Noticing a huge hole in the film landscape, Chapman class of 2013 film production alumnus Will Phelps and his creative partner Jeremy Garelick decided to set their sights on producing high school-centered content. After acquiring screenplays and establishing the American High production company, the duo was faced with the biggest thorn in a filmmaker’s side — finding locations and transportation. 

Their logical next step: buy a school!

Once a place of education, the 100,000-square foot A.V. Zogg school building located in upstate New York now serves as the location for 75% of their movies as well as storage for equipment, props and costumes. In 2023, American High launched TikTok channels @americanhighshorts and @collegelifeshorts which have garnered over one million followers and 81 million likes combined.

“It’s cool to have a big follower count. I grew up when YouTube was just starting,” Phelps said. “When I was in middle school and high school, I was making YouTube videos that nobody was watching, and it was before doing YouTube stuff was cool. So to get our YouTube Play Button in the mail was like, ‘I got a YouTube Play Button. That’s cool.’”

On Oct. 11, The Panther sat down with Phelps and members of the American High team to talk about their social media stardom, film production endeavors and why high school stories appeal to audiences of all ages. 

A large majority of the crew and some recurring American High Shorts actors live in a house across the street from the high school deemed “The Frat House.” After their first film “Banana Split” in 2018, they struck gold with “Big Time Adolescence,” starring Pete Davidson and Griffin Gluck, which released the following year. After being showcased at the Sundance Film Festival, the film was acquired by Hulu, who secured American High an eight-movie deal, which has recently been re-upped. 

After witnessing little growth on Instagram in 2022, even with the help of marketing agencies, Phelps came to the realization that it’s not just about strategy, but content. He came up with the idea to create shorts for social media and recruited actors from Syracuse University. A couple of them were brought to American High and began shooting as many sketches as possible over the course of four days. They would post one of those videos a day and come back every few weeks to film more.

In January 2023, they posted “Alpha Dads At Their Sons’ Game,” and everything changed. They began bringing in other actors and internet celebrity guests such as Ben Palmer and Nake Meeker. Once the Writers and Actors Guilds’ strikes began, they decided to focus on making sketches since they couldn’t write or film movies. They aren’t looking back now.

“At that point, we found the five core cast members (Ryan Micho, Aiden Micho, Grace Reiter, Julia DiCesare and Luke Burkeyes),” Phelps said. “We hired them full-time and said ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do: You guys will all move to Syracuse, and we're going to treat this like ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Monday, we all come in and brainstorm, and everyone pitches their ideas. We greenlight 20 for the week. Tuesday, everyone writes their ideas. We have to script them so we can order props in time. Then Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we shoot.’”

Why start a production company specifically about high school? Isn’t that such a small part of the human experience with an even smaller target audience? The American High believes it's both a scary and exciting part of life that people of all ages can relate to.

“We think (the high school experience) resonates for two reasons,” Phelps said. “For one, it’s the last shared common experience. Everyone had to go to high school. After college, everyone’s life goes in so many different directions. But in high school, everyone had to go through it and deal with all those weird things that happened. The other reason is because it was when everyone had their first experiences. It's the first time you’re driving a car or having a girlfriend or boyfriend. It’s a world of firsts.”

Grace Reiter, a comedian and actress you have likely seen on the majority of American High Shorts, credits her comedic talent and career partly to being “a product of what it’s like growing up on the internet.”

“Our generation grew up on YouTubers,” Reiter said. “So I was always like ‘Oh my gosh, I want to be on Disney Channel’ or ‘I want to be a super famous YouTuber.’ I wanted to be like them. We grew up on that influencer stuff — like it wasn’t a weird thing, and it’s not a new thing.”

Having made a majority of her videos solo on her account @reitergrace up until receiving the call from American High, it was a big adjustment to create content with others.

“It’s so much more fun to make funny videos with other people,” Reiter said. “You can bounce ideas. Like I’ll have just a little thing, and they’ll expand upon it and make it even better than I could have imagined.”

Mackenzie Holmes, a creative producing senior at Chapman and a current intern at American High, believes that the characters being created in their short-form content is great for audience testing and deciding if these characters should be written into movie scripts. It is also a test of how audiences of all ages react to content focused on these specific years of life, either because they are living through it themselves or they feel nostalgic for their past.

“I think it really works just because being in high school and in college will never not be funny.” Holmes said. “They really focus on raunchy comedy, like basically bringing back the John Hughes raunchy comedy, even more than John Hughes’ kind of comedy.”

While Phelps graduated from Chapman a decade ago, he has not forgotten the crazy memories from Chapman that have influenced many of the scripts and videos.

“Half of these stories, either on American High Shorts or College Life, are just things that happened while I was there, and I always try to have a positive spin on it,” Phelps said. “There’s a lot of negative high school stuff out there like ‘Euphoria’ and ‘13 Reasons Why.’ A big thing for us is we want to bring it back to ‘kids are going to be idiots, and that’s funny, and that’s okay.’ Everyone’s going to be okay at the end of the day. That’s the general skew that all our shorts and movies try to have, to not take it too seriously (and) have fun.”