Johansen High teens tackle the ’20s, produce silent film, concert

Silent movies. Speak-easies. Dizzy dames, gang bosses and all that jazz. None of the teens or teachers at Johansen High lived the flapper-dapper days of the 1920s, but they found common threads while bringing the era to life for this year’s collaborative performing arts project.

“It’s really relatable,” said Brad Hart, Johansen director of instrumental music. The so-called Roaring ’20s were a time of great social change, renowned for lavish displays of wealth by the privileged few. “These kids understand being able to see lots of people with lots of resources – but you can’t have them,” he said.

In choosing music for the show, Hart picked the heady jazz of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, as well as two pieces from the 1930s, “Over the Rainbow,” written as the country struggled to emerge from the Great Depression, and “Carmina Burana,” composed by Carl Orff as a warning of the fickleness of fortune and perils of gluttony.

An upbeat interlude will come with “Casey at the Bat,” read by Mayor Garrad Marsh as the Johansen band plays “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and a baseball video that teens made with the Modesto Nuts mascots is shown.

The highlight of the show, being performed in the art deco-themed State Theatre on April 25, is a 7 1/2-minute silent movie created entirely by young talent at Johansen.

A competition among English classes chose the screenplay of junior Isabel Zavala Cortes: “The Great Baby Chase.” The idea for the melodramatic comedy came from 1920s films, Isabel said during class Tuesday. “I was actually watching Charlie Chaplin films and got the idea from that,” she said. Her characters were inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

“The hardest part was, first, getting it all to fit, and then the transitions and all the details,” Isabel said. She worked with about 30 student actors and directors from the drama department, and student videographers from the multimedia department, to create the film.

Senior Ignacio Malfabon took part in the high-tech creation of the film, as well as in the musical accompaniment. “I was able to be part of both of them,” Ignacio said. “I’m in the data pathway and the band pathway – these two things are my dream.”

The script called for suspense portions, using over-the-top acting, he noted. “The actors had to be super-expressive and gesture a lot so the sound could follow the movie,” Ignacio said. “Since it’s silent, the words for the film are the music and the acting.”

The film’s score, penned and arranged by a handful of Johansen AP music theory students, will be played live by band members, in the tradition of the 1920s.

“Everybody composed what they thought of and it just fit,” said junior Michael Hildebrandt, one of the composition team members. “Everything was a collaboration.”

The fast and furious bits for the action sequences came courtesy of senior Omar Azcue. “Mine was just chaos,” he said. Senior Stephanie Seitzer contributed to what became the counter-melody.

Faculty across the campus have played off the theme of this year’s production, Hart said. History teachers gave students the back story. French AP students gathered slides of great works of the era created in Paris by cultural icons who came from, or later came to, the United States.

Science teachers made a PowerPoint for the show with technological advances of the era, which included bringing microphones, record players and movies to the masses. “My favorite thing is that’s when sliced bread was invented,” Hart said.

But as everyone worked together through different phases of the production, not everything went smoothly, he added. “They started to find, just like in the business world, they had to deal with changes and shifting timelines,” Hart said. “The kids all had to talk to each other.”

This story was originally published April 14, 2015 at 7:20 PM with the headline "Johansen High teens tackle the ’20s, produce silent film, concert."