Despite being on the same network as reality TV shows like The Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, and I Use to Be Fat, Andrew Jenks has found a way to gain both popularity and acclaim. He is the star of his reality documentary show, “World of Jenks,” in which he follows a complete stranger, telling the story of their life.
CAB Speakers featured the young, award-winning filmmaker in “An Evening with Andrew Jenks” last night, where he spoke candidly about his career, inspirations, and life lessons to a couple hundred UCF students.
Jenks started off the evening by retelling the tale of his filmmaking career, through his eyes. He began with “Andrew Jenks: Room 335,” a documentary he put together when he was 19 years old, showing the story of elderly people living in nursing homes. At first, Jenks explained, no retirement home would allow him to live there, let alone film. That’s when Jenks reveled the first life lesson of the evening– not taking no for an answer (“Unless you’re talking to a girl,” Jenks specified).
After calling home after home, Jenks finally found a retirement community in Port St. Lucie, Florida, that would allow him to film his documentary. HBO ended up buying the rights to air it.
ESPN then financed Jenks, he went on, to shoot his second film, “The Zen of Bobby V.” Jenks talked about the process of filming that went into the piece, keeping the crowd entertained with amusing stories of the shoot. One such story took place while filming a divisional baseball game in Japan,. Jenk’s partner decided to climb to the restricted area on top of the scoreboard carrying a camera and tripod to get a shot they wanted. Meanwhile, the Japanese crowd thought he was an American sniper, and almost evacuated the arena, right in the middle of the seventh inning.
Finally, Jenks talked about his MTV show, “World of Jenks,” who’s original pilot aired after MTV’s VMAs, and ended up with 5 or 6 million viewers, Jenks shared.
The show’s premise is about experiencing a week in their life of a stranger, who he moves in with. Season 1 highlights included living with a homeless woman, a man with autism, a rapper, an MMA fighter, a professional poker player, an NFL cheerleader and a female-fronted band. The show’s
In his show, Jenks explained that he is attempting to show “a cross section of young America, and what they share. What I’ve gathered is a group of young people who are ambitious and young… [They] are the underdogs in life. That are part of our generation that don’t get a voice on major networks.”
Jenks revealed that season 2 of his MTV show will feature a race car driver, a fashion designer with terminal cancer, and the return of Chad, a young man with autism.
After the show, Jenks shared with KnightNews.com how UCF students could get more involved in helping with some of the issues brought to light in his MTV show. “It could be something like going online to DoSomething.org, which is a fantastic organization that has contacts around the world that young people could get involved and make a difference.
“I remember when our nursing home documentary came out.. we had high schools around the country volunteering one hour a week to just hang out with senior citizens.”
