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Interview Porkocity (11.12.2010)

SUICIDE AND ABORTION

MINTZ
Any topics you’ve had to shy away from?

STOHN
The most difficult topic is …

SCHUYLER
Suicide.

MINTZ
Copycat fears?

VELLEND
Was there fallout from that?

SCHUYLER
Oh yes. There was a lot of fallout. And there was a lot of anger. It is the hardest topic. But we took on a hard topic this year. We took on transgender. We’ve got a young character who’s a female to male transgender.

VELLEND
What about abortion? I thought that would be, with the states, untouchable.

SCHUYLER
That has been…

STOHN
It’s so easy in Canada. People don’t blink an eye. And in the states, there was an episode that was never shown. They paid for it. Well, it was shown four years later. And now they show it. But they never advertise it.

MINTZ
And the US distributor just said, we’re not running it?

STOHN
Yeah. They just didn’t run it. They paid us for it. But didn’t run it.

SCHUYLER
And it was very interesting. Because the very last shot, now we really tried to be even handed in our storytelling. Because it was the Manny character who was pregnant and wanting to go for the abortion.It was Emma who’s Spike’s child who was giving her the argument, if my mom had an abortion when she was your age, I wouldn’t be born. So we really tried to give a balanced argument. But at the end of the day, our character Manny, with her mom, went to the abortion clinic. And the final shot is her walking through the door, going to get the abortion.

STOHN
Resolute.

SCHUYLER
And she was determined. She had done the research. This was the right choice. Here she goes. And it’s very interesting. Because in the states they said, we could have shown that show, IF, at the very last shot, she showed remorse. She can’t be resolute. She has to be remorseful. If she was remorseful, we could show the shot.

MINTZ
So, if you cut to her crying … ?

SCHUYLER
Exactly. And we wouldn’t do that.

MINTZ
Really?

SCHUYLER
Absolutely not. What kind of message is that for young girls?

STOHN
But even in Degrassi Junior High or High, when one of the twins had the aborption, PBS cut off the of the show.

VELLEND
The twins. It’s all flooding back now.

SCHUYLER
Remember the twins?

MINTZ
That's right. There were the two sisters and one of them did have an aborption.

SCHUYLER
That's right. In the show.

MINTZ
In the show.

SCHUYLER
And again, we made the family catholic, and the twin sister said, "you can't do this. You've got our beliefs in God and you can't do it". And she says, "I can't be a mom at this age". So, at those times, protests were really big, I mean this was in the Morgetaler years, when protests were huge outside of aborption clinics. And, so when she decided to go for the aborption, she had to go through a line of protesters to actually get into the clinic. And it was quite a gruesome shot. Because we had one of the protestors, had a little plastic foetus and she was holding it up and she said "this is your baby you're going to kill". And her sister at this time had decided to go with her. And they walked in, again, they walked in resolutely into the aborption clinic. When the PBS ran it, they stopped the shot back when the one twin joins the other and says "you're my sister, I can't let you go alone". And, they just exit frame and they didn't have them going through the protestors.

 

WRITERS

SCHUYLER
They’re engaging audience online. They have younger brothers and sisters. They’re just very connected. My writers now are as connected with young people as I was when I did the first generation, what we now call the classic.

I want to do something on human trafficking and I don’t know how to bring that into Degrassi.

I’m always grabbing at the big picture stuff. And then I just sort of throw it at my writers. I don’t tell them how to write it. But I say, can we at least put this on the boards, can we at least try to explore?

 

PROMOTING BROGRAN

STOHN
Stefan did a brilliant job.

KALMANOVITCH
So you took a gamble. Did you feel good about it?

SCHUYLER
Well Stefan had been writing and directing a lot of our web content. And the web has turned out to be an incredible training ground where you can let people loose and you don’t have to worry so much. So he had really proven himself. And Kevin, who follows everything Degrassi, he had seen what Stefan had done, he said, this guy needs an opportunity to direct. And it’s worked out really well. Because Stefan is now a co-producer. Wow, Corey, this is brilliant.

MINTZ
It’s nice to hear about people blossoming and rising within a company that could be insular.

SCHUYLER
It’s interesting because everybody says to us, oh, what about Drake. Aubrey Graham has gone off and made it really big. That’s great. We’re very proud of him. And we’re very proud of the fact that we got Nina Dobrev on the Vampire Diaries and Shenae Grimes (90210). But we’re equally, if not more, proud of Stefan, who started with us as a child actor and has become a writer, director, producer. And not just doing it. But doing it extraordinarily well.

KALMANOVITCH
Good for him. But also good for you for taking a chance on him. Not everybody does. I have employers now who are certainly doing that. But there have been other times when people just, they see you only as one thing.

STOHN
Well our head writer now, Brendon Yorke, started out writing web content for us back in 2001. Never even thought about writing a script in his life. He was just writing little things on the web. And one day, in about second or third season, he came to us and said, I’d like to write a script. We sort of patted him on the head and said, that’s fine Brendan. You don’t understand. It’s difficult to do that. So he wrote a script. And it was not a very good script.

MINTZ
What was it about?

SCHUYLER
It had promise. It was about Toby becoming an anorexic. We didn’t give him the best storyline.

 

SEASON 11

MINTZ
What happens in season eleven?

SCHUYLER
Most people don’t believe us but we don’t know until we get in that room. We don’t have a plan. All we know is that halfway through season eleven, the current gang that are in twelfth grade are gonna graduate at the end of our twenty-four part telenovella. At that point we’ll bring in a whole bunch of ninth graders who will be new to the school.

MINTZ
That’s a good idea.

STOHN
It’s interesting that you pick up on that. Because we were going on, I’ll use the ratings for the united states, the first six years, were just going like that (makes upward motion). We were always the number one show on the network. It just kept going higher and higher. Seventh year, it started to go a little bit like that. But we were, we had characters who people loved, but they were graduating. So what do you do with characters who are graduating. Well they love the characters so much. So let’s follow them into university or whatever they’re doing afterwards. So we had all sorts of conversations. We’ll follow …

MINTZ
That’s the direction you’d gone with the original show.

STOHN
And our ratings started to go down a little bit. And the network came to us and said, we still love you. You’re still our number one show. But you know what, we’ve got to prepare for a soft landing. All our research shows, seven years is it. So let’s start developing some other things. And finally, Linda and I, and I’ll actually in this case give credit to both of us on this, because the writers loved writing for those characters. So the thought of bringing in new characters, they would say yes, but they wouldn’t do it. And we finally just said, no, these characters are gone. We are not writing about them again. There’s a whole bunch of new characters. You’ve got to bring in six new characters. And then all the sudden the ratings started to go back up like that. You realize, that the way, Linda, you put it, is, first of all, there are different metaphorical ways you can say it, that the school is the main character. And so we were losing that by going beyond the school.

SCHUYLER
Much as they love the characters, they weren’t that intrigued with them after they left high school.

 

GENERATION GAP

KALMANOVITCH
How do you learn how to speak to teenagers ?

STOHN
Linda and I are thirty years older than anybody else in the building.

SCHUYLER
When I was doing the first generation, I was fresh out of eight years of teaching at the junior high level.

KALMANOVITCH
So you’re familiar with …

SCHUYLER
I taught all through my twenties. So I was in my thirties when I was doing Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High. But now it’s more, I rely on my writers, to be in touch with what’s going on out there.


BEST SEASON EVER

STOHN
This past year was the most fun, well probably, you go back to he very first, Kids of Degrassi, when nobody, sort of knew what they were doing.

It was one of those challenges that could have been a total disaster. We were no longer fitting on the CTV schedule. So they were basically saying, we love you but nine years is enough. So all good things must come to an end. And in the end, we ended up producing twice as many episodes. Which helped us to reduce the per episode budget. Switched to another network, which was Much Music, which is owned by CTV. So everybody was happy there. But we had less money. We produced it twice as fast. We delivered it twice as fast. And it was higher quality in every respect. And the ratings have doubled or tripled.

SCHUYLER
But Stephen, you’re missing the important part too. The N (previous incarnation of TeenNick), who’s our American broadcaster, they wanted to get onto the new way of broadcasting. And they said, rather than doing this once a week, they wanted to run this like a telenova, four times a week. So they wanted to burn off, in six weeks, twenty-four episodes. And twenty-four is normally what we do in a year. So we had to start at the beginning of this year…

 

CONSEQUENCES

STOHN
We had to change the writing style, just do more two-hander scenes. But Degrassi, and you would have seen this in the old show, the rule that networks gave us was, you have to have the consequences. I mean, anything can happen. There can be oral gonharea. There can be from the sublime to the ridiculous. But the consequences have to happen within the same episode. Now, that’s problematic if you’ve got somebody who becomes addicted to crystal meth and is in rehab twenty-two minutes later. So what we said to the networks was, listen, if you’re going to be broadcasting once a day, we’ve got to lift that rule.We’ve got to be able to, over six weeks, resolve, and we’ll have the consequences. So that, suddenly the writers felt empowered. It’s so much easier, so much richer. So they are now, I mean they stopped writing a few weeks ago. And now they’re back at it next week. And they’re energized and ready to go.This is for next season. In past seasons, after thirteen episodes, they’ve been, oh, I’ve got to take a holiday. Now this is after forty six episodes.

KALMANOVITCH
Why did the network ask for that? What’s the benefit?

SCHUYLER
It’s driven by our American network, that is, TeenNick. And they really specialize in teenage viewing patterns and whatnot. And they found, it’s really hard during the week to get these young people to make an appointment even once a week. Because they’ve got their homework. They’ve got all these other commitments. But in the summer, they’ll come daily. So it was really a matter of them … we would never have dreamt this one up on our own. But this was really a matter of them having plotted the viewing habits of their audience. So it was a huge experiment for all of us.

STOHN
If I can just backtrack for a litter bit. A few years ago we did a soap opera for three years called Riverdale, which was modeled on Coronation Street. And it was cancelled by CBC. CBC were idiots to cancel it.

SCHUYLER
That's not true.

STOHN
However, thank god they did. Because if they hadn’t cancelled it we wouldn’t be doing Degrassi: The Next Generation. So we’re very thankful that they did. But they truly were idiots. But it gave us a picture, or a peak in to the world of soaps.


ACCESS TO INFORMATION

MINTZ
Kids are still the same, right?

SCHUYLER
How they get their information is very different. Over the thirty years we’ve seen a real evolution of that. And actually, in terms of our storytelling, it’s become quite freeing to know there is an internet out there. Because when we started on classic show, there was no other way kids, teenagers, could get information, other than going to a health centre or the guidance counselor. So we actually felt that we had a strong mandate on Degrassi to not only raise the issues, but to give a lot of information about it. And as we’ve gone on, and we know that kids have a lot of access to information, we don’t have to load the show with so much educational content. We still have to be responsible and we still have to have consequences.

MINTZ
It helps with exposition too.

SCHUYLER
Absolutely. It’s been freeing. I still think the consequences to actions are a big part of our storytelling. The mandate has shifted a bit. But it’s not been a 180. It’s just a tilt.

MINTZ
A lot of characters skype with each other. Which, exposition-wise, is so helpful, because, a thing that people do in TV a lot that we don’t do in real life, is knock on each other’s doors to have two-minute long conversations.

SCHUYLER
Yes. It’s so awkward. And Skype actually helps us out a lot. It’s not … you have to use it sparingly because it’s not that visually interesting.

MINTZ
It’s still talking heads.

SCHUYLER
Exactly.

RIVERDALE

STOHN
When we did Riverdale, we wrote a mission statement that would be very embarrassing to pull out now. The mission was, essentially, to change a generation of Canadians for the better, to save the CBC, to do all these wonderful things, through the medium of a television show.

MINTZ
Do you still have that document?

STOHN
I probably could dig it up.

MINTZ
To have a Charles Foster Kane moment, where someone sends it back to you.

STOHN
But interestingly, we didn’t succeed in Riverdale. And we were devastated when it was cancelled. But sort of, Degrassi, the new Degrassi in combination with Degrassi Classic, has sort of carried on being the training ground that we wished Riverdale would be, and connecting with people.

MINTZ
What you wanted to do was create that involvement with the community, beyond just having a successful show. But you wanted to do it with a grown-up show.

STOHN
We wanted to do it with a grown-up show. Well, with a family show.

MINTZ
Should have called it Parkdale.

ADAM

YIP
You mentioned the transgendered character who was introduced this season, and I’m also thinking back to Jimmy too. Have you had a lot of feedback from viewers or different groups about representation of diversity on the show, in terms of who the actors are representing?

STOHN
The interesting thing about the transgendered character, it was a very compelling pair of episodes, when he came out and the school realized, fully, who he was. The character has had a tremendous appeal. And I don’t think it’s primarily because he is a transgendered character. I think it’s because he has a secret or he feels alienated or he has a difficulty. And …

VELLEND
Everyone relates to that.

STOHN
Everyone can relate to that. It happens to be an FTM. There’s a tremendous following to that character.

YIP
Did you consider an MTF?

SCHUYLER
You know what? You have to find the best actor for the job. If they were, that would be fantastic. But you can’t just limit it to that. It’s like saying, only women can write for women, if you’re doing a women’s story you can only hire women, if you’re doing a native story, you can only have native writers. It’s true you have to be very respectful and you want to hear the influence. You can’t just box yourself in, otherwise …

STOHN
But I think the question was, we ended up choosing FTM rather than MTF. And it could have been either way.

SCHUYLER
No, we had developed the character to be, the story had been developed to go female to male.


DEMOGRAPHIC

STOHN
One unknown thing about Degrassi, even from the earliest days, is the biggest audience is 18-34 females.


STOLEN SIGNS

STOHN
Apparently, we’re told this is true, the city of Toronto budget has a line item every year for a thousand dollars that reads “replace Degrassi signs”. Because the signs are stolen from Degrassi Street.


ONLINE CONTENT/TRAINING

MINTZ
You’ve engaged your army to flex their creative muscles

SCHUYLER
Absolutely. And you know what, it’s turned out to be a brilliant training ground. Cause it used to be, now that everything is so unionized, it’s really hard to get people a foot in the door. But on the webisodes it’s a much more loose frontier…

STOHN
It’s still unionized. But the first AD on the show may become the director.

MINTZ
Within the regular show people can’t hop tasks like that?

SCHUYLER
It’s hard. It’s really hard. And that’s the one thing that disappoints me. Because you really want to reward ingenuity.

 

WHAT THEN?

MINTZ
If the show, for some reason, came to an end, what would the two of you want to do?

STOHN
You and I would answer that differently. I would carry on doing, because I’ve got the law firm and I worked on the Junos for a while. I would just want to carry on doing other things, in the music industry or television, doing other shows. I would just carry on.

SCHUYLER
But you’re doing a lot of that anyway

STOHN
I keep saying, it drives Linda crazy, I want to work till I’m ninety-nine and then slow down to maybe three days a week, then carry on until I’m a hundred and twenty. That’s my life plan. Linda?

SCHUYLER
Well, I think that’s a very selfish theory. I think we have to make room for younger people. So my theory is, I don’t want to stop working but I would like to work less. And I’d like to be in a position where by, there’s no question that Degrassi is a very special project to me. I started it thirty years ago. And I’m just… they’re not going to get rid of me. I’m just going to be there until we’ve run our natural course. but even with that said, most Fridays now, I don’t go to the office. Tomorrow I won’t go to the office. I’ll drive out, tomorrow morning, to our farm. Which is out Coburg way.

The reason I can do that is because I’ve had people that I’m starting to train, Stefan being a key person right now, but I want people who I think are going to be making good decisions in the editing room and whatnot when I’m not there. So my goal is to sort of faze out from the complete active side of the business. But then I would be very happy to sit on boards. I want to remain very active. Out our way there’s a Brookside Young Offenders detention centre, out by where the farm is. If I spent more time at the farm I wouldn’t mind seeing what volunteer opportunities there are at Brookside or wherever. I don’t want to just keep clogging the works. Because we’ve got to make room for the young people. But at the same time, I don’t want to feel like I’m put out to pasture either.

MINTZ
So you would like to see the show continue without you?

SCHUYLER
Ohhhh. I don’t know if I’d ever let that happen.

Ecrit par brucas59 

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Ecrit par brucas59 
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