Newsday

By Erica Marcus.

Newsday, 8 July 2000 (retrieved April 2014)

The idea for "Young Americans'" really did come to Steven Antin in a flash. The creator-co-executive producer of the WB's new one-hour drama was driving through the New England countryside two years ago and pulled up to a gas station for a fill-up. "There were three girls working there,'' he recalled. "They were town girls - their father owned the station. Then these prep school boys pulled up in a groovy convertible and they all started talking.''

In that interaction, Antin recognized two themes that had fascinated him for years: the tenderness of young love and the class struggle between town and gown. Even the setting seemed right. ``Even though I grew up in Southern California,'' Antin explained, "I have this whole romance with New England.'' The set up for "Young Americans'' emerged almost fully formed from that tableau: Four teenagers meet when they arrive for the summer session at exclusive Rawley Academy: Scout Calhoun (Mark Famiglietti), handsome and rich but nice all the same; Jake Pratt (Katherine Moennig), brooding hacker with a secret; Hamilton Fleming (Ian Somerhalder), the dean's kid, and Will Krudski (Rodney Scott), a local kid on scholarship who is pretty sure that he doesn't belong at Rawley. Complicating matters is the luminous Bella Banks (Kate Bosworth), a local girl who pumps gas at her father's gas station.

Although Antin originally conceived his story line as beginning in the fall, he soon realized that summer was the season that captured what he was going for. "I wanted to write a show about that time of your life, that window between 14 and 17 when you're not a child anymore but you're not yet an adult. You're invincible and innocent and the possibilities of the world are endless. I loved that time of my life,'' he continued, ``and the image I conjure up whenever I think about it is being in a lake in the dead of summer, then lying in the sun.''

Antin struggled not only with writing a script that captured this "innocent free feeling,'' but also with creating a visual style that expressed this splendid languor. An admirer of both still photography and cinematography, he was heartened by the look of some recent TV shows. "In the last few years,'' he said, "I've seen some extraordinarily beautiful television, 'Felicity' for one.'' So he hired Bob Primes, "Felicity's" Emmy-winning cinematographer, and the two men worked to imbue the show with the right texture and palette.

Still, a few recent examples to the contrary, such attention to visual detail is far more common in film than in television. Why didn't Antin, the writer and producer of the 1993 independent feature film ``Inside Monkey Zetterland'' try to put his vision on the big screen? "I had had several wildly unsuccessful and unhappy experiences as a writer in film,'' he said. The best chance to control his vision, he believed, was to create, write and produce it as a television show.

And why shouldn't a television producer work at the highest artistic level possible? Antin feels that the issues dealt with in ``Young Americans'' are the Big Ones. "Thematically, I wanted to tell the story of star-crossed lovers. I love the classics,'' he said. ``Scout and Bella? They're Romeo and Juliet.'' He characterized another couple - whose identity should remain a secret - as "right out of 'Twelfth Night.' '' "I'm not reinventing the wheel,'' he said, "just giving it another spin.''

There's a certain tension inherent in having teenage characters act out age-old dramas, and Antin is well aware of it. "I constantly have to rein in the sophistication,'' he said. "We did so many focus groups with 16-year old kids, and while it never ceased to amaze me how sophisticated they were, they don't always articulate that sophistication. I don't want to dumb kids down, but I also don't want my characters to say things that are out of the realm of 16-year-old kids.''

If all goes well and the WB picks up "Young Americans,'' Antin will face another challenge - retooling his summer show for the fall. He's not worried, though. After all, he said, "What's more beautiful than fall in New England.''