Austin
is following closely on the heels of Santa Fe as the best place in the country to buy a crystal, go to a Ram Dass
lecture, and do four hours of the yoga lion position, all in time to break your
Wiccan fast with a macrobiotic tempeh and chard lunch. As an Austinite, you
must accommodate it, by either embracing the lifestyle as your own —
submitting to the lure of a loose-fitting dashiki and attending all the
ancillary functions — or, as has been my case, you marginalize the partakers
the same way a Catholic approaches a snake-handling holy roller, sending along
polite regrets (“My sitar’s in the shop. Damn the luck.”) while guiltily eating
beef in private and stubbing out cigarettes long before stepping out into the
Whole Foods parking lot. Occasionally, an event will change your mind —
something akin to the experience of the wedding guest in Coleridge’s Rhyme
of the Ancient Mariner — a person singles you out, and wielding a
cautionary finger, tells you something that bites you at your core. You
suddenly allow for the possibility that there are people who are happier than
you, and you listen to them.
Gary Goldstein, the 28-year-old, former teen-magazine coverboy, L.A. native,
and former host of CNN’s Real News for Kids, is one of those people. We
sit at Casa da Luz, a macrobiotic restaurant off of South Lamar, munching
rabidly healthy food as I try to ask him about his work in the Austin
Independent School District, and his life as a Hollywood prodigy, writing,
producing, and starring in children’s programming since he was 20. From him, I
attempt to pry trashy stories about interviewing strung-out starlets in Cannes,
and whether Milton Berle was the asshole I’d always heard he was, and all he
can do is look at my shoulders, hunched in and knotted up. “Look at the way
you’re sitting,” Goldstein instructs, as unassuming as Bambi, “you look
frightened. What are you afraid of, Andrew?” Ten words out of his mouth, the
notepad is on the floor, the story out the window, and Goldstein is egging me
on while I indulge my most confessional side — lamenting troubles relating to
my father, trauma with debilitatingly complex women, and chemical addiction.
“This could be the last hour of your life, Andrew. Is this the way you wanted
to live it?” A straight piece on the civic work of Goldstein and his fellow
Hollywood expatriates veers inexplicably, and I am a dysfunctional Grasshopper
to this blond-haired, California version of Kung-Fu’s Master. Certain emotional
peril is inherent in interviewing an interviewer who has undergone a spiritual
conversion.
For Goldstein, health is a full-time job and the list of verboten toxins is
endless. Booze and caffeine are out, sugar’s no good in large doses, red meat’s
bad stuff, wheat is intolerable, and nicotine, of course, will kill you. On his
A-list are intensive yoga, swimming, dance, meditation, and hugs. There is no
middle ground — a beer and burger after spending an hour in a meditative state
would be reckless backsliding. So how did all this peace and love happen to
this lifelong L.A. resident, whose balanced state virtually creates an audible
purr?
From the perspective of the non-Californian, Hollywood is the last place that
would serve as a Petri dish for this sort of unified mental and corporal health
— on TV, Hollywood looks like a breeding ground for insecurity, material
excess, reckless egotism, and epic drug and alcohol abuse. Goldstein is quick
to point out that to a certain extent, all of these perceptions of L.A. are
accurate; but he also points out that the most popular church in Hollywood is
The Temple of the Body. For Hollywood aspirants, success is gauged in the
ability to shoot to the pinnacle of stardom and afterwards, maintaining a
physique which looks good enough to stay there. River Phoenix, after all, was
considered spiritually attuned and meticulous about the foods which passed
through his lips — granted, a darker vein passed through him at night.
Goldstein notes that this diurnal/nocturnal duplicity is typical in Hollywood.
Citing the example of Peewee Herman’s dead career, Goldstein is gun-shy about
discussing personal issues while still considered a celebrity in circles of
10-year-olds. He does say that while Phoenix was tearing up L.A., he was
probably safe at home meditating. After Real News for Kids filmed its
final episodes in 1995, Goldstein retreated to Austin, a place where those who
are serious about wellness pursue it at night as well as during the day.
It is not surprising that Goldstein is frequently misplaced as belonging to
the age group to which his work with CNN appealed. At 28, Goldstein looks
preternaturally youthful, with a small frame and robust build, a mane of blond
hair down to his shoulders — the hair that made CNN execs cringe. When he
first started Real News, a VP well-schooled in the Brit Hume philosophy
of personal grooming, asked him how he would feel about shedding some, if not
all of his trademark mane. “How short?” Goldstein asked, tentatively. “That’s
the spirit,” countered the exec. The hair stayed for the duration of the show
however, through interviews with two sitting presidents, “every” Hollywood
luminary, and a host of kids with both incredible talents and harrowing
hardships.
On a walk around Town Lake in April, I confessed to Goldstein that I had never
seen his work on CNN and asked if there was a certain TV persona he could
affect on cue. “Watch,” he says. Goldstein turns to me and for a second I play
the part of a stationary camera in a TV studio. He opens his eyes, adjusts
himself to a military posture and unleashes a gigantic closed-mouth smile, the
kind which incites baboon riots in zoos. Television cameras have been known to
produce an effect which transforms a freneticism which, in real life, seems
emotionally excessive into a positivism just big enough for TV. Goldstein’s
energy plays great on the small screen. When he says, “Hi, I’m Gary Goldstein.
Today, kids…,” it becomes clear how his non-threatening cuteness might impel
pre-pubescent girls to tear his face from Teen Magazine. The shtick
works.
Along with an enclave
of industry friends who now make Austin their home, Goldstein has taken a huge
pay cut and brought his wares to the Austin Independent School District,
exposing the seams behind “Hollywood’s seamless reality” to Austin high school
students through his brainchild, Austin’s Creative Television Workshop (ACT).
The program, a hands-on television production course, received a small stipend
last spring from the City of Austin’s Cultural Contracts Office, an entity
which contracts artists to provide services that benefit the city by promoting
cultural tourism and creative community service, all funded through Austin’s
hotel/motel tax.
ACT Workshop’s first project took place last spring in East Austin’s Johnston
High School. When Goldstein introduced himself to students in Marylee Boarman’s
television reporting class and asked what kind of video the students wanted to
produce, he found most were intent on creating a news story about teen
pregnancy at the high school. Johnston has gained some notoriety from the
remarkable fertility of its female student body; 113 Johnston High school girls
are either pregnant or moonlighting as mothers. In response to the almost
epidemic proportions of Johnston’s baby situation, the school started an
on-site day care facility, allowing young mothers and fathers to shoulder the
responsibility of caring for their young children while concurrently working
towards a high school diploma. The idea is highly progressive: In a day and age
when abstinence seems to be the only reproductive curriculum that school boards
can agree on, Johnston High’s room full of hungry babies and toddlers is a
chilling lesson in the necessity of responsible sex education. Formerly, young
women with children were seen as having no business in high school, a stigma
which denied many young mothers the opportunity to graduate. Now, students with
children intersperse parenting classes with history and algebra, and spend
their lunch hours in the company of their kids. Goldstein’s students felt
compelled to tell their story.
Adolescence is frequently treated by local news affiliates as a dysfunction in
itself, granting major coverage to kids chewing on toxic ludes from Mexico or
visiting smutty Web sites with their P.C.s. Goldstein let the kids film whoever
and whatever they wanted. The story was theirs, he reasoned, let them do it as
they see fit. “One girl told me, `I’m so tired of adults looking into my world
and telling people what it’s like to be a teenager. I want to tell them myself.
I’m going to be more honest about it because I’m living that way.'” Johnston’s
students amassed a huge bulk of video footage (Goldstein allowed students with
cameras to film however long they saw fit, as long as they were willing to
provide transcriptions of every interview). When technical guidance was
requested, Goldstein stepped in, coaching kids on how to communicate with the
camera, as well as enlisting the assistance of a small army of industry
professionals. Austin’s Taylor Forman Productions donated the use of their
editing equipment and a steady stream of camera and lighting technicians,
make-up artists, acting coaches, and set designers migrated to Johnston’s
classrooms to provide tutorials to small groups of interested students. In the
six months ACT Workshop spent at Johnston, the students wrote the script,
debated the content, and were sprung from classes for a full day to interview
Johnston’s young parents as well as community health professionals. Its a
special day when boys can roam high school corridors in full make-up without
getting pummeled. Johnston High’s young crew created a truly unique product — a news story narrated from the same
perspective as the principles of the story. “The segment wasn’t dark at all,”
Goldstein says, “it was showing the issue we are dealing with without any
judgement in it as to whether it was a good or bad thing, only that this is a
serious issue.” The students, in telling the story of their peers, avoided
tactics prevalent in more cautionary styles of journalism: No screaming
sensationalism or tabloid-style scandal-making is present in the final cut. The
young men and women interviewed in Johnston’s day care facility emerge as a
group of young people strapped and nobly coping with more responsibility than
adolescents should have. The vacant expression on the face of the 14-year-old
girl with a baby in her arms who says “It’s not like babysitting. Your baby
doesn’t leave,” gives sufficiently compelling evidence against unprotected sex
with no added homily or condom waving.
Marylee Boarman was thrilled at her classroom’s transformation into a
newsroom. “I couldn’t ask for a better experience for the kids. The students
had access to sides of the industry that just can’t be provided on a normal
basis in the classroom.”
The professionalism of Johnston’s young news crew even impressed the
professionals. The students brought their footage to Martha Degrass, producer
of K-EYE 42’s K-EYE Witness News at Six, who was impressed enough to get
their two-minute clip on the news at the station’s 5pm newscast. Since the clip
aired in April, Goldstein has also approached his old comrades at CNN to use
the story on Newsroom, another show aimed at younger audiences.
Initially, the producers were hesitant to air a tape produced by high
school-aged industry outsiders, but the work spoke for itself. “When they saw
the quality of the tape they called me and told me they definitely wanted to
air it,” Goldstein said. Look for Johnston’s students taking the plunge to a
national stage very soon. As for Goldstein and ACT Workshop, in July, the
Cultural Contracts Office will recommend to the City Council a renewal of ACT’s
contract for the fall, and barring any unforseen difficulty, Goldstein will be
back in the AISD. He intends to expand the program to other Austin high schools
while continuing to dip his toes in more profitable freelance television work.
“Just enough to get by,” he allows.
At the Clearwater Cafe, Goldstein introduces me to two of ACT’s professional presenters — Kate
Linforth, formerly in script development at Touchstone Pictures, and
Lorn-Nicole Robinson, a makeup artist for television and film. Both have
worked in L.A. and have chosen the quieter confines of Austin for their homes.
The three tanned faces, all peace and health, make me feel like a city bus in a
field of electric Volkswagons. Around the table, a resounding consensus is
reached that “the energy in L.A. is really gross.” But in small ways, Planet
California persists. Goldstein has spent the morning chauffeuring a friend’s
peacocks around Austin in the back of his Honda. Robinson, a minute after
meeting me, levels a finger at my nose and sweetly tells me to enjoy my
vitality now because, “You are going to die. I’m serious, you’re going to be
dead,” while Linforth suggests that Disney has the financial muscle to assume
the role of planet earth’s central governing body. It’s a small world, after
all. A cellular phone rings once, two are beeped on pagers, and the phone makes
a complete orbit around the table, stopping briefly in front of each Austin
transplant. When asked whether there is ever a time when the three need to be
out of reach, when the three just leave the beepers at home and enjoy the
anonymity of a walk or swim on the Greenbelt sans telecommunications, they look
at me like a triumvirate of salmon asked to relinquish their gills for an
afternoon. Assimilation, after all, takes time.
This article appears in July 5 • 1996 and July 5 • 1996 (Cover).