I think you see in some of that early footage where it’s like Brian and Robin Thicke, and we’re all in San Diego. There would be these fun events at Magic Mountain, and everybody together at a party. Truly there was a small group of us growing up, and so these were real friends. My friend Neil -who edited Wild Wild Country and is an executive producer of kid 90-said he felt like it was like our Eighth Grade. It’s interesting because there’s a dual narrative at work-there’s a voyeuristic angle on the surface because all your friends happen to be famous, and then there’s this whole other story. “There are so many Easter eggs, by the way, and many funny moments of people where you’re like, Is that who I think it is?” says Frye, photographed with Will Smith and Mark Wahlberg at an Emmy Awards after-party in the mid-’90s. I can only speak for myself and my experience, but I really hope that when people watch it that they’re not just watching my story, but they can relive their own stories. ![]() I needed to share the pieces-the blueprint-and try to put together the memories. It just came out because really I was on a search to my own self. I had locked all of it away and was not planning on any of those experiences. How did you come to feel like you wanted to share these private moments with viewers? It ended up becoming a deeply personal coming-of-age story, and four years later I’m sitting in an edit bay every day and night cutting frame by frame. So I kept digging-it was like the teen journalist in me started to come out again, and I kept peeling back the onion. It’s been a four-year journey of going through the footage and the tapes and the diaries and then the emotional component of finding voicemails from friends that are no longer here. How did you shape it when you had so much material to go through? What prompted you to make this documentary?Īround the time I turned 40, I started to wonder-because I have this incredible family and beautiful children-who am I separate from these things? Who am I as an individual? Did things happen the way I remembered them from my childhood and my teen years? “Truly there was a small group of us growing up, and so these were real friends,” says Frye, photographed with Brian Austin Green (second from left) and Stephen Dorff (second from right) in the mid-’90s. Here, Frye, who also stars in the new Punky Brewster reboot that starts airing on Peacock today and has been busy supporting the Covid-19 response of CORE, Sean Penn’s nonprofit for which she is a board member, speaks to WSJ.: While not thrilled to witness her daughter’s teenage partying or heartbreaks, according to Frye, her reaction was: “It reminds me of a female Charles Bukowski.” There was one critic Frye was especially nervous to show it to: her mom, who finally saw it two weeks ago. “What was there was her truth, so we encouraged her to not shy away from it.” “You can use that footage and tell a story about dark young Hollywood, or you could use it to tell an exposé of the club scene in the ’90s,” says kid 90 executive producer Jennifer Davisson, the president of production of Appian Way Productions. “It was uncovering all of these things and experiences that I had truly blocked out or stored away and really had not dealt with,” says Frye, who directed the documentary and interviewed many of her subjects as adults in an effort to understand what had been distorted or forgotten in the intervening years. Frye also traces the arc of her relationships with rapper Danny Boy O’Connor from House of Pain and actor Charlie Sheen, as well as a sexual assault she had not previously confronted.Įarly on, Frye had been considering the idea of making a film that examined the death of privacy and the Internet era, but it took a turn. But there’s also pathos, such as the untimely deaths of friends, including Kids star Justin Pierce, musician Andrew Dorff and actor Jonathan Brandis. ![]() There is precious footage indeed-with never-before-seen flashbacks of teenage tomfoolery with Tiger Beat stars like Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Balthazar Getty, Stephen Dorff and Leonardo DiCaprio in Los Angeles and New York. “I always said, ‘Oh, there’s gold in storage.’ ” “I get picked on all the time for the storage rooms,” says Frye, 44, speaking via Zoom from her book-filled Los Angeles home. For the most part, she never looked at them again, instead stacking them inĬontainers and tucking them away. A time capsule from last century, it’s crafted from Frye’s storage units full of video tapes, diaries, photos and audio tapes that she had recorded mostly in the late ’80s and ’90s, extending into her post-Punky teen years. “I don’t really know where I ended and Punky began,” Frye says in her autobiographical documentary kid 90, the latest on-demand look at celebrity life, which streams on Hulu on March 12.
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