The high school that my teenage daughter attends does not look anything like Lake Forest Academy. There are few high schools in the world that resemble LFA. Founded in 1857, it is a coeducational school that sits on 100-some beautifully manicured and garden-filled acres, with many of its buildings dating from more than a century ago, when they served as the sumptuous living quarters for a meatpacking millionaire and his family.
On the surface, it would seem that this school and the northern suburb in which it sits might be too isolated or rarefied to be able to offer any understanding about the ways in which most of us live and learn today. Indeed, the school and suburb are relatively sheltered from the headline-making troubles that pepper our perilous and violent times. But filmmakers Mike Leonard and Mary Kay Wall thought there was a story worth telling here and so decided to take their cameras and spend a year filming and interviewing students and faculty at LFA.
The result is a film, “Global Generation,” airing Thursday through Saturday on WTTW-Ch. 11, that tells us much that is encouraging.
“In an age when we seem to be coming apart due to differing political beliefs and driven apart by advancing technology, this film explores what it is that brings us together,” says Leonard.
This is the latest in an ongoing series of programs produced by Leonard and Wall in a collaborative video endeavor dedicated to “ordinary people making an extraordinary impact.” Having seen a number of their efforts — including one focused on singer John Prine and his fight with cancer and another on lawyer and civic treasure Newton Minow — I can tell you that their aim is true and their film making accomplished.
A bit of background first, because you have no doubt seen Leonard before.
He was born in New Jersey in 1947 but has spent most of his life here, growing up in Glencoe and living with his wife and raising their four children in Winnetka. For more than 30 of those years, he was a “Today” show fixture, supplying that morning program with the sort of substantive, non-celebrity stories that have been in increasingly short supply, tales about such “ordinary people” as the different folks around the country who supply the Christmas trees that stand in Rockefeller Center in New York City.
He left “Today” in 2012 but has stayed busy, playing with his grandchildren and remaining part of a family-run video production company, Picture Show Films, run by Leonard’s son, Matt, and son-in-law James Fleischel, with another son, Brendan, on camera. (Leonard and his wife, Cathy, also have two daughters, Kerry and Megan, and eight grandchildren.) They had created 2011’s “Catholicism,” a 10-part documentary about the history of the Catholic faith.
He and Wall began collaborating a few years ago. A divorced mother of five, she had worked in field operations for Mayor Richard M. Daley and also closely with her brother, Father the Rev. Jack Wall, when he and the Rev. John Cusick were working hard to bring Old St. Pat’s on the Near West Side back to life in the 1980s.
Among their first ventures was “Old St. Patrick’s Church: A Chicago Renaissance Story” and much of their work has been for a series called “inCommon with Mike Leonard,” 30-minute programs on the topics of time, acceptance, hope and humility, all broadcast on WTTW and some nationally (find them on thetellingwell.org).
The idea for what would become this film came when Leonard started thinking how social media and technology might be isolating young people from one another and what the effect of that might be. In talking to many youngsters, that notion expanded and a couple of years ago, he approached some high schools about allowing him to roam its halls with a camera, talking with students. They turned him down and so he talked to the folks who run Lake Forest Academy.
He had spent a year of high school there long ago and served for three recent years as a member of its board. He was intrigued that the school’s curriculum operates on an educational philosophy centered on the concept of global citizenry.
“It is a tiny school, an elite prep school,” says Leonard. “But it is more attuned to diversity and what that means than so many other schools.”
Tuition is in rarefied neighborhood of $44,400 annually for LFA’s 400-some students, or $59,400 for those who live on campus. But the relatively small student body, as well as its diversity (there are students from 15 states and 41 countries, and a number of scholarship students from disenfranchised big-city neighborhoods), gave Wall and Leonard a manageable environment, what Leonard calls “a globalized laboratory.”
Many of the kids the Leonard-Wall cameras captured are sincere and forthcoming, surprisingly so for Leonard who says, “If you’d put a camera in my face at that age I would have run away.”
The show is a lot of talking young heads, some teachers and administrators and a lot of smart Leonard narration. You will hear of homesickness, of mis- and pre-conceptions shattered, of challenges specific to this generation. You will see facilities that will prompt envy in most parents and their high schoolers and you will realize that some of these kids, given their economic and academic opportunities, may one day run the world.
“Yes, this is a very special place but it is one of inclusivity, of cultures, ideas,” says Leonard.
This is not so much a conventional documentary as it is a series of interconnected and interesting snapshots around the global generation theme. (If you want a different look at contemporary high school life watch “America to Me,” Steve James’ compelling 10-part documentary the 2015-16 school year at Oak Park River Forest high school in Oak Park).
But, as Wall and Leonard continue to cinematically explore LFA for what may be future episodes, “Global Generation” might provide you with something that often seems in short supply as the world spins with increasing frenzy. It might give you hope.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
@rickkogan
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