Film School (3 page)

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 wrought-iron 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. The 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.

In contrast, film schools can be many different things. Institutions vary, course lengths vary. Even in production film programs, there can be a different emphasis. Some schools do big films with big crews. Other schools send students into the field solo or in groups of two or three. Some programs emphasize experimental films; some emphasize commercial films.

At USC, the graduate production division is set up so that students tackle ever-larger films, semester by semester. It's a three-year program, with six semesters. (USC has fall and spring semesters, each four months long, with a month off from mid-December to mid-January. There is a short summer semester, too, with limited class offerings.)

In my first semester, we'll shoot solo projects. We'll produce, shoot, direct, edit, and mix our own short films. Everything is shot on video.

The second semester at USC, we'll work in partnerships. We'll do two six-minute films. For the first half of a semester, one partner will write and direct and do sound, while the other partner will shoot and edit. During the second half of the semester, the roles will be switched. In contrast with the first semester, when we shoulder a basic video camera, during the second semester, we'll shoot with ancient German Arriflex film cameras, loaded with color film. The cameras are so old the U.S. Army used similar models back in the Eisenhower administration.

By the third semester, we'll move to larger group projects. These are either fiction films (on film) or documentaries (on video). Every semester, USC's graduate production division makes seven group films. Four of the films are fictional, three are documentaries. The fiction films, part of a class called Production 546, are roughly twelve minutes long. The documentaries, done under the aegis of Production 547, are about twenty-six minutes in length. Students do everything on these films, with limited faculty involvement on set. The size of the crews varies from seven to eleven students. USC underwrites the cost of these films.

Here the specialization starts, and the competition begins in earnest, because instructors pick the students who will be the directors and producers for fiction films, and the directors for documentaries. Then, those lucky students will choose which of their fellow students will crew on their projects. It's a competitive, zany time of musical chairs and hurt feelings and intense politicking—with students vying for what they perceive as the best films and the best positions, and directors deciding who to choose and who to reject and begging students to fill empty positions. It's a remarkable event, filled with shifting allegiances and betrayals and high fives and tears. In that sense, USC is a real studio system, with gossip and favoritism and misinformation running fast and furious. This competition is a core principle of the entire USC film school experience.