New Independent Film Applauded by New York Times Shot Partly on Campus By Betty Gabrielli
			JUNE 8, 1999--A year and a half ago, news that a professional film crew was on campus shooting interiors in Barrows Residence Hall for an independent coming-of-age film barely trickled beyond the Barrows lounge. Today Edge of 17 is on view at Cleveland's Cedar-Lee art movie house and has garnered high praise from the New York Times and other publications. Written by Todd Stephens and directed by David Moreton, Edge of 17 is set in Stephens's hometown, Sandusky, Ohio, in 1984. The 100-minute flick, which borrows its title from a Stevie Nicks hit, tells the story of a young man's journey into gay adulthood. An Ohio amusement park, no doubt Cedar Point, also figures in the film. The film crew took over the residence hall for the one-day shoot. Barrows 115 was used as the youth's college room, but the crew redecorated the space with Penthouse pinups and American flags to recreate the feel of Ohio State University in the 1980s. According to the November 7, 1997, Oberlin Review, "The movie shooting, which was completed in one day, required the services of dozens of camera men, costumers and crew. Crew members parked their trucks on the lawn and milled around the buffet tables set up in the Barrows lobby. Many students quickly became annoyed by the unplugged vending machines and crowded lobby. Some glared angrily at the movie makers who were interrupting the movie they were watching on TV." Much more receptive was the New York Times film critic: "The insecurities and turbulent desires of adolescence have rarely been portrayed more faithfully on screen than in Edge of 17," said Stephen Holden after the film's release last month. He called the film, "the latest and most poignant in a recent spate of teen-age male coming-out-of-the-closet dramas." "At the time," Holden adds, "British pop stars like Boy George and Annie Lennox were at their peak of popularity, and groups like the Bronski Beat were popularizing disco-oriented pop songs with explicitly gay content. The movie gets the music, the clothes and the tone of the teen-age culture of that era exactly right." He adds that another of the movie's strengths is its acutely remembered sense of time and place. The critic concludes by citing a few problems with the film, but in his judgment, "these are minor flaws in a movie that captures a small slice of 1980s middle-class Middle-American life just about perfectly."
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