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| Director Of MTV Teen Mom |
REMEMBERING the glory days is easy, but Morgan J. Freeman remembers the nadir just as clearly. It was March 2003, and he had traded in his house in the Echo Park section of Los Angeles for his old room in his parents’ house in nearby Long Beach. Hollywood had shredded Mr. Freeman to bits, and this indie director was ready to head back to New York, where he’d last been a success.
One last wild night couldn’t hurt, right?
He slept through his flight and woke up to derision. “I just remember my mom, the way she looked at me that day,” he said recently, during an interview on the High Line, near his West Village office. “Like, at 33, this is how I showed up.”
At 27, he’d been doing far better. The first feature he directed, “Hurricane Streets,” a story of the tension between morality and reality as seen through the lens of a headstrong and streetwise New York teenager, had been the first dramatic film to win three awards at Sundance: the audience favorite, as well as prizes for directing and cinematography.
But Mr. Freeman had burned hot and fast, never again approaching the acclaim of his Hollywood debut. It took submergence in another world altogether for him to get his resurrection. Now 40, he is the executive producer of “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom,” tandem docu-series that have helped reposition MTV’s reality slate from tracking the lives of the young, beautiful and rich to capturing the lives of the young, beautiful and resilient.
Though the medium may be different and the subjects real, it’s a full-circle move for Mr. Freeman, whose early characters were just the sort who could have ended up on a show like “16 and Pregnant,” cocksure and naïve, not inclined to make bad decisions so much as unsure of how to avoid them.
Marcus, the protagonist of “Hurricane Streets,” evolved from a character Mr. Freeman had originally written based on his own mischievous childhood antics. He met Brendan Sexton III, the actor who would give the role intense life, on the set of “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” the Todd Solondz film that won the 1996 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Mr. Freeman had hustled his way from production assistant to second assistant director on that film, in charge of supervising its young stars, Heather Matarazzo and Mr. Sexton.
“He was genuinely interested in my thoughts and what I had to say,” said Mr. Sexton, who remains close to Mr. Freeman.
From “Dollhouse,” Mr. Freeman — not to be confused with Morgan Freeman, the actor — took a charmed, fast path to “Hurricane Streets,” quickly securing an initial $60,000 in financing and shooting over a few weeks in the summer of 1995. “I loved ‘400 Blows,’ all the antihero kind of movies,” said Mr. Freeman, who was still attending film school at New York University while he was shooting “Hurricane” in and around downtown Manhattan. When the film won at Sundance, though, Mr. Freeman was no longer just a film student with outsized ambition and ego.
“It was like ‘Entourage’ was starting,” he said. “I really had a sense that I’d arrived, and I was going to do it my way. I wouldn’t even go in and take certain meetings. I was so set I was going to be Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino. I was only going to direct what I wrote.” It was the height of the independent film movement, and thumbing one’s nose at standard Hollywood practices seemed like a potentially viable career route.
“It went to all of our heads,” Mr. Sexton said. “He and I both suffered from a combination of arrogance and naïveté.” (“Hurricane Streets” remains an artifact of the day: it’s never been available on DVD or on any online streaming site.)
Mr. Freeman’s follow-up film, “Desert Blue,” had an undercooked script and was rejected from Sundance, the first sign of gloom on the horizon. “You don’t get to make a second film twice,” Mr. Freeman said. He had no third script, but “at this point,” he admitted, “people weren’t very interested in financing my ideas.” Neither of his first two films had been commercial successes. At the same time he was falling in with a fast Hollywood crowd: “the right clubs with the right people at the table.” He was publicly linked with the actress Michelle Williams, then a star of “Dawson’s Creek,” on which he’d worked briefly.
Over the next couple of years everything crumbled. His relationships were unhappy. His representation cut him loose. He struggled with substance abuse. “You never knew what you got when you invited me places,” he said. “You invite me to your graduation, I may show up and throw up on someone, or I may not show up.”
Concerned e-mails were exchanged among Mr. Freeman’s family, colleagues and close friends. His brother, who was beginning his own family, told him he wouldn’t be welcome around the dinner table. Mr. Sexton finally confronted Mr. Freeman on his misbehavior “after we’d both crashed and burned some more,” letting him know, “We’ll help you get well if you want to get well.”
A happenstance meeting led Mr. Freeman to MTV, as a director on the first season of “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” the pioneering reality-soap about the indolent, suntanned youth of Southern California, during which he helped shape that show’s visual grammar: cool, spacious and patient. He was also an executive producer on the “Up” series by the British documentarian Michael Apted and one season of “Maui Fever,” about surfers in Hawaii.
“He was young, had a maverick eye and knew how to bridge the gap between vérité and cinematic film language,” said Tony DiSanto, MTV’s president for programming.
By comparison “16 and Pregnant,” about young moms-to-be and “Teen Mom” are rougher around the edges, an evolution for an audience perhaps fatigued with the visual flawlessness of the earlier shows. Mr. Freeman is an executive producer on both shows (through his company, 11th Street Productions), no longer a director, though he still aspires to bring some of his old filmic impulses to the show: “I like to get nice establishing shots and cutaway details and to build a richness in the story.”
The second season of “16 and Pregnant” averaged 2.4 million viewers per episode. “Teen Mom,” which follows the lives of four women who initially appeared in the premiere season of “16 and Pregnant,” has averaged 3.3 million viewers per episode this season. It has also emerged as a surprising pop-cultural phenomenon: Two of its stars, Farrah and Maci, were on the cover of Us Weekly this month, grinning and hoisting their toddlers high.
The shows have become “an unexpected franchise,” Mr. DiSanto said, noting that initially, the network felt “16 and Pregnant” would be driven more by concept than casting. But now that some of the mothers have graduated to “Teen Mom,” that show is “almost becoming ‘The Hills,’ a cast-driven show,” he said. (This season of “Teen Mom” will conclude next month, and the third season of “16 and Pregnant,” with a new cast, is scheduled to begin in October.)
Mr. Freeman has become attached to the shows’ stars, even envisioning the possibility of sticking with these young women through motherhood’s various stages — “first words, first walks, first conversations “ — in the spirit of the “Up” series. “It would be amazing for Morgan to be the guy to bring the Apted thing to MTV,” Mr. DiSanto said.
Barring that Mr. Freeman sees many untapped teenage stories yet to be told. “Can we shine a light on truancy? Can we shine the light on the dropout rate?”
Mr. Sexton said that the teenage years are a natural milieu for Mr. Freeman. “He’s a jubilant, exuberant, youthful person,” he said. “He respects teenagers and respects them as a voice.”
And now Mr. Freeman is finally equipped to handle success. “I have two shows that are working,” he said. “I don’t take that lightly.” He has a place in Brooklyn with a backyard. He’s in a healthy relationship. “I feel like I should go buy a briefcase,” he said.
“What a travesty my life would have been if those had been hits,” he continued, speaking of his early films. “I would be dead.”
