When a group of grade four and five students in Toronto premiered their film Robot Bullies this past October, the event had more than the usual school-show buzz.
The students had developed their script with Simon Rich, one of the writers from the Pixar hit Inside Out. The cast for the short film included, among others, Jay Baruchel (How to Train Your Dragon), Robbie Amell (The Flash) and Millie Davis (Orphan Black). The film was introduced to a room full of proud parents by Bailee Madison, who played young Snow White on the TV show Once Upon a Time.
These young filmmakers found themselves working with Hollywood A-listers thanks to a friendship forged years earlier between two McGill undergrads.
Adrienne Slover, BA’04, and Evan Goldberg, BA’05, met at McGill in the early 2000s. She now works as a schoolteacher in Toronto. He found fame in Hollywood as a writer/producer for major hits like Superbad, Pineapple Express, and This Is the End.
Though Slover and Goldberg followed different paths, their friendship endured. Last year, they combined their respective areas of expertise to create And Action!, a program that gives elementary and high school students a chance to work with professionals to create their own movies.
Slover and Goldberg run And Action! in partnership with We Charity, an organization that provides an extensive array of programs to educate and empower young people.
“It was really when Adrienne said we should talk to We that things started to happen,” Goldberg says. “We didn’t have the infrastructure to pull all this off on our own.”
They did have a few things going for them: Goldberg had extensive connections to Hollywood talent. Slover knew how to connect that talent to students.
We Charity connected them first with John C. Fremont High School in Los Angeles. Students there created Dumpster Diving, a film about peer pressure that they shot with actors Seth Rogen, James Franco, Michael Pena and Hannah Simone.
Goldberg says he was surprised by how willing his film-industry colleagues were to help. “I think people [in the film industry] don’t get asked to do this stuff very often. They were pretty thrilled to do it.”
Robot Bullies was the second And Action! project. Even though the kids were younger this time, they had no trouble taking creative control.“
When we started working with the grade fours and fives, they showed a lot more maturity than you might think if you don’t interact with kids at that age,” Slover says.
She says And Action! does more than teach kids how to make movies. The program fosters teamwork, media literacy and commitment. Most important, Slover says, students learn how their stories can change the world – even if they never work in film again.
“If these kids just go out in life and carry this experience with them, and if it gives them confidence I think that in itself is a special thing,” she says.
Participants discovered plenty about themselves.
“I thought I was going to be a scientist,” said 10-year-old Rachel Szlendak. “I still want that, but this opportunity was really great. Now I think about maybe becoming an actor. I feel like acting is inside me.”
Slover and Goldberg don’t worry too much about the possibility of disrupting Szlendak’s academic ambitions. They trust her to find the path that’s right for her.
“Rachel moved to a new school this year, and she already started a We group there,” says Slover. “She is so extroverted.”
Goldberg says students like Rachel help And Action! extend its influence beyond direct participants, inspiring other kids to discover their own ways to change the world.“
She signed up teachers and, like, 20 kids at her new school,” he says. “Rachel is already pretty incredible. And you never know. Maybe one of those 20 people will do something cool. That would be awesome.”
