Documentary centers on 'where parents aren't allowed'

Every parent eventually hits the Wall, an invisible stop sign that says: ``Back off. This is my life.''

Web posted June 29, 1998

Associated Press

ATLANTA -- When David Zeiger turned his camera on the marching band at Decatur High, he was trying to draw closer to his son. But the Atlanta filmmaker also learned truths about a whole generation.

While interviewing his teen-age son Danny, about his new girlfriend, boom -- he hits the Wall.

Every parent eventually hits the Wall, an invisible stop sign that says: ``Back off. This is my life.''

Danny doesn't actually say this. Rather, he feeds his dad some generalities that say little: ``Everything's going real smoothly. We both have a lot of fun together.''

Mr. Zeiger realizes with a jolt that his nearly grown son now has a private life. No matter how close they are, the father will never be completely privy to it.

The moment is captured in The Band, Mr. Zeiger's documentary exploring the lives of Danny and other teen-agers who were members of the 1995-96 Decatur High School marching band.

``I get the message,'' Mr. Zeiger says in the voice-over. ``It was time to leave Danny and Mary Ellen alone.''

Duh, Dad.

Mr. Zeiger's insights on teens flow through The Band. Think of it as ABC's old The Wonder Years, only switched around; instead of hearing the son's epiphanies, we get his dad's.

Mr. Zeiger, an Atlanta filmmaker and still photographer, got the idea to do a film about Danny and his friends during a Decatur High football game one night in 1995.

``I happened to look at Danny for a moment, and he was dancing, something I'd never seen him do,'' Mr. Zeiger says. ``It was startling. He was a completely different person than I'd ever seen him be.''

Which got him thinking he didn't know his son as well as he wanted to.

He also hoped that filming Danny might help close the ``open wound'' he was still feeling from the loss of Danny's older brother, Michael, who had died of a stroke eight years earlier at age 9.

Mr. Zeiger would never know Michael as a teen-ager. So he didn't want to miss the chance with his younger son, too.

So, with $100,000 in grant money and permission from the Decatur High principal, he started shooting in August 1995, the beginning of Danny's junior year.

The project took him to a world ``where parents aren't allowed,'' he says.

``I don't pretend to be an expert on teens. This film represents one person's experience,'' Mr. Zeiger says. ``But I think it's an honest account.''

He got to know Mary Ellen, who was struggling with anorexia; Kate and Cameron, who -- put on Ritalin as young children -- were members of ``the real drug culture of the '90s''; Burt, whose every sentence seemed to include obscenities; and, most of all, Danny.

He found in his subjects ``a great dichotomy of kid and adult living in the same body.'' He also discovered they lived their multifaceted lives ``with an intelligence and insight they are rarely given credit for.''

This is especially true, he says, in their relationships with their parents. In an essay about the film, he notes, ``Among Danny and his friends, I found a wit and sense of irony about their parents that I can only describe as wisdom.''

One of Danny's band friends takes care of her mother, who regularly comes home drunk.

``I wet a washcloth and put it on her forehead,'' she says without rancor. The girl could have chosen to be furious with her mom; instead, she decided to accept her the way she was.

Another teen-ager describes with bemusement her complex step-family relationships. Though her family was whirling around her, she maintained her balance with good humor.

Mr. Zeiger purposely didn't interview parents, he says. Instead, he wanted to be in the kids' world, hanging out with them and letting them talk and be themselves.

He says he discovered that teen-agers ``aren't crazy and stupid; they're experimenting and attacking the boundaries that we put up around them, trying to define their own lives.''

In the film, band member Burt seems to never stop testing his boundaries. He brags about how often he can work a vulgarity into a sentence, gets in trouble with the law and even swigs cheap wine on camera.

But Burt's parents -- a college dean and a lawyer -- let Burt make his own choices. As a result, Mr. Zeiger says, Burt enjoyed a better relationship with his parents than any of the kids he got to know.

``Every single kid has aspects of their lives they don't want their parents to know about. But Burt was more open with his parents than other kids. The difference with his folks is, they trusted that he would do what he would do and survive,'' Mr. Zeiger says.

The trust seems to have paid off. Despite his high school antics, Burt has successfully completed his freshman year at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Other parents gave their kids fewer freedoms. For a parent, Mr. Zeiger says, ``it's the first time in your life when their world is closed off to you. So you just assume they're doing something wrong.''

The stricter parents, however, did not enjoy the openness of Burt's family.

What about Mr. Zeiger's relationship with Danny? Did he get to know him better by filming The Band?

``You can never really confidently say that you know who someone is, because there's a lot that goes on in someone's head that doesn't translate into words,'' Mr. Zeiger says. ``But if I hadn't done the film, I probably wouldn't have known as deeply the depth of his emotional life, which was kind of an enigma to me.''

For his part, Danny, who will be a sophomore at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, says The Band gave him a better understanding of his dad as well.

``I got to see him not just as a father but as a filmmaker, which was interesting,'' he says. ``And most of the time it was nice spending so much time with him.''

Mr. Zeiger says the project didn't completely close the wound of Michael's death. But it did help: Though Michael died at 9, Mr. Zeiger could at least mentally project his life forward; he could picture him as a virtual teen-ager on the verge of adulthood.

``It made it a little easier,'' the filmmaker says, ``a little easier to accept his death.''