Film School (18 page)

FTC sits there and listens. He doesn't say anything, just listens.

Within a minute or two, my blubberfest is over. I wipe the snot and tears from my face and take a big breath. I am thankful no students have come back into the room. The end of 507 is in sight. The end of my first semester is in sight. I apologize to FTC and ask him not to mention my sob session. He agrees and says he is sorry about what happened to Annette.

Now, to set the record straight, I did not sob into FTC's shoulder, and he did not pat me on the back. We did not become best friends. Violins did not play. That would have been an easy melodramatic scene to imagine, but it didn't happen. Instead, it was an awkward moment of emotions exposed, emotions observed. And another day in film school class.

I breathe again and comment about the absurdity of bawling in class. I ask FTC if anyone else has cried in front of him. “Not this year, so far,” he says. I wipe my eyes one last time and chuckle at his comment. FTC gives me a slight smile. The clenched jaw is history.

I duck into the hallway to get a drink of water and a breath of fresh air before the other students come back.

I
'm done making films for 507. It should be a relief, but I've still got much on my platter for the last few weeks of school.

The production of 507 films takes what appears in retrospect to be an insane amount of time. When I look back, I question my sanity. Did I really spend several long days tracking down animal trainers? Yes, I did.

Early in the semester, I felt like we were mice in a hallway, trying to avoid a cat. I feel that way now more than ever. Looking back, I see how many wrong turns I made and how much time I wasted and how many mistakes I made. I realize the first semester of film school would be quite easy if I could only do it all over again.

Life doesn't work that way, of course. My experiences seem to be shared by my classmates. Many are very talented, and I'll admit it sometimes gave me a slight feeling of
schadenfreude
to see them stumble and make the same mistakes I make.

Some events that could be great instead become memorable for their awfulness.

Every semester in 507, all the production students participate in the Vagabond shoot. It's named after the nearby Vagabond Motel, where the shooting takes place. The idea behind the shoot is to let students work together for the first time and make a short film, together. It's the first taste of the system we'll see repeated over and over again in film school.

The rules are simple: the film must be filmed within the confines of the Vagabond Motel in one afternoon. We all pitch ideas.

I pitch a story of a young man and woman, the woman extremely pregnant, who walk into a room at the Vagabond where film students are shooting a sci-fi drama. The students and the couple both have keys for the same room. During the argument over who gets the room, the pregnant woman's water breaks. Surrounded by film equipment and costumed sci-fi characters, the now-screaming woman is aided by a lowly film student who was once an emergency medical technician. It's a scene in which the director and producers know nothing, and the lowliest grips and costumed actors save the day.

The kicker comes when other film students, peering into the room and unaware of what's really going on, compliment the woman in labor for her acting.

Students vote on the pitches. Mine doesn't get chosen. Instead, we choose a script that hits the film school high notes: a young couple shoot heroin in a cheap motel and talk about breaking up.

The Vagabond shoot takes over much of the motel for two days. One day is pre-prep and rehearsal. The second day, a week later, is the shoot. I'm recording sound for the shoot, a job I volunteer for because I want to spend as little time as possible involved with a film about a couple talking about heroin and breaking up.

Our story is very simple and contains almost no movement or action. The day of rehearsal, the two actors show up and they know their lines. We run through several rehearsals, check the lights, check the sound. It's all good.

At this point, I come up with what seems an obvious suggestion: let's shoot the scene, I say. We have our actors, we have all the equipment. Let's strike now while the iron is hot! I gather our group together and explain my thoughts. I'm not the director, however, and she doesn't want to. She wants to wait a week. I'm mystified—it seems to invite disaster. What happens if one of the actors doesn't show up in a week? Plus, I point out that all of us are busy, so why don't we do this shoot now and have a free day to work on our other projects. My fellow students look at me like I'm speaking in tongues.

We don't shoot. We instead sit on our hands and run through several more rehearsals, not shooting any video. I feel frustrated.

A week later, we gather in the same room. Luckily, the actors show up. Unluckily, the day is hot. We have to turn off the AC while shooting because the cheap AC unit roars and blots out our sound. Given that we have roughly a thousand watts of extra lighting in the room, it quickly becomes stiflingly hot. It also soon stinks—there are eight of us in the small room. We spend the next four hours shooting take after take after take of the same scene. From my perch next to the bed, holding the boom mike over the two actors and listening to the dialogue through my headphones, I try to discern if there are any noticeable changes in the acting or if we're just recording the same thing over and over. The hours tick slowly by. Sweat runs down my back. Eight hours total shooting time over the two weeks, and we have a very short, one-location, one-scene film.

As I watch my much younger classmates agonize over every minute detail and spend long stretches trying to decide what to do, I formulate an observation based on something I learned long ago in chemistry. Nature abhors a vacuum, and film students will often use every minute of time they are given. Give some film students an hour to pound a single nail, and they'll spend fifty-nine minutes discussing how to hold the hammer before swinging it.

It's an oversimplification, but I'm so sick of being in the motel room I want to scream. At the rate we're shooting, it would take six months to wrap a low-budget feature film. When the shoot finally ends, I leave as quickly as I can, carrying a heavy load of sound equipment the block back to Zemeckis in the heat. I'm hot, I'm dehydrated, I'm glad to be done. When I return my load to the equipment room, a student technician inspects it. He shakes his head over the badly coiled electrical cables and a microphone wind cover that is in pieces. “Who did this?” he demands. I just want to get out of there. “Showbiz,” I say. Everyone knows Showbiz.

He shakes his head. “F'ing Showbiz.”

M
y paper on TEACHER'S PET is finished. Casper wants twelve pages. Mine is twenty-nine. I have gone overboard, and when I drop it in a cardboard collection box, it hits the bottom with a meaty thud.

I take Holman's sound exam. I'm sure I pass it easily. We study the textbook he authored,
Sound for Film and Television
, which has become standard reading material at most film schools around the country. I've read the entire book, some parts twice, because it gives an exceptionally clear-eyed view of sound and the physics of sound. His teaching shows the importance of sound—and its woeful underappreciation by the public. Just reread my last two sentences: I describe sound in entirely
visual
terms:
clear-eyed view
and
shows the importance
. Sound doesn't even get any respect in the English language. But Holman's class emphasizes how vital good sound design is.

Holman worked for George Lucas, and he's the man behind the Lucasfilm THX sound system. Holman jokes in class that if he got a nickel for every time the THX promo appears at the start of a film, he'd be so rich he wouldn't be teaching at USC. And then he adds that he probably wouldn't be as happy, either. Holman likes to teach. He heads the sound department at USC, and he won an Academy Award in 2002 for Technical Achievement in Sound.

Most of the class is technical. It reminds me more of an engineering class than an art class. It's objective material. Sound is wavelength, which we can learn to our advantage and ignore at our peril.

There's plenty of artistry displayed in the class, however. Holman brings in the dailies of famous films to emphasize his points. One day he brings production dailies from STAR WARS. The dailies have the sound recorded on set. He shows the scene where the storm troopers take control of Princess Leia's starship. It's the opening battle scene, familiar to anyone who has watched STAR WARS, and it introduces us to Darth Vader. But in the dailies the sound is atrocious and comic. The storm troopers sound as if they are running on plywood, which they are. The voices are dreadfully bad. Darth Vader sounds like a skinny asthmatic talking from under a mask. There are no sound effects for lasers and explosions and beeping robots. It
sounds
like a really low-budget sci-fi film—and because of that it
looks
like a really low-budget sci-fi film.

When Holman shows us how different STAR WARS looks with good sound, we understand a bit more about the importance of our ears. He also gives a few insider tidbits, like how some of the sound effects of that film were recorded within earshot of the USC campus.

He continues the demonstration with a scene from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. First we watch the scene with no sound. In the scene, Indiana Jones takes the carved head from the pedestal inside the cave and makes his escape, avoiding darts and spears and a chasm and a rolling boulder. With no sound, it's a somewhat dull scene. Then we watch the scene with successive layers of sound added. The darts now have some zing. Indy's whip cracks with authority. The boulder sounds enormous. Over and over we watch the clip. Each time the sound becomes more rounded. Each time the action gets more exciting. Finally, we watch it with dialogue and music added. By the time we see the final version, we want to keep watching, which is to say, listening.

Holman's class makes me feel like I've learned something truly exciting, a bit of moviemaking magic. To laypeople, filmmaking is always about the image. Film schools capitalize on that. Every school advertisement I see shows people operating a camera. Sound? That's not sexy. In class one day he asks how many of us want to direct. Nearly everyone in class raises a hand. He tells us the straight truth that only a tiny handful of us will ever actually make a living as directors. Holman gives us advice: if we want to make a living in Hollywood, work in sound.

Holman's sound class is an example of why film school is worthwhile. The director Robert Rodriguez famously spent just $7,000 to
film
EL MARIACHI on sixteen-millimeter film, but the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) estimates a total of $220,000 was spent in postproduction, and much of that was to improve the original film's soundtrack.

I like Holman's class because it is primarily technical, but it often veers into the realm of art. Holman's class lifts the veil on a lot of the magic of movies.

Earlier in the semester I had a discussion with several students and FTC about the notion of art vs. technique. I explained I came to USC for practical reasons: I wanted a more stable career, and I wanted the hands-on training to do that.

“If you want that you should have gone to a technical college, that sort of place,” FTC said to me. “You'd be better off getting that training there.” I disagreed with him. I thought USC should be putting as much of an emphasis on teaching technique as any technical college does.

FTC shrugged. He said film school is there for us to find and pursue our artistic vision.

The idea chafes at me. Implicit in that idea seems to be that, although technique is teachable, art can't be taught. Art is, according to this view, something that flows from a mysterious source. To extend the view further, either you've got
it
, or you don't. Those without the genius are doomed to mediocrity, to non-art, to being hacks or replicators. Those with the genius are the
Ubermensch
.

This argument was put forth most prominently in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic movement, by Byron and Keats and Blake. And that movement, the belief in the artist as a gifted
Ubermensch
, has been lapped up ever since by the creative class. And no wonder! In this view, artists are special, with a genius that comes from elsewhere, and thus can't be understood by the unwashed nonartists of the world. The masses don't have that
it
, whatever it is.

There's a serious side effect to this, of course. It breeds elitism and gives the artist a ticket to behave anyway he or she wants, for better or worse. Artists, in this view, are temperamental like Lord Byron, and it just can't be helped. Hollywood seems to embrace this because the list of directors and writers and actors who behave poorly is long. It is a Romantic conceit, this notion that the rules of society stifle and bind the true artist. It's a notion that emerged only a few centuries ago, long past the era of William Shakespeare and Leonardo daVinci. DaVinci was a scientist, a mathematician, an artist, a teacher . . . and he was fully enmeshed into his Florentine society. Shakespeare, for what little is known of him, never trashed a hotel room.

O
n the last day of Casper's class, he takes the stage and explains his grading. He says he's sick and tired of grade inflation, and he's grading accordingly. He warns people that a C means average work, that he's giving out a handful of Ds and only a tiny sprinkling of As. He tells us to be happy if we get a B.

His assistants hand out the papers. Our grades on the paper will be our grades in class. It's a chaotic scene in the auditorium with 120 students milling about and excited to see their grades.

One of Casper's assistants stands on the stage and points at me. “Are you Steve Boman?” I nod and work my way to the front of the milling crowd. “That was quite a paper,” he says. I hope he means that in a good way . . . and when I look at the back of my paper I see my grade: “An Easy A,” it says. I feel my chest expand.