G2W EDITOR: Being a parent is hard. Being a parent to a Girl2Watch is even harder. In order to gain some insights into what it’s like to have a daughter trying to make it in Hollywood, we spoke with Marty Gilmore, father of Lauren. In this exclusive two-part Girl2Watch interview, Marty gave us his views on raising children, high school, Hollywood, and our dysfunctional dependence on oil.

G2W: Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself.

MARTY GILMORE: I do two things. I have a small hedge fund, which is not the evil hedge funds you hear about, just an investment fund and financial product. More importantly, I’m the executive director of a nonprofit called The Coalition for Independent America, which goal is to educate people on the core issues surrounding our oil dependency. We’re non-partisan. It’s an extremely difficult issue in this environment so our goal is to educate that public.

G2W: What was Lauren like growing up?

MARTY: Lauren’s always been tall.  She was off the charts as a child. She was precocious in athletics and she was a really tough soccer player.  You have a picture where this mud draped all over her and fighting her way through it like six years old a mud pile , fighting the kids for the ball.  My core image of her would be that.  She’s very tenacious and always has been way ahead of her time. She’s always been extremely outgoing.  She’s always been a good student. Those are like the three terms I would use.

G2W: Tells about how she left school early.

MARTY: Well first of all I orchestrated it. Lauren ended up going only a year and a half. My other daughter did the same thing.  I hate high school for upper middle class, white, high school suburban high schools surrounding major metropolitan areas – that’s sort of a stereotypical “mean girl” high school. We have the two daughters in this whole community of Chicago-land that have taken a little advantage of a trick I found. The loophole is that in our state, a junior college has to accept a person who is “disenfranchised” from the high school, and so normally what would happen is somebody would get expelled, and so the kids kind of travel off to a junior college when they’re 18 or 19 and don’t have a GED or something, some of that hard luck story, but I turned it into a positive.

G2W: How did you manage that?

MARTY: My theory has been why are the kids going to this junior and senior year in this era, where the kids are so mature and there’s so much social pressure?  Why not just go to a junior college take the exact same courses they would be taking whether it be high school or a major college? Lauren left halfway in the school year. She tested at all college level courses and we started her the next day in a junior college.  So she was going to junior college while all her friends were going to high school and the whole social brouhaha that was going around, she sort of bypassed. The way we played at than was first of all, all her friends hated her because they were saying, “How did you get out of high school?”  “How come you don’t get to come to high school?”  I leveraged that and used it as a sort of a pride issue to her.  That she was saying, “I’m in college now and I’m only sixteen.”  So from the self confidence level, where normally high school crushes her confidence, now you have a girl who’s saying “Well look now I’m going to college and you’re not.”

G2W: How did other parents react?

MARTY: The parents I talk to don’t think of me negatively.  They say, “That’s a really good idea.  I wish I’d done it with my kid instead of spending $80,000 to take English 101.”  Everybody tells me to write a book on this.

G2W: You don’t really care what people think about you, do you?

MARTY: No, no, we’re not going to worry about that too much.

Stay tuned for Part Two of our exclusive interview in which Marty gives his thoughts on Hollywood and more!

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