JIM MCCAY june 1996  

I met Jim McKay ten years ago at our friend Katherine’s house. We were all sitting on the floor watching Les Blank documentaries she had rented and eating popcorn with garlic butter. I was a bleached blonde associate editor at Teenagemagazine (no one else remembers it either) and he was a long-ponytailed substitute teacher and waiter with an idea for a documentary on nursing home residents he eventually made called Lighthearted Nation. Now he’s a big deal, having just directed his first feature movie, Girls Town, which stars Lili Taylor, Anna Grace and Bruklin Harris, and comes out in August. Even if I didn’t know Jim, I’d still say that Girls Town is the best, most honest movie I’ve seen in years. It’s definitely the Sassiest movie I’ve ever seen. The first time I watched it, I had to run into the bathroom after ‘cause I was crying too much -- partly out of relief that there’s this movie about teenage girls as they really are. It’s so real that I’ve since then found myself wondering what’s happening with the girls in the movie now, how things are working out for them, wanting to know where they’ll be in five years. And then of course I have to remind myself that Emma, Angela and Patti don’t really exist. But I still want to believe that they do. Jim and I went to this little Italian restaurant on 12th Street to talk into a tape recorder about Girls Town and girls. Girls being our mutual favorite topic.

Jane Pratt:  If you hear yelping in the background, that’s not us.  That’s the music.  Okay.  So, how did this fascination with teenage girls begin, Mr. McKay?

Jim McKay:  Better be more prepared to answer.

J.P.  That’s okay, we have a STOP button here, if you need it.

J.M.  Truthfully, I don’t know.  I never got hit by a lightning bolt or anything that marked the beginning of my fascination with teen girls.  The embarrassing thing is that I do have a fascination in the first place.  It’s just, I think, a lot about how I grew up, probably.

J.P.  Were girls a mystery to you when you were a teenager?

J.M.  I kind of related more to the girls I was friends with than to the guys I was friends with.  I can’t say that I hung out with girls more than guys, although now I definitely do.

J.P.  You have more girl friends now?

J.M.  Yeah, I think so.

J.P.  Okay.

J.M.  I always felt like the girls I was around in high school were really more thoughtful, and really conscious of where they were at and what they were going through.  And the guys were on a much more visceral, physical, guy-level, which never really interested me. I was very much caught in between... I was kind of jocky and kind of afraid and kind of... whatever.

I mean, that new book, Going All The Way, by Sharon Thompson, talks about the uniqueness of every girl’s different experience and how it’s really tough to even study what teen girls go through, or what anyone goes through, for that matter.

But so much of it is based on storytelling and there’s so many secrets involved.  And so, you never are quite sure what comes out, exactly where it’s coming from.

J.P.  Were the girls you went to high school with at all like the girls in Girls Town?

J.M.  Definitely, yeah.  If I had any experience to bring into the whole thing, as a writer, that’s my experience, the girls that I was with.  In particular, the character of Patti that Lili plays -- I knew a lot of girls like that. 

J.P.  You should probably first explain how the movie was written.

J.M.  I came up with an idea for a story about this group of friends, girls, and wrote a pretty detailed outline. And I took that outline and we cast actors for the three or four main characters.  And over the course of a couple of months, through improv scenes that we videotaped in my apartment, we worked off of that outline, building a story.  Changing it as we went along.  Developing the characters.  And eventually, finishing up with about 400 pages of transcribed dialogue that I then worked into a script.

J.P.  So did each girl write her own lines, in a way?

J.M.  Well, you kind of can’t even say who wrote the lines because it wasn’t actually writing.  It was acting.  But yeah, there were times when I literally just transcribed the scene and almost word-for-word used what was there.  A lot of other scenes I wrote completely by myself, to fill in the story.  And some scenes are half and half.  I mean, it varied a lot, but we ended up with a script that was very, very colloquial and true to life and probably had the word “fuck” in it more times than any other script in history.

And we had a script when we shot, but the actors were very free to improv again, within reason and within making sense in the scene.  Because I had a lot of confidence in them, that they knew their characters as well as I did, and if they felt a line come up, that it was probably the right line.  So it was pretty loose.  And they all get actor and writer credits in the movie.  Every time I’d give them the script, I'd ask them to come back with comments and notes.  And then I’d go back in and write another draft.  We did about eight drafts by the time it was done.  Most of the literal writing I did.  But it was a collaboration.

J.P.  Did you use them in terms of trying to get a sense about what really does go on with teenage girls?  I mean, did they ever say, this isn’t realistic to me...

J.M.  Definitely.  There was a lot of that.  But obviously, the reason I worked that way was because I did feel like, I don’t have a female voice or a teenage voice.  And I felt like this was the only way I could write it and make it come out correct and real.  But as the conceiver of the whole project, I definitely had certain ideas that I wanted to put across that needed to be in there for me, for other reasons.  I really wanted to create a mixture of very realistic work with an idealistic side in order to say, this is what is; and then be able to say, this is what could be, or what might be, or what should be.

And then, because you’ve accepted the reality of the characters and the reality of the story and the place, these other more “could be” or “should be” scenarios actually become almost realistic themselves... because you’ve based them in this unbelievably real foundation.  So, for instance, of the five most-prominent characters in the movie, three are black, two are white.  The one main white girl is kind of upper middle class and the other is the most lower-class of them all, and has a kid.  Angela, who is black, is on the road to Howard University and becoming a writer.  When we wrote the script, a lot of people said, well, is anyone going to believe that these girls hang out with one another? 

I want to say -- they hang around with each other, whether you want them to or not, that’s the reality I’m going to present.  You know, we somehow made a semi-urban film without using the “N” word once, with no guns.

J.P.  Right.

J.M. I mean in every single movie we see, a gun is the central turning point in the film, you know?

But I’d like to think that there would be a world where girls grew up in high school and never even mentioned a gun.  That might be nice.  So, that was my choice, as a film maker; I’m not going to go to that place.

J.P. But you present other things that are probably not part of your ideal world - like a young girl having to support a kid.

J.M.  Well, when I grew up I knew teenage mothers.  I think in films we’re always seeing stereotypes.  And we're seeing the  poor black teenage girl with a baby.  So, I kind of went against that stereotype.  Even though Patti having a kid and being in high school might not be ideal, I think that she deals with her kid in a really strong, really positive way.

For instance, there’s a scene when Patti isn’t there, and the girls talk about the fact that she had this kid, and Emma says she should have had an abortion.  And Angela doesn’t disagree.  And I think that we pretend that these discussions don’t happen, and we pretend that certain statistics don’t exist.  And we really buy into a lot of societal stereotypes about kids, about girls, about women.  And I just think it’s important to show another side of that.  I think it’s important to show real stuff, too. 

In Just Another Girl On The IRT, that girl was a really smart college-bound girl, and she got pregnant.  And she decided not to have an abortion and she had her kid.  She almost threw her kid in the garbage, but she ended up keeping her kid and going to school and it was going to be a happy ending.  I like that.  I think that’s great.  You know, I think that was an interesting choice, as a film maker.

The fact is, you know, a lot of urban minority girls have abortions.  And we’re lead to believe, in the popular media, that that’s taboo... because the popular media is a white male media.  And we’re led to believe that that just doesn’t happen.  And I just wanted to try and push the envelope, and try and make something that was blatantly feminist.  And I think where we were very lucky, in the end, is that we made a film that’s fun and funny and engaging enough so that it doesn’t feel like a feminist movie, hopefully.

J.P. It absolutely does not feel like that.  It doesn’t feel like a message movie.

J.M. A lot of people felt that.   I really trusted the process that we used and the actors who took part in that process.  People had read certain scenes from the script and were just kind of like, oh, my god, that’s not going to come off right.  But I knew that when these lines came out of their mouths, they would be real, and they would come from a truthful place.  And that was the most important thing.

You know, we weren’t really caught up in a very measured attempt to write clever or witty or snappy or trendy dialogue.  It wasn’t that kind of a movie.  We were trying to make a real movie and the process through which we did it made that happen.

J.P. Were any of the actors actually teenagers?

J.M.  I don’t think any of the main actors were actually under 20.

J.P. But I think it’s the most realistic depiction of teenagers I’ve ever seen in a movie.  And the language, in particular, is so, real to right now.

J.M. I don’t think any of the actors went out of their way to do a lot of research.  There’s actually very few slang words in the movie.  I mean, there’s maybe ten instances where weird kind of hip hop words or teenage words are used.  And yet, a lot of adults, older adults in particular, come away from it feeling like they’ve been to the Margaret Mead Documentary Film Festival or something.  And I think they’re reacting to the look and the vibe, and the way the girls carry themselves and the way they relate.  I mean, they don’t stand around going, "I was chillin' at my crib and bustin’ rhymes...."  It’s more about the meter of their language and the flow of their interaction that, for me, makes it very real.

All these girls felt really comfortable being themselves around one another, rather than all becoming one another,  you know, and that might not be an incredibly realistic thing.  That might be more the idealism that we’re trying to put across.  So Emma’s like, on her way to Princeton next year, or Columbia.  And this really smart suburban white girl, she’s hanging out with these other girls and she doesn’t have to become a little mini-gangsta in order to fit in with them.  She’s herself and they dig her for that, as she digs them for who they are.  I think that was important.

J.P. I do, too.

J.M. Let me ask you the questions.

J.P. Okay.

J.M. Let me ask you, as an expert on teenage girls, name a couple of movies that you have liked or found really inspiring or right on.

J.P. Well, first off, there aren't a lot that even deal with teenage girls.  And not a lot that really hit the mark for me.  I know we disagree on this one, but I thought that Kids did a good job of showing teenagers in a way that I had never seen them shown in a film before.  Although  I felt like the interaction between the guys was much more realistic than the interaction between the girls.  But I liked that the girls were shown talking really openly about sex.  Usually, girls are supposed to talk about sex only in terms of like, trying to get a commitment from the guy.  And I thought that the very raw way they were talking about it was pretty real.

J.M. I agree.

J.P.  But I’m having trouble thinking of other examples.  I really am.

J.M.  If you look through the racks in the video store for realistic portrayals of teen girls, you’re in big trouble.

J.P.  There have been documentaries that have done a good job.  There was Girl Talk.  That was alright.

J.M.  Streetwise is another one.

J.P.  I had problems with Streetwise, actually.  But you liked it?

J.M.  I loved it.

J.P.  The one that I loved was Seventeen.

J.M.  Incredible movie.

J.P.  What would you add to the list?

J.M.  Well, Just Another Girl On the IRT, was a real landmark for me. A lot of people don’t react very positively when I say that, but I just thought it was tremendous for its portrayal of a girl whose character we had literally never, ever seen on screen before.  You know, it was very low budget, and I thought it had a great spirit.  I would say Out of the Blue, Linda Manz’s character is tremendous.  There’s a Canadian film called Sitting in Limbo.  It’s really, really interesting, about three Jamaican girls, two of whom are single mothers and one of whom gets pregnant by her boyfriend and it follows her story.  And it’s really, really a cool movie.  I like Alison Ander’s films and Gas, Food, Lodging.  And some Australian Films.  Puberty Blues is a great, great teenage girl film.

J.P.  You could do a plug for Claire Danes' show My So-Called Life.

J.M.  Yeah, yeah.  I thought that show was incredible.  It was very kind of sterile, because it’s a TV show, very light and very suburban.  But within that, a lot of the main characters were tremendous.  And a lot of the storytelling, a lot of the things that they went through, were really true to life.

J.P.  It’s definitely, by far, the most realistic show about teenagers that’s been on.  But...

J.M Welcome Back, Kotter...

J.P. ...but talk about your idealistic portrayals in terms of the group of friends being all very different from each other.

J.M.  Well, there’s always a struggle to try and figure out where to show what’s really the truth and what's...like the other day, we saw Primal Fear, and we were just saying, you know, if I see another wise, strong, black woman judge, I’m going to kill someone.  You know, in the film makers’ minds, it will send a positive signal, but in the end it becomes this bad stereotype.  And all the main characters in the movie are still the same boring middle-aged white people that you keep making all your movies about anyway.  It’s like music videos and advertisements now; they try and artificially integrate society.

J.P.  Right.

J.M.  It comes out of this place of positive thinking, but in the end it can actually be an adverse thing, it isn't really that helpful.  I think sometimes it’s better to show the harsh reality of things.  I liked that My So-Called Life didn’t always have a happy ending.  I really liked that friendship between Claire Danes’ character and the other redhead girl; they were really good friends in junior high, but now they were kind of moving on to another clique in school or whatever.  And it wasn’t just for a couple of episodes.  That's what was going on, and they weren’t close anymore.  It showed that people drift... 

J.P.  Right, and it’s not all solved in one episode.

J.M.  Yeah, I thought that was nice.

J.P.  What about magazines and teenagers?

J.M.  Sassy magazine was definitely a big influence on me, as was Ms. magazine, which is obviously an older audience.  I really liked how empowering Sassy was, and how it gave girls credit.  For me, that was the most powerful thing about it.  It didn’t make assumptions about how every girl was and about what every girl wanted.  You know, I went to school to be a teacher and I spent a very short amount of time student teaching and substitute teaching, and I realized how easy it is to just treat teenagers like kids, you know, and they’re not.  At the same time, with I read a lot of essays while I was developing the idea, while I was writing the movie.  belle hooks, I’ve read almost everything she’s written.  And Angela Davis, I’ve read a lot of her stuff.  She's been really exciting to me because she’s a communist, she’s a feminist; she’s a this-and-that-ist.  I mean, she’s the label queen of them all.  She’s such an outsider in so many respects and yet she’s like this really plain-speaking, plain-writing, positive-voiced person...a lot like Patti Smith and Yoko Ono, both of whom I saw in the last couple of months.  And it's funny that I would make a connection between them but I realized there’s been this whole revolution with girls and rock music.  And I realized that the one thing that’s really missing - not from the riot girls really, but to a large degree, missing from Courtney Love’s music, for instance - is idealism.  I mean Patti Smith has it but she's also very caring. In the end, she’s always somehow positive and idealistic.  And that is really inspiring to me.  Two of the girls in the movie are named after them.  There’s a Patti and there’s an Angela.  Those are my influences.  What influenced you during the Sassy years?

J.P.  Mine all came out of my own experiences as a teenager.  Almost all of it was just from being fifteen and feeling like I wanted to kill myself, you know.  Feeling so alone.  Looking at magazines especially, because that’s where I think a lot of teenage girls go for solace.  I just wanted to see something that spoke to the way that I really felt inside.  But you couldn't at the time.  There were only adults' images of what teenagers should be like.  In Girl's Town I think that you respect them by showing them the way they really are, rather than the way you think they should be.

J.M.  Ultimately that’s why we called the film Girl's Town.  It’s totally their world.  There’s only a couple of adults in the whole movie, and it was really hard to write the adult parts.  It’s easier to write the adults from your own perspective, but that’s not how the kids see them.

J.P.  Exactly, I was just going to say that.

J.M.  So they turn out not working.

J.P.  But the adults in Girls Town totally work because they are exactly the way that those girls see them.

J.M.  The adults were the hardest to write, and we ended up cutting three adults from the movie because they weren't meshing.

J.P.  Basically, I don’t think teenagers are that interested in adults.

J.M.  Exactly.

J.P.  They’re not that interested in what their teacher really likes, or what makes her do what she does.  She’s just an obstacle.

J.M.  Exactly.  There were all these adult characters who exist who aren’t in the movie.  You know, Patti lives in the basement of her grandmother’s house because her parents threw her out when she had her kid.  You never even know that she has parents in the film.  But Lily knows that, and the other girls know that.  But it’s not part of their story.  And we made a decision about the male characters in very much the same way.  I mean, when I first started out, one of my original ideas was to never have a guy character in focus in the whole movie.  So it would always be a two-shot, and the girl would always be in focus and he would be underlit in every scene, stylistically give them what women have been giving...

J.P.  And there would never be a shot where it was just a guy on the screen?

J.M.  Exactly, but we changed that.  And the men characters in the film are very human, I think, and really developed.  But they’re not the main characters and they never become the main characters, even within their scenes.  They’re still really strong and really present characters, but the story is not about them.  And luckily, again, men so far have not been alienated by this movie at all.  They haven’t felt threatened, or I think they see enough reality in those characters, and understand what the story is really about.  You know, it’s funny how movies can start as one thing and then become something else.  You go to see a movie like Dangerous Minds, and you think it’s a film about this teacher and her students, but you realize it’s a film about the teacher.  And the students kind of serve her story, you know what I mean?  And in Girl's Town we wanted everybody else to serve the girls’ stories.

J.P.  Have people given you shit for being a man directing this movie about girls?

J.M.  Actually, I got beat up the other day by a group of girls just for that reason.  I think that among the cynical kind of jaded crowd there’s been a little bit of, "who does he think he is?"  And I was a little afraid that would be a problem in maybe, for lack of a better word, feminist circles,  but  it hasn't been.  Actually, Ruby Rich, who’s one of my favorite critics, really a strong woman, she saw the film at Sundance and was a big fan of it.  The one thing I can be proud of is that I knew enough in the beginning to open this up and say, I can’t do this myself.  It wouldn’t have been the film it is if I had done it myself.  And if a woman had made it, it would have been a really different film, too.

But I think there are a lot of men out there who are making strong films about women.  Ken Loach did it last year with Lady Bird, Lady Bird.  And Todd Solondz's did it this year with Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I haven’t seen yet, but I hear is tremendous.

With Girl's Town, I feel like, maybe because I opened up the process and collaborated so openly, that it's truly not my movie alone.  It's our movie.