Girls (and Boys) on Film: Gen Y’s Hollywood Screen Test

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So, MTV has decided to inject a little topicality  into its reality show line-up with a new series about young, unemployed college grads on the job hunt. Five bucks says all the job hunters are hot and at least 80% of them have marketing backgrounds and are looking for social media heavy jobs in PR or digital advertising. The others will be aspiring journalists. And there will be a would-be event planner in the bunch. Bank on it. I don’t quite know how MTV is going to sex up sitting on the couch in your pajamas aimlessly clicking around Monster or Workopolis while eating Doritos, watching Days of Our Lives out of the corner of your eye and trying to ignore FB status updates from higher-achieving members of your extended family. Or perhaps gently weeping as you return from the mailbox clutching a loan repayment notice from Sallie Mae?  I have faith that they’ll think of something, though. Something involving copious amounts of alcohol and ill-advised job hunter hook-ups, no doubt.

But MTV isn’t the only network with an eye to Gen Y-related programming. ABC also has a Millennial-themed pilot in the works for fall 2010. Generation Y is billed as “a documentary-style dramedy that tracks a group of former high school classmates over the last decade.” If you’re imagining a potential Muppet Babies version of The Big Chill starring a bargain basement Michael Cera clone, you might be uncharitable, but you certainly aren’t alone.

News of both of these Millennials under a microscope shows reminds of a post-Oscar conversation I was privy to re: who might step forward to be this generation’s John Hughes and do for Gen Y what he did for Gen X with films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club.  Leaving aside the fact that  you could make a pretty good argument that the likes of Reality Bites trumps Sixteen Candles in terms of generational street cred, I don’t necessarily think  that it’s a given that a single successor to Hughes will emerge to corner the market on portraying the Millennial experience.  Rather, I think we might end up with an assortment of zeitgeist-y features that we can look back on as representative of the collective and individual experiences of  a given time period (post 9-11 or pre iPad for example), with Gen Y’s perspective being only one piece of the puzzle. See?  We do know how to share after all.

But if Gen Y does need a definitive directorial spokesperson, I fall firmly in the Anyone But Apatow camp (my reasons are encapsulated, in part, by this). Also, Seth Rogen looks eerily like the dude who used to front the Barenaked Ladies. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that. If, however, I had to back one horse, I suppose a case could be made for Jason Reitman. Juno is going to hold up about as well as American Beauty (i.e., not at all), with execrable dialogue that sounded like it was written by a bunch of marketers who took a weekend course in teen speak at the Learning Annex and were drunk on their newfound knowledge, but Up in The Air does press the right zeitgeist-y buttons.  Remains to be seen if future work will validate this confidence. You could also throw Kevin Smith’s name into the mix and Don McKellar’s, too, if you were so inclined, but only if they promised to stay behind the camera.  Hell, as long as we’re spit-ballin’ here,  I’d pay big bucks (which is what it costs to actually catch a movie these days) to see Christopher Guest skewer youth culture and the Millennial mindset in his inimitable way.

But really, anything that saves us from a Judd Apatow vehicle starring the aforementioned Cera and a sullen Kristen Stewart (with Ben Stiller as Stewart’s dad and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cera’s BFF) is fine by me.

Also, MTV and ABC? I’m open to trying my hand at scriptwriting. Just putting that out there.