Month: December 2024

A Week in the BOC Life: Intro

Christine

Long time, no post! This semester nearly swallowed me up, but even still with two weeks left, I have managed to escape from the belly of the whale with another chapter written. This one is titled “Lessons Learned From the Writers’ Room to the Editing Bay: A Week in the Life of the Company,” and it covers, well, a week in the life of the company, primarily during the heart of the 1970s. (There will be separate chapters about the unique circumstances of the early years and the post-Dave Williams years.) This is the third chapter I’ve drafted, and it was the most fun to write so far primarily because it relies heavily on first-person testimonials about the BOC experience, and that source material is just overflowing with thoughtful, witty, insightful gems from company members. I had to fight the urge to fall into oral history mode and just line up great quotes — and I still do that a little bit in there — but I’m having too much fun interpreting it all to let them have all the say. It’s all still very work-in-progress, so I’ll only share the introduction here, but hopefully it’s an enticing tease.

It’s hard to describe how all-consuming it was for those of us who were super involved. It was the most consuming thing in my life for four years, and four of the most impressionable years, of my life. It’s all I did. It’s almost all I thought about. I did school work because I had to, but every waking moment that I didn’t have to be doing something else, I was doing something for Beyond Our Control. – Kate Doherty (1973-77)

Commercial TV production has one ironclad rule: an episode must be delivered on time and within the allotted running time or it won’t air. The obsession with efficiency that we saw in the previous chapter wasn’t about perfection; it was about meeting deadlines. Emmy winner Larry Karaszewski (1976-80) reflected, “BOC taught me early on what it takes to put material on the screen, and a lot of that is just getting it finished.” But BOCers didn’t simply get it finished; they produced a widely-awarded program up against professional competition. The professional caliber of BOC’s young talent was also nationally recognized. When Seventeen magazine profiled twelve “super-active Superteens” in 1976 for “doing really unusual things yet professional—especially considering their age,” Kate Doherty made the list, thanks to Dave Williams’ recommendation. 

Meeting such high standards required an intense commitment of time and energy. Chris Webb (1976-78) detailed what a typical week looked like for BOC’s most dedicated members: 

Monday from 7-10pm writer’s meeting. Tuesday from 7-10pm writer’s meeting. Wednesday 7-9:30ish, full company meeting, casting, meeting at JA center. Thursday, 7-10 writer’s meeting. Friday memorizing lines while all over town there were people making props, costumes, designing sets, recording film, recording music, and doing voiceovers in a sound booth. Saturday 6am-1 making the show. Some go home, some still hang around and have lunch, get home at 4. Then a lot of times there’s a party that night til 1am. Sunday could be a filming session or editing the show or watching it.

The depth of this commitment is perhaps best captured in Karaszewski’s frequent quip, “I didn’t go to high school, I went to Beyond Our Control.” 

While on the surface this references his time commitment to the show, it also speaks to its educational value, an experience that Karaszewski claims surpassed not only high school but even a pinnacle of higher education:

I went to USC Film School, which is supposed to be the best film school in the world, a school of George Lucas and all these other things. Beyond Our Control kicks its ass. You know, that’s what we did with the resources we did, the access to equipment we had, there was no better film school in the world. There was no better place to learn how to make movies. 

BOC also became a crash course in adulthood. Julie Darnell (1980-84) explained how such a rigorous schedule and professional responsibilities as a teenager made her much more mature than her high school peers: “I had to operate at an adult level. We were treated as adults. It’s odd to think about all the responsibility we had. And I never thought about it as, gee, I’m a high school student doing this. It was just more, we can do it. We were asked to do it; we can do it.” 

This chapter deconstructs how they did it via an intensive weekly production cycle. We’ll first see how, from early week writing sessions through Sunday night editing, the teens tried to balance the demands of creating professional television with their regular academic and social lives. Then through detailed accounts of writers’ meetings, pre-production planning, Saturday studio sessions, and post-production work, the chapter explains how BOC’s structured chaos encouraged both technical proficiency and personal growth. The experience demanded extraordinary commitment – sometimes to the understandable concern of parents and at the expense of typical teenage fun – but the participants today consistently describe it as a transformative experience, providing not just practical professional skills but also unparalleled confidence and purpose during their most formative years.