The senior year of high school. Nine months, and then it’s over. Unless you were in "American Teen," the Paramount Vantage docu-drama that opened this summer. The film follows a group of kids from Warsaw, Ind., during their senior year, and we asked a few of them to guest blog the experience of promoting the movie while spending the summer in Los Angeles.
Essays from Mitch Reinholt and Colin Clemens are what follows. Reinholt and Clemens both leaned toward the jock end of the spectrum in the film, with Clemens playing the role of Warsaw's star basketball player. These days, Reinholt is studying pre-med at Indiana University and Clemens is attending Manchester College in Manchester, Ind.
Read the Los Angeles Times review of "American Teen."
Mitch Reinholt's guest blog: Talk about culture shock.
The four quasi-teens and I embarked on a journey to Los Angeles from our hometown in Indiana, not knowing what the next eight weeks would entail. However, now that we are more than halfway through the experience, living and breathing the documentary that tells the story of five small-town kids' last year of high school, "American Teen," I have begun to reflect and have made some intriguing observations.
Warsaw, Ind., is a small town where the highlight of one's day is often a trip to Wal-Mart to pick up groceries. However, it is a very family-oriented town and was a great, safe place for myself and many others to grow up.
Literally, my entire family is from and lives in Warsaw, and operates a small furniture store business. It is a very tightknit community, where it is not uncommon to know every single person you see at the post office. I'm telling you all of this to help paint a picture of the drastic contrast between this small community and the new city that I call home for the summer, Los Angeles.
I have discovered that the city never sleeps. I have actually been stuck in traffic on one of the infamous freeways at 3 a.m. Here, even the Subways are open 24 hours a day. There is always something to do or something new to see and the size is incredible.
My favorite change is the proximity to the beach here in LA. From our apartments, it is a 30-minute drive to the beach, as opposed to 30 hours from Warsaw.
However, in addition to the change in scenery, living here has also been a change in lifestyle. Instead of a summer job delivering furniture or working in a duck hatchery (my last two summer jobs), our job is to talk to people and tell them about our lives.
It sounds very simple, but it is also very difficult. I have discovered how incredibly exhausting it is to talk all day, let alone about yourself. During the last couple weeks, our normal schedule has consisted of interviews in the morning and often into the afternoon, followed by a screening of the movie and a question-and-answer session, and then generally an evening event of some kind to promote the movie.
While all of this has been a lot of fun and we have met a lot of incredible people, at the end of the day we are more tired than if we had been doing physical labor all day.
However, the exhaustion is almost always trumped by the joy of seeing the reaction of a crowd as they watch the pains and pleasures of our senior year of high school in documentary form. In case you have never had the opportunity to watch yourself on a big screen in a room full of strangers, let me tell you about the rush of emotions that I have experienced in the last several weeks.
My first time seeing the movie with an actual crowd of strangers was at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and my emotions could be described one word: petrified. I was a deer in headlights when we walked on stage for our first question-and-answer session. It was clear that the crowd disagreed with some of my actions in the movie and I was afraid that someone was going to call me out and that I would not be able to handle it. (Editor's note: Reinholt dumps his high school girlfriend Hannah Bailey via text message.)
However, adrenaline quickly took over and each of us survived the 20 minutes in the spotlight. Fast-forward a few months and many screenings later.
With my entire family in the crowd at the LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art] Theater and another screening complete, Colin, Jake, Hannah, Megan and I took the stage, mikes in hand, and calmly took our seats. Each of us recited our normal "where are you now" spiel and boisterously mocked each other. It felt as if we had known each other for a lifetime as we played off of each other's mistakes and took the floor to bail each other out of awkward questions.
I really felt as if things clicked between the five of us that night, as the memories of the initial fear and stage fright were the last thing on our minds. Essentially, we were officially comfortable enough to talk very openly about the condensed events of one year of our lives to complete strangers and have a blast hanging out together at the same time.
And to top it off, I had my family there to cheer me on and love me the same when it was all over.
Going into the summer, I had absolutely no idea what it would be like to promote a movie or what all that would entail. However, I also had no idea that only a few short weeks after arriving in the grand state of California that I would surmount any fear of public speaking that I ever felt and would be able to address thousands of people calmly and candidly.
Although I feel as if I still have a great deal to learn about myself and about the entertainment industry, I feel that this amazing summer has been an exciting challenge that has helped me put a lot of things in perspective. I certainly have a different standpoint on what an actor goes through throughout the filmmaking process.
However, more importantly for me, I have learned that I enjoy living outside of Indiana, as well as many other helpful details about my personality. The experience has stretched my limits physically and mentally, and although it may not ultimately change the course of my life, I will walk away from this summer with newfound wisdom, four best friends and incredible memories that will last a lifetime.
-- Mitch Reinholt
Photo: The cast of "American Teen": From left, Jake Tusing, Colin Clemens, Mitch Reinholt and Megan Krizmanich. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times
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