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  “It’s not my fault,” she protested. “You should have seen the questions. I couldn’t understand them, and nobody else in the class could either. All of the kids around me got Cs and Ds.”

  She insisted that she had studied hard, then offered: “Here, read the test yourself and tell me if it makes any sense.”

  I took it from her, confidently. After all, I had graduated 25 years ago from USC with a bachelor’s degree in cinema. I’d written a biography of movie director Sam Peckinpah, articles for Variety, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, and written and produced episodic television.

  On the exam, I found the following, from an essay by film theorist Kristin Thompson:

  “Neoformalism posits that viewers are active that they perform operations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film viewing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity … According to Bordwell, ‘The organism constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.’”

  Then came the question itself:

  “What kind of pressure would Metz’s description of ‘the imaginary signifier’ or Baudry’s account of the subject in the apparatus put on the ontology and epistemology of film implicit in the above two statements?”

  I looked up at my daughter. She smiled triumphantly. “Welcome to film theory,” she chirped.

  This is what I want to avoid by going to USC’s production division, and I dearly hope Casper, a critical studies professor, won’t veer too much into this gobbledygook. It is bad enough I am spending nearly $3,000 to hear a film history course. If I have to listen to references to Jacques Derrida, I’ll want to put a gun in my mouth.

  As his lecture starts, Casper begins talking about the post–World War II political scene and the state of the filmmaking industry at that time. His language is clear, to the point. He puts films in a political and social context without referring to imaginary signifiers and the like.

  I am pleased. I settle in for a nice listen, my notepad and pen ready. Casper is giving an overview of 1950s American history to start the class. He’s talking quietly. He then jots down HUAC on a blackboard and without missing a beat looks at me and says, “Steve, what is this?”

  Is he really asking me a question? I thought this would be an easy class—sit and listen and watch and maybe eat popcorn. The whole class seems to tense up. Oh crap! Casper is going to demand answers from us?

  Casper stands on the stage, staring at me. He’s waiting. I know the answer. “The House Un-American Activities Committee,” I say. He nods, then adds a slight embellishment: “Yes,” he says. “The House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee.”

  And with this, Casper is off. His voice gets louder, he starts pacing the stage. Without missing a beat, he starts popping more questions to us students. Casper is revealing his true self. The lamb is becoming the lion. His initial quiet and slow delivery is now machine-gun rapid. He talks about the studio system and in the middle of a sentence turns to a woman who, like me, had engaged in some preclass handshakes with him.

  “Why is this, Susan?” Casper demands. Susan sits with her mouth moving like a fish tossed into the bottom of a boat. She doesn’t know the answer. I feel bad for Susan, as I didn’t fully understand what Casper was talking about either.

  We all quickly understand what’s going on. Everyone the oh-so-polite Casper has introduced himself to before class is now getting grilled in front of 120 other students. He has half a dozen names in his quiver, and he keeps coming back to us. If we don’t know an answer, he will ask another student on his list until someone answers it correctly. In this case, Casper moves on to another of his targets.

  “Michael? Michael? Yoo-hoo! Wake up, Michael!”

  I sit rigid in my seat, laughing inwardly, and waiting for Casper’s next question. He comes to me with two other questions—easy ones. But so much for relaxing. This is supposed to be my popcorn-eating class, but instead I’m on Casper’s pimp list. There is no assigned reading for this first class, and his questions focus on political and historical events. The lecture ends after ninety intense minutes. I feel exhilarated and relieved.

  When we take a short break before watching the first film, a few other graduate students approach me. I don’t know them well. They give me lukewarm congratulations for being in the spotlight and getting my answers right, but I smell the competitive spirit in the air. The vibe seems to be: Good for you, but we really wouldn’t mind if you failed. I give them lukewarm thanks in return. I don’t tell them I’ve been an avid reader of history. I’m still figuring out the game here at USC. I don’t want to show the cards in my hand too soon. Less is more.

  M

  y other non-507 course is Introduction to Screenwriting, officially known as CTWR 528. The class has only a dozen students, all production students. Some are from the other two 507 subgroups, and I don’t know most of them. I do recognize Paulo, the happy Italian from orientation. We share a smile. The instructor is a pleasant bear of a fellow named Ross Brown who introduces himself as a semi retired TV guy.

  Brown’s résumé is impressive. He wrote for the superhit THE COSBY SHOW, spent more than a half-dozen years as head writer on the ABC comedy STEP BY STEP, and, in total, was executive producer of more than one hundred episodes of broadcast television. What makes me want to hug his feet is the fact that Brown was an assistant director on National Lampoon’s VACATION, a classic film based on an even more classic short story.

  Brown introduces himself, and he laughs a lot. He listens hard to us, nodding emphatically. He’s very encouraging, and he works hard to make us feel comfortable. After the surprise of Casper’s metamorphosis, I’m a little wary. I wait for Brown to drop his cheerful enthusiasm and go on the attack. I’m waiting for some kind of transformation.

  It never comes. Brown remains upbeat and positive through the entire first class. This class has a unique feel: it’s smaller in size than all my other courses. Casper’s lecture has 120 students; my 507 has sixteen. This class feels tiny, intimate. We meet in a simple little classroom. No projector. No sound system. Just a handful of people sitting around a table.

  In class is a wild-haired redhead, S., from my 507 group. S. is a comic guy, very self-deprecating. Next to him is a Goth girl in a black motorcycle jacket and black nail polish and intensely pale skin. She puts out a tough don’t mess with me vibe, but her toughness seems an act. There’s a pleasant, short-haired, freckled woman who looks about thirty. Fee Fee, still coughing, is in this class, as is Paulo, the happy Italian, and a couple other students.

  We are all production students. I feel comfortable with the keyboard, far more than with a camera, so I’m looking forward to this class a great deal.

  The first class is a disappointment, however. Brown keeps up an encouraging chatter, but there’s not much discussion. S. makes a few comic asides but otherwise is quiet. No one wants to speak out. I find this distressing as I want the writing classes to be as intense as the production coursework. I’m here to direct, but I also plan to write scripts—and sell scripts.

  Eventually, Brown assigns us a group reading. We go around the class, each of us reading a few paragraphs. A couple of the students in the class stumble over some pretty easy words. They’re nervous—that may explain some of it—but I’m learning that the students have widely different backgrounds. So far in school, I’ve met a business major, an engineer, a novelist, a former teacher, and a French major, along with a large number of people who studied film production or critical studies as undergraduates. The least articulate students appear to be those who studied film production as undergraduates. Maybe it’s just a fluke or maybe it means they simply feel more comfort
able letting a camera speak for them. A little voice calls out in my head: Or maybe they’re not that smart after all.

  After class ends—we are meeting in an upper floor of an education building near the film school—we stand quietly in front of an elevator door, waiting. The elevator takes an absurdly long time to arrive. The silence is awkward. We’re still in the first week of film school and it’s clear no one is feeling at ease. My guess is that if we were simply participating in a conference a few days long, we’d all be chatting and sharing information. But spending three years together seems to up the ante and creates a resistance to small talk and jokes. No one seems to want to stick his or her neck out. Everyone is reticent at first.

  A

  s I mentioned earlier, USC is surrounded by a high wroughtiron fence. It’s a stately fence, the kind you might find outside a Beverly Hills mansion. The fence isn’t just for show, and the difference between being inside the fence and outside the fence is dramatic. Many of the neighborhoods near USC are dirty and potentially dangerous. The broken sidewalks are littered with broken bottles, dried barf, and a thousand flattened pieces of gum. Because it doesn’t rain for six months at a time, the streets and sidewalks get dusty in an Old West way. Many of the side streets are potholed and lined with beater cars (the locals) and new autos (the students). Directly to the north of campus is fraternity and sorority housing—and lots of off-campus student housing. To the south is the L.A. Coliseum, where the USC Trojans football team plays. To the west are low-income housing and more student rentals. To the east are the Harbor freeway and more low-rent neighborhoods. The campus is on the edge of the sprawling area known by Los Angelenos as South Central. The area has been renamed by city officials as South Los Angeles, but whatever the name, the reality hasn’t changed a whole lot over the decades. Shootings, muggings, rapes, and property crime are common. The area is home to more gangs than there are NFL teams. I talked to a glum-faced USC student one day who was filing a police report because he’d had all four wheels stripped off his old, nondescript Mazda two blocks west of campus the night before. The thieves did it the old-fashioned way, using cement blocks and the cover of night.

  A darker story occurred when twenty-three-year-old Bryan Frost, a USC film student from Boise, Idaho, was stabbed to death two blocks north of campus. Frost, who was walking with friends early one morning in 2008, apparently banged on the gate of an apartment complex. That upset twenty-five-year-old Travion T. Ford of Los Angeles, whose mother lived in the complex. The two men got into an argument, and eventually started fistfighting. Frost, a West Point cadet who transferred to USC, apparently got the best of Ford in the brawl, and Ford ran into his mother’s apartment. Moments later, Ford came back out with a knife and stabbed the film student in the chest. Ford was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to sixteen years to life in prison.

  That’s outside the fence. Whenever I’m outside the fence at night, I pay close attention to my surroundings. I don’t walk outside the campus much after dark. I’m lucky to have a car that I park near campus.

  Inside the USC campus, inside the fence, it’s a different story. The sidewalks are clean and the grass is impeccable. The security is excellent. And given that there’s very little auto traffic allowed on campus, it’s very quiet. Stately and relaxed come to mind. The greatest danger facing students inside the fence is getting hit by a miniskirted coed pedaling a beach cruiser with a cell phone pressed to her ear. Once inside campus, it’s really like being on the inside of a nice country club. The buildings are gorgeous, and fans of architecture rightly enjoy strolling around the campus. Even people who’ve never been to USC have seen glimpses of it. Dozens of films and television shows have been shot on campus, including FOREST GUMP, THE GRADUATE, GHOSTBUSTERS, LEGALLY BLONDE, CSI: NY, ENTOURAGE, COLD CASE, and 24.

  Compared to sprawling public universities, USC feels positively tiny. It’s possible to walk from one end of the campus to the other in ten brisk minutes, and jogging around the perimeter is a popular thing to do, taking barely fifteen minutes to circle the campus fence at a slow trot. Despite the small size of the campus, more than thirty thousand students attend USC.

  The campus is also very much in Los Angeles. The high-rises of downtown are just a few miles away. On a clear day, it’s possible to see the Hollywood sign far to the north if you stand on the upper floors of a campus building. The rejuvenated Staples Center (home of the Lakers) is a short bike ride away.

  The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located on the north side of campus, very close to the dental school, the music school, and the athletic offices. It’s a sweet and funny mix: football players and dental students and music students and film students share the sidewalks of the north side of campus. The athletic dining hall—the Jocketeria—is just a few hundred feet from the film school. Ditto with the athletic hall of fame, a glass lobby where you can see the treasures of USC football history. The USC football program and the USC film school are the two highest profile programs on campus; they are located cheek by jowl, and there is absolutely no mistaking who belongs to which program. The muscular mastodons chowing down on tall stacks of pork chops in the Jocketeria are not film students. The thin guys smoking and drinking coffee while sitting on boxes of camera and lighting equipment are not football players.

  N

  or are there many graying students sitting on those camera boxes. Very few people over forty have gone to film school at USC. It seems understandable.

  It’s expensive. Every year I’m at USC, for the same amount of money, I could buy a nice new automobile and drive it off a cliff.

  There’s a little rumor floating around that Hollywood is not welcoming to older people. In 2010, many of the major networks, studios, and talent agencies agreed to a $70 million payout to settle an age discrimination lawsuit filed by Hollywood writers. Those awarded monies in the class-action suit were writers forty and older.

  There’s no guarantee of work when a student graduates with a degree in film production, no matter what the age. None. Before I applied to USC, I spoke with an admissions director and asked if they had data on what happens to students after they graduate. He said the school did not track that information other than anecdotally. It seemed a polite way of admitting that many students don’t work in the industry after completing their degrees. Comparing film school to law school or medical school is like comparing apples and oranges to beef liver.

  The entertainment industry is heavily based on relationships. Starting in the field with a ten-or twenty-year disadvantage in cultivating relationships is hard to overcome.

  Film and television are not family-friendly fields. The days are long. Work can be sporadic; travel is often required. It is a game for those with energy and perseverance. While at USC, I hear many stories from successful graduates who said the years immediately after leaving film school are ones of poverty and constant struggle.

  Film schools are hard places to fit in socially as an older student. I’m married. I’d like to stay that way. Clubbing/barhopping/going to the strip club is not on my schedule, which makes it hard to socialize with some of the younger students.

  Perhaps someday, older film school students won’t stick out like sore thumbs. At one time, law schools were mainly places for fresh-faced college grads. But now no one bats an eye when a cop or a housewife goes to law school. A neighbor of mine, a woman with five kids, went to law school in her forties. It’s the new normal.

  As to being married—in case you missed it, people in the moving picture industry seem as attracted to marriage as Superman is attracted to Kryptonite. Just a scattering of my classmates are married. Less than 5 percent by my count—a far smaller percentage than in my wife’s medical school class at the University of Chicago. There, more than a quarter of the med students in her class were married by the time they graduated.

  And kids? Forget it. During my years at USC, I knew of only two other production grad students who had children. One was a Korean who w
as going to return to Seoul; the other was married to an NFL player. They each had one child.

  Then there was me, who had three.

  A

  t my next 507 production class, there is a break in the ice. FTC seems a little more cheerful this time around. Maybe he had a cup of coffee with the upbeat Ross Brown. Whatever the reason, the frown is missing. I’m fully aware, more than I was in college, that instructors are regular humans, prone to having—gasp!—bad days. In college as a nineteen-year-old, I was once surprised when an English professor, his eyes lined with tiredness, said we might someday understand what it was like to sleep on a couch after a marital spat. I didn’t understand him at the time.

  FTC gives us our first assignment. We are to make a two-minute silent film, edited in the camera (which means we have to shoot every scene in order—no rearranging scenes). We each have one day to shoot it over the weekend.

  We are limited to one day because every camera will be shared by three students. We will air the films on Tuesday. It is now Thursday. We are assigned our class equipment: a well-used Sony PD150, a basic digital camera that we are told to operate in manual mode. No auto-focus, no auto-white balance is allowed. My camera partners are Fee Fee and an exchange student from India who is pursuing his PhD in critical studies.

  In the hallway during a class break, a few of my classmates express their fears. They hadn’t expected to have to do a film so quickly, with such short notice and with such limitations (no dialogue, no real editing, and having to shoot in sequence). They are worried about finding locations, actors, writing a story. They worry about having just one day to shoot.

  I look forward to the shoot. I figure the shorter and more elemental the project, the less chance there is for me to screw up. I’ve never done this before.