Illegal Civilization Is Not The First Teen Movie Studio | North Hollywood Mini-Review
by Rhett Rhodes twitter: @rhettrhodes98
If you go to IllegalCivilization.com, you are immediately met with the description of "the first teen movie studio", even though they aren't the first teen movie studio, nor do they fit the age range to qualify as teenagers. The description of their YouTube channel also clarifies that as well, weirdly. Illegal Civilization is a skateboard company/brand started by Mikey Alfred after he started filming his friends skateboarding at the age of around thirteen years old, which for Mikey was 2008. He was thirteen years old in 2008, but wouldn't release any Illegal Civilization content until the first and short titular video, 'Illegal Civilization' in 2012 when Mikey was seventeen years old. 2012 was also the year that Mikey began hanging around and filming Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future as they were at their highest and most popular, that fact being known from Odd Future's New York Noisey video.
What I'm really here complaining about is how anyone is considering this the first teen movie studio? I mean, yeah Mikey has been making YouTube videos and short skate films (for YouTube) since he was a teenager, but so have I and a billion others on planet Earth. No, a lot of us aren't in the Los Angeles area or even live in California at all, so the videos and films most of us make are not going to feature or even be seen by big named celebrities. We didn't meet Tyler, the Creator when we were sixteen years old like Mikey did, or meet Pharrell Williams when we were eighteen years old like he did either. Hell, even eighteen is legally an adult so any chance I could've gotten from the age of eighteen to be around/work with big names and brightest of faces in Hollywood, I would've honestly taken things from a business stand point, hiked up my dungarees like a big papa, and got myself respectfully into the movie industry even if it meant I was a second assistant director or a water boy. And no a water boy is not a real position to fill on a movie set, but damn it I would do it.
I have actually seen Mikey's directorial debut, 2021's 'North Hollywood' and I deeply wanted to give a review of the film. Actually, in a Tumblr post that no longer exists I reviewed the film, but not very positively. I'll go ahead now and re-review the film briefly for you:
'North Hollywood' is a 2021 comedy/drama/coming-of-age movie written and directed by none other than the then-twenty six year old teenager himself Mikey Alfred. The film stars mostly the Illegal Civilization crew of skaters on top of film veteran Vince Vaughn and Nickelodeon star Miranda Cosgrove. It's also not a secret and is very known that Alfred co-produced Jonah Hill's directorial debut 'Mid90s', and for mostly unknown reasons Hill and Alfred are no longer cool with each other or on speaking terms. And I'm not even lying to any one of you, I believe it's Mikey's fault for that and not Mr. Jonah Hill's fault. In this extremely pretentious and boring interview with Big Boy, Mikey asks the hosts if they know Spike Jonze, and then proceeds to say that he "doesn't fuck with them". It seems like by the way he's talking about these discrepancies, it's like he was trying to be their friend even though the work was strictly business and when it came down to strictly business and he wasn't treated like a friend for a second, he now dislikes them and won't work with them.
North Hollywood borrows a lot of it's plot and themes from Jonah Hill's Mid90s, a little too much, but I admit it seems like it wasn't genuinely on purpose somehow. In Mid90s, the kid (Sunny Suljic) has one parent, he has dreams of being a pro skateboarder, feels awkward like he's uncomfortable in every situation, mostly yearns for friendship and features older; 1950s era music. And in North Hollywood, well you have the same thing but replace Sunny Suljic with Ryder McLaughlin. McLaughlin who of course was also one of the stars of Hill's Mid90s. Alfred was around twenty two years of age when he co-produced Mid90s, and around twenty five when he directed North Hollywood; not a teenager whatsoever in any sense of the word except for his mental state.
UPDATE: I rated the film a 5.1/10, so it's watchable but not re-watchable, let's say that.
Harmony Korine directed his first feature film 'Gummo' in the summer of 1996, when he was twenty three years old and I don't recall him ever wanting to be considered the first teenage director, well, because he knew his age and unlike North Hollywood, Gummo was something no one has quite seen before. I believe Seth McFarlane was also twenty five when he created and began developing Family Guy for Fox Network and even before that in his early twenties he was a writer and animator for Hanna-Barbera. It just seems weird to be an adult and portray that you and your friends are teenage skateboarding Hollywood filmmakers, meaning if anyone else did that, it would genuinely be strange and possibly even mocked.
The Illegal Civilization website has not been updated since 2020, when Alfred was twenty five-teen years old.
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