Boyhood

A Young Life on Screen

Timothy Shary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367735630
• eBook ISBN: 9781134822454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the development of Richard Linklater's Boyhood from its audacious concept through its tenacious production to its celebrated reception, placing it within the context of cinematic parables about children to demonstrate its distinctive vision. Timothy Shary, author of numerous studies on the history of teen cinema, evaluates the film's many messages about youth and adolescence within the context of early twenty-first century American culture, illuminating how Linklater's singular vision of the otherwise ordinary life of a boy reveals potent universal truths about all people.

1
The child on screen

Capturing youth

Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.

– Aristotle¹

A true appreciation for the ingenuity and reach of Boyhood is best informed by understanding how it aligns with and deviates from the history of children’s depictions in cinema, and by a comparison to other attempts at long-duration film productions, which themselves have an interesting place in cinema history. Because the childhood issue is more complex and lengthy, and connects with the subsequent chapter, I turn to the production issue first.

There are extremely few examples of long-duration single film productions in narrative cinema. At the same time, there are numerous examples of recurring characters played by the same actor over many different films, and in terms of young characters, one of the most famous is Andy Hardy, who was played by Mickey Rooney as a teenager beginning in 1937 with A Family Affair and continued for over a decade in fifteen films until 1947 with Love Laughs at Andy Hardy.² While these films featured returning characters and references to previous plotlines, they remained distinct productions such that each stood on its own. The same could be said of the films about young Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), which French auteur François Truffaut began making in 1959 with The 400 Blows and revived across four more films until Love on the Run (1979), following this character from his early teens to his 30s.³

A closer parallel to the production of Boyhood was the Harry Potter series, which began as seven books released from 1997 to 2007 and was adapted into eight films, following the famous story of a boy who progresses through wizardry school across his teens. The first film appeared in 2001, just before production started on Boyhood, and continued with the same primary cast until 2011, a few years before shooting on Boyhood ended, prompting some critics to see a correlation between the two approaches.⁴ Kristin Thompson (2015) has even suggested that Linklater’s conception of Boyhood may have arisen from the Potter phenomenon, which would have emerged by the time he thought of his own project (and he was at least so conscious of the connection that he included two Potter references within his story). Yet the parallel is disrupted on many levels, including the fact that novelist J.K. Rowling supplied the story for each film independent of production concerns, the story’s otherworldly setting largely disregarded verisimilitude for contemporary youth, and four different directors made the films with budgets no less than $100 million each.

The Potter films also had the momentum of an established audience following the books as they were released, as well as the support of a major studio (Warner Bros.) that had the financial and technical means to ensure the sustenance of such an ambitious undertaking. Indeed, the liabilities and practicalities of mounting a multi-year production are daunting to say the least. Funding must first be secured, and while movie studios may have a horizon for taking a project from development to release over a few years, the true production time for most features is closer to a single year, with principal photography for the actors and key crew scheduled for usually no more than two months.⁵ Any film that actually began with a plan covering many years before its release – during which a studio and ancillary investors must wait with uncertainty without any return on investment – would require an enormous leap of faith that corporate practices do not tolerate well.

Many variables could also wreak havoc on a very long production schedule, from environmental and technological changes to fluctuations in financial conditions for a studio to the limited availability of actors. Simply trying to maintain the continuity of actors’ performances over a multi-month shoot is difficult enough, but over the course of years, changes in the corporeal aging of (particularly young) actors could disrupt the characters’ appearances. Thus, casting actors for a long-duration production becomes especially critical, because those needed for key roles not only need to be available at different times over the course of years (which many Hollywood actors would not risk for fear of missing potential opportunities), but the director needs to have confidence in the cast to sustain their characters over extremely long intervals.⁶ In the case of a film like Boyhood, which features two young children as leads, the casting is further based on intuition and hope, as neither actor had an established screen presence and/or proven acting talent.

Presumably the sole reason for deliberately attempting any long-duration film would be to demonstrate the passage of time, which previous movies had been content to represent through changes in makeup, costuming, cultural references, and the use of multiple cast members. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital effects, a film like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) was able to depict its title character across the vast expanse of his life with a single primary actor (Brad Pitt), whose face was digitally modified and added to different actors’ bodies as he ‘aged backwards’ throughout the twentieth century.⁷ Yet to achieve the authenticity of aging that Linklater envisioned for his project, and to stay within an indie budget that had no room for expensive effects (Benjamin Button cost over 37 times the amount of Boyhood), any digital depiction of the aging process would have been plainly unrealistic.

Realism is the domain of documentaries, many of which also eschew special effects for the sake of efficient storytelling dependent on veracity. Further, because documentaries are not typically bound by the complications of casting actors or the demands of a restricted shooting schedule, directors have often been able to film for many years in search of a complete testament to their given concern. This has been quite appreciable in some animal and nature documentaries, such as Winged Migration (2001), shot over three years; Planet Earth (2006), more than five years; and Samsara (2011), nearly five years. And some documentaries about humans have been shot over still longer periods, such as the famous British Up series that began with Seven Up! in 1964 and offered its latest installment with 56 Up (2012). In this case, a movie crew has been visiting most of the same fourteen people every seven years for over 50 years now, documenting their progress through life beginning at age seven, and tacitly examining the influence of British class and social structures on the influence of citizens’ development. While the Up series has obviously endured for considerably longer than the production of Boyhood, and has followed many more people, it is not limited to a coherent storyline.⁸

The unique magnitude of the Boyhood production can be further appreciated through an understanding of how few long-duration narrative films have been completed, many of which were not planned as such. For instance, Leni Riefenstahl’s Tiefland (1954) began shooting in 1940 but was disrupted by WWII and not completed for fourteen years. The Indian film Pakeezah (1972) was similarly plagued by production delays when, after shooting sporadically for six years starting in 1958, work was adjourned due to personnel defections and not resumed until the early 1970s. The animated feature The Thief and the Cobbler was in various phases of shooting for 31 years starting in 1964, sustaining various funding dilemmas along the way, and even after its 1995 studio release, had three more edited versions released up to 2013. More recently, Michael Winterbottom did plan the production of Everyday (2012) to last for five years, shooting scenes for two-week periods once a year beginning in 2007, as the story chronicled changes in a family while a father serves time in prison. Although begun five years after the first filming for Boyhood, this British film can at least claim a similar production agenda.

Having established the distinctive design of Boyhood, Linklater would also offer an incomparable perspective on childhood due to the comprehensive detail of his story, since no film had previously attempted to depict a child for the duration of every single year in school.⁹ In fact, since the early twentieth century, when most American children were done with schooling by their early teens, movies about children tended to focus their stories on one year of school or less, and despite the promotion of longer-term schooling (until the age of seventeen or eighteen) in the U.S. after WWII, extremely few films endeavored to depict more than a year of experience for their characters.

Before the 1930s, Hollywood featured relatively few child protagonists in movies at all. When major child stars began to emerge, such as Jackie Coogan (by the mid-1920s), Jackie Cooper (early 1930s), Shirley Temple (mid-1930s), and Mickey Rooney (late 1930s), they were almost always placed in scenarios with adult protagonists to ensure a wider audience appeal and to avoid concentrating on the child’s ostensibly juvenile perspective. But the Great Depression elevated concerns about child welfare in the 1930s, and by the end of that decade, several films had emerged to address the experiences of primarily poor and troubled youth, which made for compelling drama and lucrative box office income. Many movies celebrated the gutsy nature of children overcoming the poverty and adversity of those years, often by adding musical elements that were newly appealing to the sound era. Films such as Let’s Sing Again (1936), One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), and Babes in Arms (1939) showed audiences that children, by being more focused on their families and simple pursuits of happiness, were a welcome antidote to the darker troubles that were more typical of films about adults at the time.

Alongside these cheerful cases, the studios were also discovering means of exploiting fears of youth, particularly in terms of delinquency. Caution-ary tales appeared such as Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Reformatory (1938), allegedly to forewarn youth against immorality while also enjoying the same sensational aspects of criminality that were making gangster films popular at the time. By the end of the decade, an entire series of films was built around this topic, beginning in 1937 with Dead End, which labored to show crime negatively although audiences were enthralled by its charismatic young characters who openly resent and combat the gentrification of their neighborhood. The film was such a hit that Warner Bros. developed more films around these so-called ‘Dead End Kids,’ and had an even bigger hit with Angels with Dirty Faces in 1939. The ‘kids’ grew into adulthood and carried on as the Bowery Boys in the 1940s, making dozens of films, with two actors, Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, going on to play their returning characters in over 40 different releases.

To be sure, by the 1930s Hollywood had promoted many characters played by the same actors across multiple films, such as Charlie Chaplin’s famous Tramp in five features (and many more shorts) up to 1936, and Glenda Farrell’s seven films as reporter Torchy Blane from 1937–39. Such a practice would also lead to the Andy Hardy films by the end of that decade, and like Hall and Gorcey, Mickey Rooney matured and aged over the course of his numerous reincarnations, and his stories retained most of the same characters, settings, and casts. To some extent, then, a slight precedent had been set by this point for movies following a young character into adulthood. The continuity of character and narrative that Linklater would later develop around Boyhood, however, would be far more linear and coherent.

In addition to facing the real-life dilemma of younger actors aging more visibly than older actors (Rooney’s youthful appearance was aided by his short stature), Hollywood’s interest in producing more films about youth would have the far thornier dilemma of adapting to the young population’s changing interests and images. The 1940s were a relatively fallow period for movies about adolescent life as the industry focused on the war effort and recovery in the years thereafter, but in the 1950s, the nascent curiosities about juvenile delinquency that arose in the 1930s reawakened with abundance. By the middle of the 1950s, movie screens were filled with sensationalized stories from both major studios, such as the Warner Bros. landmark Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and the smaller but lucrative exploitation market, which rushed out titles that tapped into the trend of troubled youth, including Teenage Rebel (1956) and Juvenile Jungle (1958). These films appeared alongside youth culture’s explosive interest in rock-and-roll music, which further symbolized the rebellion of independence that young people embraced during a decade that otherwise strove to present an image of domestic peace after the troubled war years.

Richard Linklater was born in 1960 as America was gaining an altogether new perspective on the young consumers, protesters, and artists that would have more influence in cultural events than any other generational group in the century. He would grow up watching the Vietnam War unfold on television while the student revolts of the late 1960s were overtaken by reassuring complacency in the disco era of his later teens. Linklater and his contemporaries witnessed an intriguing trajectory of youth representation at the movies throughout the course of their coming-of-age: Hollywood moved from sublimating teenage sex with sun-and-surf mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Series editors’ introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The child on screen: capturing youth
• 2 An audacious adventure: making the life of Mason
• 3 Understanding Boyhood: the child becomes a teenager
• 4 Understanding Boyhood: the teenager becomes a man
• 5 The moment of this boy’s life
• Works cited
• Index