Filmmaker Lauren Lazin On Her 'True Life'
Rebecca Craven
Issue date: 11/3/05 Section: Arts
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When Lauren Lazin graduated from Smith in 1982, MTV was right on the verge of celebrating its first birthday and Lazin was headed for graduate school, having barely heard of the nascent network. At Smith, "We didn't have cable," she says. "We barely had television! The summer after I graduated, my mom and dad got cable, and I watched a LOT of MTV." In just a few short years, Lazin would be part of the new network and working to create the MTV we know today, as the producer of shows like "True Life" and "Cribs."
Lazin majored in sociology at Smith, and used her Smith Scholars' thesis here as part of her final film project at Stanford, where she earned her master's degree in documentary film production. She was hired at MTV in large part because of her experience with documentary film-making, since the network had decided to extend its programming from music videos to actual shows. "From the very beginning, I was making documentaries on celebrities," Lazin says. "I guess around 1990 I came to my bosses and said, 'Do you think we could do topics other than celebrities?' and I gave them my whole list of ideas, and they said okay."
This leap of faith on the part of the network had a hand in changing MTV, and arguably the way in which television looked at young people and youth culture. The first program to be created as part of Lazin's initiative was "Sex in the 90s," an extremely popular series of programs that also happened to feature TV's first same-sex kiss.
"The news department was in place," Lazin recounts, "and I came to them and said that I wanted to start a documentary wing, and at first it was me, and then it was me and one other person, and then we got an assistant. That was a big day when we got our assistant!" From its humble beginnings, MTV's documentary department has grown to about twice the size of the station's news department, and the periodic specials have become weekly episodes of "Cribs" and "My Super Sweet Sixteen," series like "True Life," and wide-reaching campaigns against violence, racism and AIDS.
Lazin majored in sociology at Smith, and used her Smith Scholars' thesis here as part of her final film project at Stanford, where she earned her master's degree in documentary film production. She was hired at MTV in large part because of her experience with documentary film-making, since the network had decided to extend its programming from music videos to actual shows. "From the very beginning, I was making documentaries on celebrities," Lazin says. "I guess around 1990 I came to my bosses and said, 'Do you think we could do topics other than celebrities?' and I gave them my whole list of ideas, and they said okay."
This leap of faith on the part of the network had a hand in changing MTV, and arguably the way in which television looked at young people and youth culture. The first program to be created as part of Lazin's initiative was "Sex in the 90s," an extremely popular series of programs that also happened to feature TV's first same-sex kiss.
"The news department was in place," Lazin recounts, "and I came to them and said that I wanted to start a documentary wing, and at first it was me, and then it was me and one other person, and then we got an assistant. That was a big day when we got our assistant!" From its humble beginnings, MTV's documentary department has grown to about twice the size of the station's news department, and the periodic specials have become weekly episodes of "Cribs" and "My Super Sweet Sixteen," series like "True Life," and wide-reaching campaigns against violence, racism and AIDS.