking about this, I hadn't thought about writing teenagers at all. Marshall and Ed had the idea to create a show about a teenage girl, initially conceived as a half-hour drama in the vein of The Wonder Years (for which Holzman had also written). ![]() My So-Called Life was created by Winnie Holzman, a writer tapped by executive producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz in 1991 after they worked with her on the influential baby-boomer drama Thirtysomething. Here is the story of My So-Called Life, in the words of the people who created and starred in it. Though the series takes place before teenagers had smartphones and email, its stories still feel timeless, even urgent. But that single season has lived on: first syndicated in heavy rotation by MTV, then released on home video, and now, streaming on Hulu. Many of us caught in that generation gap -dubbed, appropriately, "Generation Catalano" by writer Doree Shafrir -felt like we were part of Angela's world, and were crushed when ABC cancelled My So-Called Life after just 19 episodes. Kurt Cobain had died four months earlier, and the Gen-X flannel shirts and acoustic guitars of the early '90s would soon yield to the shiny, over-caffeinated, pre-Millennial culture of Britney Spears and Friends. ![]() The hour-long series about the teenage travails of 16-year-old protagonist and narrator Angela Chase, played by Claire Danes, premiered in August 1994, back when MTV featured Bjork and The Smashing Pumpkins and the cool girls had ditched YM for Sassy. For teenagers in the mid-'90s, nothing else on TV so honestly captured the all-consuming euphoria of first love, the deep pain of a best-friend breakup, or the daily identity shifts that defined teenage existence as My So-Called Life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |