Film School Page 2

  No way! I didn’t know you were even applying here! That’s sooo cool! I thought you had another year at Stanford!

  The women, both with sunglasses perched on their heads, cell phones clutched in their hands, hug. The other students around me also watch the two women with slight envy. It must be nice to know someone.

  The vibe in the auditorium is all first-day nervousness. It’s like the first day of fifth-grade summer camp. Even though this is graduate school, and we are supposedly older, wiser, more mature, and much better at new social interactions, we are still nervous. At least I am.

  I have a tremendous amount riding on my journey through film school. I’m spending far too much money on tuition and spending long weeks away from my wife and kids in order to attend USC. I wonder how I’ll fit in. What little I know of film school is that it is apparently very collaborative. I’ll be spending hundreds of hours working with people who could be my own children.

  Just before coming to USC, I read a book called The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom. The book discusses how scientists have discovered that the way in which animals find their pecking order can differ from group to group. Scientists found that group dynamics are so complicated there is almost no way to predict those dynamics beforehand. The bottom line—as a chimp, sometimes you’d be the chump, sometimes you’d be the champ. Scientists discovered the same was true for humans.

  I wonder how I will fit in. I’ve spent years working since I finished college. I’ve worked as a reporter for two newspapers, reported for a radio network, spent time as a transplant coordinator at the University of Chicago hospitals. I’ve been married since before some of my classmates were in grade school, and I have three daughters. I’ve always loved the buzz and excitement of the newsroom and the operating room. I like talking with people. I get along with nearly everyone. A friend of mine once said I “would have fun at the bottom of a cesspool.” How could my time at film school be any different?

  We’re about to start the orientation when a small man with a mop of wild hair bursts through the doors, the last one in. He’s electric with energy and all smiles. He works his way around the auditorium and plops into a chair next to me. We grin at each other. He’s sure happy!

  A faculty member takes the podium. The orientation is starting.

  In the weeks leading up to orientation, I had practiced a speech I would give if we introduced ourselves. I honed my speech while jogging, while in the shower, while driving. I felt it had all the elements of why I was coming to grad school, where I had been, where I wanted to go.

  Hey there. I’m a guy a decade and a half out of college with three beautiful daughters, a lovely wife, and a journalism career that was sidetracked as I supported my wife’s dream of attending medical school and becoming a doctor. But my wife, not long ago, discovered she had cancer, and during her recovery, I applied to this institution so I could jump-start my career and take some of the load off her shoulders.

  It went on. And on. As I huffed and puffed on my jogs, I went over and over my speech. It constantly changed. One thing was certain—in my imagination, my fellow students dabbed tears from their eyes and laughed uproariously as I told my life’s tale.

  I’m jolted back to reality inside the screening room when a short, smartly dressed woman is introduced. She’s the dean of the film school. She tells us what an honor it is to have us. We hear our program is one of the most selective in all of academia. More selective than Harvard Law School. More selective than all medical schools. We all nod and feel very lucky.

  We then hear lots of dos and don’ts from other faculty. Mostly they’re don’ts. Don’t film on the edge of tall buildings. Don’t use real guns. Don’t use anything that even looks remotely like a gun without first talking to your instructors. Don’t fall asleep behind the wheel and crash into a tree.

  One of the instructors tells a story about a former grad student that makes the room go quiet: the student had been a medical doctor prior to applying to USC’s film school as a production student. Going to the first year of film school, he reportedly said, was harder than anything he had to do in medical school or residency.

  I feel like we’re grade school campers gathered around a fire, hearing horror stories from the camp counselors. There was a kid who tried to sneak away from his cabin one night a few years ago. Nothing was ever found but a piece of his shirt. A bloody piece. He was an orphan, so he didn’t have any parents who called the cops, and since the camp wanted to keep the story quiet, you never heard about it. Until now …

  Apocryphal or not, the doctor-who-came-to-film school story gets my attention—I witnessed my wife go through medical school. But I’m skeptical. I doubt making films and writing stories can be as hard as dissecting a cadaver or passing biochemistry. Finally, a female instructor takes the podium and asks us to introduce ourselves. I smile. Perfect. I’ve got my speech all ready. Then she says, “Let’s keep it short. Just tell us your name, where you went to college, and what your degree was.”

  I think, What about my awesome speech?

  She points to a student in the far back corner. “Why don’t you start?”

  He gets up, nervous. It’s hard to hear him from where I’m sitting.

  “Ahhh, hi, my name is (mumble) and I went to Yale. I graduated two years ago with a major in (mumble). I was going to go to law school but decided on this instead. I’m really glad I did. I look forward to working with you all.”

  He sits down. The next person gets ups. She’s from UCLA. Then there’s a guy from Harvard. A Japanese guy who struggles with English. Then a petite Asian woman introduces herself, coughing. She apologizes, says she’s sick, and is from Wisconsin. She majored in film production. It sounds like she said her name was Fee Fee. Did I hear it right? Did she really say Fee Fee?

  Soon afterward, a thin guy with a beard stands up to introduce himself. He’s nervous and very emotional. He’s got a heavy New York accent and he’s intensely earnest. In a wavering voice, he explains he applied several times to USC but had been rejected each time. Finally, he says, he got in. He says he is so grateful to be here. He clasps his hands together like he is a serf thanking a king for giving him a little extra grain to survive the winter. He seems ready to burst into tears. He’s really letting his inner self out for all to see.

  The introductions come closer. I’m getting nervous. I wonder if maybe I should do my speech. That would show some cojones.

  The man next to me with the mop of hair stands up. He looks like a stunt double for Roberto Benigni, the Italian actor/director of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. And he sounds like Benigni! He explains that when he flew in from Rome, the airline lost his bags so he hasn’t changed his clothes in days and he just retrieved his luggage from LAX. That explains the slight wave of body odor that wafted my way when he sat down. He tells some jokes in his lilting Italian accent. Everything he says sounds so comic! The class laughs. He, too, expresses his appreciation for being accepted at USC and says it was his dream to be studying at a place that is so well known. He goes on and on. The class laughs along with him. His speech is great. He’s very funny.

  I know my goose is cooked. How can I ever say something remotely clever after that?

  I make a snap decision. If the happy Italian had wowed them with a funny, meandering, off-the-cuff story, I would impress my classmates with brevity. I would be a man of few words. I would say less than anyone else. After all, less is more, right?

  I start talking fast as I rise to my feet. “I’m Steve. I went to Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. I graduated so long ago I don’t remember what I studied.”

  I sit down. I took all of eight seconds. The room is silent. Someone coughs slightly, probably Fee Fee.

  I slowly feel my face flushing red. The less is more thing didn’t go over well. Edit that. It went over badly. My joke bombed. I graduated so long ago I don’t remember what I studied? Not a tiny chuckle penetrated the dead air of the screening room after that dud.


  And Gustavus Adolphus College? Most everyone else comes from boldface names on the list of America’s Best Colleges. I went to a small college smack-dab in the middle of Minnesota farm country, a school named after a seventeenth-century Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, a military leader revered for his strategic skills in the Thirty Years War, but … big f’kn’ deal. Who knows anything about small Midwestern colleges here among graduates of Yale and Harvard and Stanford? Was that The Gus Davis Dolphins?

  I think about the chimp studies. First impressions are vitally important and I flubbed mine. I’m already the oldest guy in the class. I don’t have a film studies background. I hardly have any filmmaking experience, period. Now I feel I’ve made my first step into becoming something not so great. I feel the other chimps judging me: zero in a golf shirt, oldster in an Oldsmobile, potential poison.

  T

  he campus of the University of Southern California is a beautiful place. It’s leafy and quiet, an oasis of calm just a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, and the tidy square campus is surrounded by a high wroughtiron fence. The film school is located in the heart of this exclusive private university.

  The history of film schools is relatively brief. Moving pictures are, all things considered, a very recent invention. The first public projection of a film took place in 1895, in France. For the next thirty years, filmmaking was a fledgling and intensely fast-growing industry/art form. Filmmakers were self-taught or apprenticed to established talent.

  In America, filmmakers worked mainly on the East Coast in the early years. And then, in 1910, a director named D.W. Griffith shot a film, OLD CALIFORNIA, in a dusty part of Southern California called Hollywood. The sky was almost always sunny, land was plentiful, and production companies discovered they were a long way from the banks out East, giving them a few extra days of float to come up with enough cash to cover their expenses. Within a decade, Hollywood was the place to be.

  In 1927, a few dozen Hollywood heavyweights gathered and created an organization called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The dashing actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was elected the Academy’s president. The Academy wanted some gravitas. Filmmaking wasn’t just an experiment anymore. It was an industry. An art form. And a swell way to make some serious cash.

  Fairbanks’ first order of business was to create an awards ceremony to honor the industry’s own. He wanted to give out “awards of merit for distinctive achievement” in film. In 1929, the first Academy Awards were handed out.

  Fairbanks’ second order of business was to create a film school. He approached the University of Southern California with his idea. USC said yes, and the USC film school was born the same year as the Academy Awards.

  “From early on, the school focused on moviemaking rather than academics,” The New York Times noted in a 2006 article, “with its very first course named ‘Introduction to Photoplay,’ only later branching into film theory and critical studies. Hollywood was never far from the campus; Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were among the early lecturers.”

  Other instructors were producer/studio honcho Darryl Zanuck, director D.W. Griffith, and fellow director Ernest Lubitsch. All were towering figures in the film world. To this day, Hollywood “players” regularly rotate through USC as instructors or lecturers.

  Today, the USC School of Cinematic Arts is the largest film school in the world, with roughly 850 undergrads and 650 graduate students. The program is not only tightly associated with Hollywood, the production program in particular models itself on Hollywood studios, and in fact looks like it. The campus has several large soundstages, rows of editing bays, many screening rooms, and an atmosphere of gossip, competition, envy, and the unmistakable feeling that something exciting is going on—pretty much what I found to be true at a real studio. At USC, students take on all the roles of filmmaking. They’re producers, directors, cinematographers, sound editors, picture editors, writers, composers, special effects gurus, gaffers, grips, grunts, and gofers.

  Other institutions eventually followed USC’s lead and created their own film schools. In 1939, ten years after USC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences conceived their school, the publicly funded University of California Los Angeles created its own film school. On the East Coast, New York University created its Tisch School of the Arts in 1965.

  In the last few decades, film school programs have been popping up like mushrooms after a long rain. They now include big institutions and small, and they also include the Zaki Gordon Institute at Yavapai College in Sedona, Arizona, (founded in 2000), the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, (founded in 2007), and the New York Film Academy (founded in 1992), whose advertisements seem to find their way onto every other film-related website and a thousand bus-stop benches.

  Film schools are a hot ticket now, with more than 110 American institutions offering degrees in film.

  The rise of film schools in the last forty years can be traced to four names: Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese. These four men—George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese—dominated and transformed filmmaking starting in the 1970s. All went to film school. George Lucas went to USC, Spielberg went to Long Beach State (even though his heart was with USC—he was rejected by USC three times), Coppola went to UCLA, Scorsese went to NYU.

  These directors created AMERICAN GRAFITTI, STAR WARS, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, THE GODFATHER, APOCALYPSE NOW, MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL, and so many more.

  By the 1980s, film schools were suddenly hot. Everyone wanted to be a director, and film schools were seen as a way to become one. The demand for film schools exploded. (That is not to say the demand for film school graduates exploded.)

  Led by USC, film schools changed the way Hollywood works. For much of the twentieth century, directorial giants in the film world worked their way up through the industry. Alfred Hitchcock, No. 1 on the MovieMaker magazine list of most influential directors of all time, started as a title card designer in his teens; five years later he was directing. Orson Welles started as an actor and radio playwright. John Ford got his start working as a handyman, stuntman, and bit player for his filmmaking older brother. Stanley Kubrick began his career as a magazine photographer a year out of high school before shifting to newsreels. Billy Wilder was a newspaper reporter in Germany before becoming a scriptwriter and then director. Howard Hawks was a race-car driver, aircraft designer, and flyboy before he turned to scriptwriting and then directing. These giants of the film world learned their skills inside the industry, most of them at a young age. Hawks was the only one with a college degree, and his was in mechanical engineering.

  The filmmaking world today is a very different place than it was forty years ago. Going to film school is now a common route into film and television production. Thousands of people in the industry have attended film school. USC alone has more than ten thousand graduates with some type of film degree. The following recent Oscar-winners also attended film school (this is an incomplete list, but you get the point):

  Kathryn Bigelow, director of THE HURT LOCKER, got her MFA at Columbia University.

  Ron Howard, director of A BEAUTIFUL MIND, attended USC.

  Joel Coen, director (with brother Ethan) of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, attended NYU.

  Ang Lee, director of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, attended NYU.

  Roman Polanski, director of THE PIANIST, attended Poland’s National Film School.

  Dustin Lance Black, writer of MILK, attended UCLA.

  Michael Arndt, writer of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, attended NYU.

  Conrad Hall, cinematographer of ROAD TO PERDITION, attended USC.

  Robert Richardson, cinematographer of THE AVIATOR, attended the American Film Institute.

  And Luke Matheny, a thirty-five-year-old former journalist and 2010 graduate of New York University’s film program, won an Oscar in 2011 for his short film, GOD OF LOVE. Th
e mop-headed Matheny also charmed the Oscars telecast audience with his acceptance speech, in which he thanked his mother for preparing food for his crew.

  Film schools are popular because moving pictures are popular.

  “The cinema is an invention without a future,” famously stated Louis Lumière, the nineteenth-century Frenchman who invented the motion picture camera. Lumière was brilliant but awful at predicting the future.

  If you believe the statistics provided by the Motion Picture Association of America, the moving picture business (film, television, web) today employs more than two million Americans and contributes $140 billion in combined payroll (from studio executives to the kid sweeping up spilled popcorn at the Cineplex). Whatever the exact numbers are, they’re big. And the impact of film and television on our society far exceeds any measurable dollar totals. Weekend box office tallies are big news. TV ratings are big news. The rates charged for Super Bowl commercials are big news. Everything to do with the world of moving pictures is big news. What would we do without the drug scandals of young film stars? Or the falls-from-grace of old film stars? Or the returns-to-grace from the formerly fallen-from-grace stars? It’s gotten to the point where reviewers of films are themselves celebrities.

  It’s no surprise perhaps that one former movie actor became a two-term president of the United States after being a two-term governor of California (Ronald Reagan) and a current actor became another two-term governor of California (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

  In little more than a century, the moving picture business has grown from nothing to the colossus it is today. The relative newness of the industry—and the newness of film education—means there is no standardized path for film schools in the same way there is for law schools or medical schools. Whether you’re a first-year medical student at the University of North Dakota or at Florida State University, classes are essentially the same. After two years, every medical student takes the same national standards test.