Film School (14 page)

He didn't. He found cocaine just too strong. He loved crack. He loved the way it made him feel, the smartest guy in America, stoned out of his mind on a shitty street in the ghetto. He felt powerful at first, in total control of his destiny, and then, slowly, he just felt wasted.

He sold everything. His guilt and his pity drove him on a two-year journey into the gutter, which is where he was when the twelve-year-old was shot. The boy was a crack runner, innocent as the morning, who got a bullet in the chest when a buyer started waving his Glock around and the thing went off. Calvetti, coming off a high and sitting on the curb, just watched the boy bleed to death.

When the police cleared the scene, Calvetti walked away, puked, and took a bus to his old hospital, where he checked into rehab and made his first attempt at staying clean.

He failed, and failed a second time.

It was after his second drop-off into crack that John Calvetti, one of the best heart surgeons in America, met in a Burger King with one Jose Cardinal, who had an offer: one million dollars if Calvetti would sober up and perform a heart transplant on Luis Mercato de Silva, the vicious and ailing drug kingpin of Tijuana.

USC also wanted an essay about an emotionally powerful moment. I wrote about the day Julie gave birth to Maria, without sedatives, and tried chewing on my arm because she was in so much pain.

USC also wanted my GRE scores, transcripts from my undergraduate days, and at least three letters of recommendation. The essays were easy to do. Taking the GRE was not. I hadn't taken a math class in decades. So I picked up a study guide at the local Barnes & Noble and spent several weeks going through it while the kids napped during the day.

I figured I might have a leg up on the all-important diversity issue, as I guessed not many middle-aged suburban family men applied to film school. The thought that I might be a minority candidate made me smile with a sad sense of irony. In my days as a reporter, there was always the blunt and rarely discussed reality that it was hard to get promoted or hired as a white guy in newspapers. Newsrooms had plenty of old white men, and hiring editors didn't want more if they could help it.

Still, diverse or not, I figured my chances of getting admitted to the production program were still very slim. I had only one real ace in the hole: my letters of recommendation. The USC guidelines state an applicant must provide at least three letters of recommendation, with one being from a former instructor. I thought if three were the minimum, I would send ten.

And what letters they were. I had letters from a Milwaukee television news anchor; a
Chicago
Tribune
reporter; a friend who wrote about third-world poverty; a designer with a piece in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection; a lead actor on the TV series SPORTS NIGHT; one of my brothers, a former air force captain who was on the flight crew of the world's fastest ten thousand kilometer flight; a pal who'd worked for National Public Radio and now taught at Duke University; my former college English teacher; a former
Saltmine
pal who worked at
Vanity
Fair
; and finally, my old college traveling chum named Tom, who had been the best man at my wedding. They all knew me very well, and all of them wrote exquisitely funny and touching letters. My age was an advantage here. I felt bad for my fellow applicants who didn't have such a deep bench.

I sent my application package off to USC late in the summer. I would find out in the spring. Meanwhile, there were diapers to change, meals to cook, bathrooms to clean, laundry to ruin, and bills to pay. Life went on as normal, whatever that was.

I
n 507, time moves forward with amazing speed. We receive a lecture about the next semester, and the next big production class, 508. With 508, we leave behind solo filmmaking and work at all times with a partner. The quality in 508 is expected to be much greater, as we'll be spending more than five times as long per minute on our work. Instead of shooting on a relatively cheap video camera, we'll be shooting sixteen-millimeter color film. We are told to think wisely about choosing partners. Whatever the stress of 507, the stress of 508 is worse, we are told—much worse.

We learn a few details about 508. We will be locked at the hip with our 508 partners. A 508 partnership shares the same grade. If one fails, both fail. If one partner quits, the other partner is out for the semester and has to repeat the entire class again.

It's a tremendously high-stakes partnership, and we're asked to make our choices after only a few months in film school. Like others in the class, I hardly know anyone from the other two 507 sections. It's like dating within a very small pool of potential partners.

As class lets out, I walk from Zemeckis with S. The sun is setting, and it's a really beautiful evening in Los Angeles. I tell him I'd like to partner with him for our 508 class. We share an overall comic world outlook, and I tell him I am impressed he does not have any apparent issues with sadomasochism or ego or heroin. He is surprised I am asking so quickly in the mating ritual, as the deadline is several weeks away. I explain I don't like to wait 'til the last minute on anything, much less something as important as a 508 partnership. Despite our age difference, we enjoy each other, and he agrees we'd make a good partnership. I think:
That's easy! A partnership! Whoooo!

As I walk to my car I feel lucky. I don't know anyone else in our class who would be as good a partner as S.

Having to find a partner emphasizes the fact that our 507 class has become less cohesive as the semester goes on. Turnout is down at the Thursday-evening gatherings at the 2-9 Café. We're all tired, and it seems some of the more biting comments and critiques in class are taking their toll. We are becoming cliquish. I make an offhand comment to S. that
critique
is French for “rip the shit out of someone.” We all seem to take joy in snapping at each other's throats.

We are also learning more about FTC. He shows favorites, which becomes fodder for gossip after class. He likes the women in our class, and jokes and offers them support, but with the straight men he's colder. During a break in class one day, I ask him directly—I feel like a reporter again—if he feels hostility toward heterosexual men. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I do. I consider straight men to be the enemy.”

He says the worst are older straight men. “They have been disruptive in class in the past,” he says. He feels they've been hardheaded, and he implies they carried an antigay bias.

I ask him if I'm being disruptive. He shrugs and smiles slightly. “Not really, no. You're different.”

I'm surprised at his honesty. It's refreshingly direct. Yet I can't imagine an instructor at USC expressing antigay views with the same intensity. If an instructor said, “I don't like homosexuals, I consider them the enemy,” he would likely be bounced from campus.

Still, I find myself liking FTC the more he expresses himself. It was blatantly obvious I bugged him from the first moment I showed up in class. At first I thought it was
me
, the individual. Now I realize he disliked what I represented: all the straight white males of the world. One day not long after that, I met him by chance outside of class on a campus sidewalk. He was walking to lunch. I was walking to lunch. We talked easily and even joked a bit. The tension of the early days had mostly dissipated . . . and I thought of inviting him to get a burger with me. But I didn't invite him. I figured he'd consider either me or a Fatburger XXL (or both) too unpalatable. Or maybe I didn't invite him because I still harbored a slight grudge against him for his behavior in class.

Favoritism and outbursts aside, FTC talked about some very important things. His chief tenet in class is: have a point of view. During this period he's writing a film in which the lead character shouts: “I wanna kill every straight fucking asshole!” This character eventually moderates his stance and urges his new lover not to kill his heterosexual parents with a bomb, but rather to shame them with a little PDA. “You can't get rid of them with their weapons. I tried that,” the lead character advises. “But if you really want to fuck them, all we have to do is kiss, because when two guys kiss, it's like a bomb going off in the straight world.”

The promotional material for the film says the characters free themselves “from the homophobic bonds of an oppressive American society.”

FTC most certainly has a crystal-clear point of view. He's deliberately stationed himself on the outer edge of queer cinema (a genre term, not my name). In his work, gays are good and straights are very bad. It's us vs. them.

The more I learn about FTC, the more I understand him. And the more I feel, well, a little sorry for him. All the heterosexuals in this film are violent or dishonest scumbags. All parents are unaccepting at best, abusive at worst. He's obviously got a worldview different from mine. I do find it slightly ironic that the guy who complains about oppressive American society is an instructor at the world's best film school. That's a pretty good gig. I apparently represent to him the oppressor class. Yet I'm the one without money in the bank, without a job, without power. He's the teacher, I'm the student. I wonder if he sees the irony.

The more I ponder my relationship with FTC, the more I learn about the USC School of Cinematic Arts administration . . . and
my
point of view toward the place. The leadership, so sensitive of doing the right thing, tends to turn a blind eye to reverse discrimination (Lord, how I hate that term) from some key faculty. In my time at USC, I learn that certain people are fair game for jokes and mockery from a handful of instructors. The list is short: white males, blue-eyed blondes, Mormons, political conservatives, religious Christians. Especially Mormons. In an environment where I never once heard a joke or criticism aimed at Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or freethinkers or New Agers or blacks or, heck, even Canadians for that matter . . . it seems the only outlet for venting is against people who live in Utah or go to church or have very little melanin in their skin. When I hear one of these occasional broadsides, I sigh at the predictability. It's so tired and timid. Where's the creativity and boldness in that?

The prevailing attitude coming from the administration seems to be that all of the above (white males, etc.) represent Repressive Power; therefore, fighting the power, whatever exactly that means, puts one on the side of the angels. The student body at USC is a mosaic of colors and sexual orientation, with every class of incoming film students a perfect Benetton commercial. There is diversity in everything at USC, it seems, except diversity of opinion.

At USC's film school, the fashion is to say that America is a corrupt and villainous empire, with injustice under every rock. It is as if the 1960s were sealed in amber. I hate to use the word
irony
so much, but it is ironic that in this bastion of wealth and privilege and luxury, I hear almost unrelenting criticism of the society that creates all this wealth and technology and freedom of expression. I notice the loudest critics often have perfectly straight and dazzlingly white teeth. Sometimes these opinions seem more often based on the desire to be cool than on clear-eyed political analysis.

I'm different from most of my classmates, I realize. My worldview is different. My former girlfriend grew up in East Germany. Her father was imprisoned for five years by the East German government for the crime of speaking to the American Red Cross. She knew what it was like to be monitored by the secret police. My wife worked for three years in an Ecuadorian village where squalor and corruption were endemic. For better or worse, I've spent a lot of time interviewing people, cloaked in the full power of the First Amendment, and I take complaints with a grain of salt. Only in America can a guy like filmmaker Michael Moore get stunningly rich and powerful by continuing to play the underdog card. So, in film school, I sigh quietly when I watch and read a seemingly endless stream of stories that depict (choose a topic) American GIs torturing innocent prisoners, square suburban bourgeoisie squashing someone's dreams, buzz-cut cops brutalizing innocent kids, villainous corporate types, and, of course, bad dads. It truly is the minor leagues of whiny Hollywood, and I often think (as a buzz-cut suburban bourgeoisie former corporate speechwriting dad)
you don't know how good you have it
. I'm guessing most of my classmates didn't grow up in rough-and-tumble towns like Duluth, a place where my eighth-grade shop teacher had us build gun racks and where the biggest employers in town when I was a kid included a U.S. Steel mill, an air force base, and the Duluth shipping harbor.

To magnify my differences, I'm also a bit of an outlier when it comes to gender politics because I've lived the progressive dream, and it gave me a chomp in the ass. To wit: I put my career on the backburner and supported Julie through medical school and residency and her postresidency payback so she could become a doctor and we could have a family. I became the supportive spouse, a feminist's dream. I shunted my career onto the mommy track as her career took off. Then Julie got sick, and she had a very basic desire: she wanted to work less and stay home with her children more. By then, my earning potential had crumbled. We were broke, and I couldn't get a decent job. That's what led me to film school.

The fact is, I had started our marriage as Mr. Public Radio Liberal (but one with a couple of nice rifles in that eighth-grade gun rack). Then I began to realize I had been hoisted by my own petard. I'm reminded of the old joke:
What's the definition of a conservative? A liberal who's been mugged.
I began tuning out public radio. I started subscribing to
The Wall Street Journal
. My views put me in a very small minority at USC.

Now I certainly wasn't expecting anyone on campus to be humming Lee Greenwood's “God Bless the USA,” but I often roll my eyes at the reflexive anti-Americanism on campus, and the lack of historical perspective of my classmates, and, well, the simple absence of life-lessons. Granted, some of my gripes are simply an age issue. I was much more idealistic/naïve when I was twenty-two, but my time at USC let me clearly see where the institution sits on the political spectrum.