Like many anxious mothers, Sharon Liese fretted about what lay ahead for her eighth-grade daughter Justine when she entered Blue Valley Northwest High School. Unlike those other moms, though, Liese coped by interviewing Justine's classmates on camera. For four years.
The result: "High School Confidential," an absorbing documentary tour of the world of today's suburban high school girl. Drugs, pregnancy, ambition, self-loathing, issues with parents, the desire to be free versus the yearning to belong in short, the sturm und drang of becoming a young woman in middle America. The eight-hour series begins at 9 p.m. Monday on the WE cable channel.
The idea of a Kansas mother spending four years of her life filming schoolgirls and hoping to turn it into a TV show sounds like more of a roll of the dice than it really was. A local cameraman, Jim Browne, became an investor, offering production services in exchange for later payment. And Liese, who produces video for her own marketing company in Overland Park, had a pretty good idea what she wanted to do.
Sharon Liese, left, spent 2002-2006 filming the lives of these 12 Blue Valley Northwest students. Above, from left, Cappie, Lauren B., Cate, Allyson, Crystle, Courtney, Kim, Jessi, Lauren G., Beth, Sara N. and Sarah T. "High School Confidential" students (from left) Jessi, Lauren, Kim, Sara, Cate and Crystle arrive at a special screening Wednesday in New York. Sharon Liese
"I thought it would be more of a feature documentary," she said. "I always thought it would be on television or in theaters."
That said, Liese did have to abandon her initial plan, when her daughter bailed after just one interview.
After that disaster, "I just let my mom do her thing," Justine Liese said. "It would've been just too hard to tell her everything I was going through. Every high school girl keeps something from her parents."
So Sharon Liese put out a casting call. More than 40 soon-to-be freshman girls responded, and a dozen were picked. And Liese became confidante for a group of teenagers like Jessi, a tall, vulnerable would-be actress whose poise hid a mountain of insecurity. "She captured my heart," Sharon said of Jessi. "There was a lot of presence on camera that really struck me."
And, she soon learned, a lot of issues - depression, thoughts of suicide, a mother whose unstable love life mirrored her own - which Jessi unflinchingly bared on camera. Like other subjects on the show, Jessi's issues did not come out all at once. Other girls' lives would take dramatic tours in their sophomore, junior, even senior years. Watching these developments doesn't seem like voyeurism, because the presence of Liese was more like a caring counselor who checked in from time to time rather than a busybody who demanded to be in the room when the girls were having their meltdowns.
(By the way, you'll notice in this article that I don't use any of the subjects' last names - that's at their request. It's somewhat at odds with their willingness to appear on TV, but Liese insisted to me that maintaining some degree of privacy was part of her compact with the girls.)
"One of the wonderful things about being followed by Sharon, for me, was it's a great way to look back," Jessi said. "I went through a lot - I don't know if it was more than the other girls - but it's allowed me to look back and be proud of who I became."
And even a little proud of sharing who she was.
"There are girls that are suicidal. There are girls that are pregnant. There are girls that have a dream but they can't break away," she said. "My story is what a lot of people are going through. I hope they can relate. I hope they just don't feel alone in this situation."
Another of Liese's subjects, Cate, had one of the more dramatic story arcs of the series. Her mother died and her father remarried, setting in motion a blended-family drama that played out during her years at Northwest.
"It's not like the reality TV you see today where everyone is followed 24/7," Cate said. "When things were really bad at the house with the fighting and whatnot, it's not like someone was there with a camera. Jessica Simpson, when she was fighting with Nick Lachey, was like, 'Well, let me recap how the fighting is going.' If I didn't want to say anything, I didn't have to."
That said, Cate was grateful for Liese being there to "provoke" her, coaxing her to reflect on her experiences.
"It was like having a diary," Cate said.
Some girls, like Jessi, get the whole hour to themselves. Other hours feature multiple subjects whose stories provide interesting contrasts, such as the fourth episode, which presents three girls with very different relationships to their fathers. The fifth episode follows three more girls, lifelong friends who decide to take a trip abroad - and that adventure winds up straining the ties between them. Maybe it was being in close quarters for so long, or maybe it was the inevitable toll that growing up takes on old BFFs.
Though the show is called "High School Confidential," most of it was taped outside the walls of Blue Valley Northwest. Still, Liese had to get permission to do some filming there, and it was not an easy sell.
"They were cautious," she said. "We'd just come off 9/11 when I started this. So they were hypersensitive to having a stranger in their building with cameras. We had to talk, but they got on board with the idea that this would be really profound."
That said, you'll notice that the school is referred to on TV only as "Northwest High in Overland Park, Kansas," and every reference to Blue Valley was pixelated out of sweat shirts and signs.
Even though she wasn't featured in the series, Justine Liese also had her life changed by "High School Confidential." New Line, the studio that agreed to produce Liese's series, hired Justine as a production assistant, and she has added film as a major at KU.
Her first job with New Line? Getting hundreds of her fellow students to sign video releases. Seems that Mom hadn't thought of that when taking crowd shots at the school or the shops around Overland Park frequented by the girls. Oops!
"Thank heavens for Facebook," Sharon said. "Otherwise she wouldn't have been able to get hold of these kids."
What's really interesting is that the most vulnerable girls in the series turn out, in person, to be young women who seem pretty comfortable in their own skins. If there is one shortcoming to "High School Confidential," it's that the format doesn't do justice to how media-savvy its subjects became after four years of talking to Liese.
"People ask all the time, 'Well, are you OK totally spilling your guts to the camera?' " Cate told me. "And I was like, 'Of course I'm OK with it. I hope to help someone someday.'
"Sharon told me that when she brought up the topic of sex. She said, 'You don't have to talk about it.' And this was just after I'd had sex for the first time, and I was really ashamed of it, embarrassed, and she was like, 'You don't have to, but think about the girls who might be in the same situation that you were before.' I think that was the ice-breaker for me. I just released everything. From that point on, I thought, 'Well, if I could talk about my sex life, I could talk about anything.' "
I asked Cate about the ad that appeared in Oprah magazine promoting "High School Confidential." The 12 girls are seated at school desks. Behind them on a blackboard, each of their four-year experiences is summarized in three or four words. I ask Cate what the ad copy said about her.
"I'm the anorexic wrist-cutter!" she said, with a laugh. "I'm very blessed."
"She's a good sport," said Liese.
"I didn't have much say," Cate replied.
'HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL' The eight-part documentary series begins 9 p.m. Monday on WE (Channel 74 on Time Warner Cable). Q-AND-A WITH 'HSC' CREATOR Aaron Barnhart will conduct a panel discussion with "High School Confidential" creator Sharon Liese and two of the subjects of her WE series at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Kansas City Central Library, 14 W. 10th St. The event is free and open to the public, but reservations are requested at 816-701-3407. VIDEO Watch videos of the people featured on "High School Confidential" at videos.kansascity.com.
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