Richard Bye, AS '92, didn't know that graduating with a political science degree from UD eventually would send him back to high school.

"I thought I wanted to be a lawyer," he says, "but by the end of my senior year, I decided I wanted to make documentary films that addressed political and social issues."

This year, Bye garnered an Emmy as a producer of the documentary series American High, which follows a year in the lives of 14 high school students in a Chicago suburb.

Bye headed up one of the film crews that focused on seven of the selected students. Another producer and his crew followed the other seven.

Bye became involved in the project at the request of executive producer R.J. Cutler, one of the producers of The War Room and A Perfect Candidate. After a stint on MTV News in the early '90s, Bye worked with Cutler on the MSNBC series Edgewise, which featured interviews and short documentary pieces.

American High was an idea Cutler had "in the wake of Columbine," Bye says. "He believed that there would be a real interest in seeing the day-to-day lives of teens at the turn of the century." The location of Highland Park, the suburb of Chicago where the series was filmed, was chosen because of a combination of factors--the executives at the Fox network who wanted a more middle America location than New York or L.A., and the fact that Cutler had a friend in the school who was willing to give the filmmakers the access they required.

It was that extremely close access to the students that helped American High yield such rich dramatic material in a time when "reality programming" was becoming almost passé. Each month for 10 months, Bye and his crew shot every day for three weeks. "Very few documentary filmmakers spend that amount of time with their subjects," Bye explains. "Typically, it's like Hoop Dreams [the acclaimed 1994 documentary film about basketball hopefuls], where the shooting schedule is a handful of times over several years. The closeness with the kids was one of the unique things about this project."

American High deals with the raw and real experiences of high school students as they struggle with issues of sexuality, relationships, divorce, experiments with drugs and alcohol and the pressures of schoolwork and planning for life after graduation. Bye and his crew followed the students as they interacted with their peers, parents, teachers, coaches, boyfriends and girlfriends, showing a full spectrum of the issues they face in their daily lives.

"There was a real intimacy between us and the kids," Bye says. "Our relationship with them was paramount. If at any time we betrayed their trust, it would have been over."

According to Bye, half the time that he and his crew spent listening to the students occurred without the cameras rolling. "We spent hours on the phone," he recalls. "The whole experience was like a vehicle for self-awareness for these kids."

The constant contact "took an emotional toll," Bye concedes. "We had to be careful about getting too involved. If kids are drinking and going to drive...we are going to stop that. But, if a kid is blowing off a paper...sometimes, you have to let him learn for himself."

That wasn't always easy for Bye. "There is a struggle with a real line that you have to be aware of," he says. "There were definitely times when we questioned whether we should be shooting.

"Allie, for example...her parents had just gone through a nasty divorce. We couldn't have done anything without her help and her mother's. We always used the subject as a guide, and we always were shooting with permission. But," Bye adds,"there were plenty of things we didn't shoot."

American High was originally shot as a 13-part series for Fox, but was picked up by PBS when Fox canceled it after showing only a few episodes. Even with its short-lived run on a major network, the show made an impression, evidenced by its Emmy win over other non-fiction reality programs such as Trauma: Life in the ER and E! True Hollywood Story. Bye says he was surprised by the nomination, and it "was totally thrilling to win. [The series] was my life for an entire year. I'm glad it was recognized as something incredibly special."

Bye currently splits his time between New York City and Los Angeles, where he is working on a new documentary project about medical residents for TNT. The new 13-hour series follows 15 residents through a full year, and is described by Bye as "a different kind of intense" than American High.

"Doctors don't have time to sit and chew the fat," he says, "and, there is the seriousness and gravity of what happens in the hospital each day."

Bye says he wasn't sure how comfortable he would be shooting in a hospital, and he was concerned with the moral and ethical issues raised by filming interactions between doctors and patients.

The new series will be in production until mid-2002, but repeat showings of American High can be found on many local PBS stations. To find out if a re-broadcast is planned in your area or for more information about the series, visit the show's web site at [http://www. pbs.org/americanhigh/].

--Jeanine McGann, AS '93