Film School (7 page)

When it comes time for the dream sequence, I direct Maria to act as if she's asleep. She does a great job of not giggling. Then I pull out the special effects: I smear a little Vaseline on the edges of the screw-off lens dust cap. Our whole crew—me, Julie, and all three kids—heads to the local park just down the street. When we get there, Lara climbs on the monkey bars while Sophia toddles around. I stand nearby, my camera and tripod ready. Maria rides Lara's bike on the sidewalk, past the monkey bars, grinning widely. I stand next to other dads with my camera. No one has any idea what I am doing. I look like any other suburban dad videotaping his kid learning how to ride a bike. Yes, I've got a tripod, but no one gives me even a sideways glance. One hundred feet away a woman is videotaping a birthday party. To the unpracticed eye, my boxy Sony looks like any other out-of-date camera.

An hour later, we're home again. I check what I've shot on playback. It's far from perfect, but it's good enough. I know using a dream sequence is the biggest cliché in moviemaking. (
Look, it didn't happen, it's only a dream!
) Yes, I'm being lazy and not very original, but my goal is just to get a base hit, not a home run, and move forward.

With this film, I mainly want to show my class—and my
instructors—my kids. They are such an important part of my life, and I want to use this film as a two-minute brag session. When I plug the camera into our television set and we watch the completed film, Maria beams. Sophia claps. Even Lara agrees her annoying little sister did a good job.

If this is film school,
I think
, this is not hard
. For my two-minute film, I did no more than twenty different setups. That works out to six seconds a shot—a pretty slow pace. Watch any TV show or film and count how long each shot lasts. In television, it's rare for a shot to last more than four seconds on-screen, most are less than that. My short film is a slow-moving affair, and, if I remove my bias, it's actually pretty dull. But I'm happy. I'm guessing film school is a game of attrition: I just need to survive to fight the next battle and not flame out early.

The next week we show our two-minute films in class. The Zemeckis classrooms have large pull-down screens and overhead video projectors. As we sit in the dark, our videos play out on the screen, larger than life. The smallest details are enormous. It's the first time I've seen my camera work displayed on such a large screen. Small bobbles of the camera make images look like they are going through a magnitude 8.7 earthquake. Flaws in lighting, in acting, in set design all jump out.

No one has a masterpiece. Most are, like mine, silly things. I feel relieved watching them spool out on the big screen that I'm not completely outclassed. Fee Fee, a production major in college, features a woman being chased, horror-movie style, by what turns out to be a fluffy stuffed animal. This is par for the course.

My film has the effect I hoped for on my classmates. I hear
ooohs
and
aaaaaahs
as my three daughters appear on the screen. My five female classmates seem especially appreciative. I get a nice round of applause. I feel like I've got a two-minute family talent show on the screen. Von Trapp Family Singers, watch out.

The lights come up. FTC clears his throat. He holds a long dramatic pause. He is frowning. His lips are tight.

Finally, he speaks. “Steve.” He exhales. “Steve . . . Steve . . . Steve.” He shakes his head.

He looks at me for several seconds. I look back, confused. Did the story not make any sense? Is he going to hammer me for using the lame
It's Only a Dream
concept? Did my technique stink that much?

FTC finally speaks. “Did you have a studio teacher?” he asks.

My brain races. I do a quick mental survey of the term
studio teacher
. I had read about them in some of the material we received in class. They make sure actors under eighteen don't work beyond union-specified time limits on a set, and they're also supposed to make sure a child actor is tutored while on set if a shoot takes place on a school day. A studio teacher costs about $400 a day.

Did he really mean I needed to spend $400 to hire someone to watch me shoot a video of my kid riding a bike at the playground?

“No,” I answer, slowly. “I used my wife. She
is
a pediatrician.” I smile wanly.

“That's not good enough,” FTC snaps. He stares straight at me. “The rules here at USC are very explicit. You needed a studio teacher. You did not have one. This is a very serious breach of filmmaking.”

He pauses, then adds: “The rules say you are to be expelled from school for doing what you did.”

The room is silent. Completely and totally silent. I feel every face in the class staring at me. I can hardly see FTC's eyes under his cap. He jaw is set.

I feel my face flushing. My heart, which has been beating fast, now starts pounding.
Oh, Lordy, I'm about to get kicked out of film school for making a home movie.

How did I get
here, at USC, as a graying father of three? Part of the reason I'm loath to say much during our classroom introductions is because I can't imagine turning on the spigot and explaining my background. When I applied to USC, I had to write several essays. One was a personal statement. It started like this:

On a sweltering August morning in the 1960s my mother is in a Minneapolis hospital, about to deliver her third child. That would be me. A young doctor feels her stomach and wonders aloud if the baby has two heads and one body. My mother is very upset. Luckily, a more experienced doctor goes into the delivery room and assures my mother I don't have two heads. My umbilical cord is wrapped around my head and I survive.

My parents name me Stephen Gregory Boman. If I could have talked, I would have said: “I prefer Steve instead of Stephen. So many people mispronounce Stephen (Steff-en) it's kind of embarrassing. Saint Stephen got stoned to death by an angry mob just for mouthing off. And that young actor named Steve McQueen seems like a good egg. So, please, just make it Steve.”

I could not talk, of course, until much later, about the time my parents move north to Duluth, Minnesota. They have one more child and buy a small house. I now have two older brothers and a younger sister. My dad is a newly minted professor at the local university. My mom stays home. We have a pretty normal existence. I never came home to find the car on fire and my parents brawling on the lawn. My brothers and sister and I are outside playing constantly. We rarely watch TV. I am teased by my brothers, and I learn to use my mouth as a weapon (blame my namesake). I become the family joker. We are highly competitive. We have sibling competitions to see who can run the fastest, who can shoot BB guns the most accurately, and, among us boys, who can pee the farthest in the woods.

We all turn out pretty well. No jail time, no front-page scandals. Just the usual family sagas of marriages and heartbreaks and laughter and minor grievances. My oldest brother becomes an orthopedic surgeon, marries, has two kids. My other brother is in the Air Force for years, and then he, too, becomes a doctor. He has five kids. My younger sister is the brains of the family, a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and a successful medical researcher.

I am the reader, the storyteller. I am always curious about the outside world. I read
Papillion
in the fifth grade, and give a book report about it. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Johnson, has also read the book. He does not ask me to explain to the class some of the finer details in the story, such as how prisoners stuffed valuables up their assholes to hide them.

When I am in high school, the school guidance counselor sits me down during one of his rare bouts of sobriety. We go over my record: I have been a good student. I have been a jock. I play trombone. I act in plays. He wants to know what I want to do. I have my choice pretty well narrowed down. I don't like science. I am very good at math. In junior high, I wanted to be a forest ranger but mainly because I wanted to drive around in a Jeep all day. But by high school I have ruled that out. I tell him I want to be a writer. He nods vacantly.

Duluth, the town I grew up in, is then a town on the skids, just like my guidance counselor. It's a blue-collar town with a recently closed steel mill, high unemployment, and limited options. My idea of being a writer probably sounds dreamy and stupid, like students saying they're going to be a rock star or an NBA player.

The counselor doesn't give me any advice, or any that I remember anyway. With all the wisdom that seventeen-year-olds have, I know—absolutely know—the best way to pursue my career is to load up a motorcycle and head west and work as a menial laborer. I am going to spend at least a year traveling, working, and, most important, renting a really cool apartment somewhere in the Rocky Mountains where I can work during the day at a ski resort and write fascinating stories in the evening as Count Basie plays on the stereo. I assume there will be many beautiful women visiting. I imagine I will be smoking a pipe, like a young Hugh Hefner.

I go on the trip with my former seventh-grade locker partner, Scott. Scott has his own beat-up motorcycle, a bike even more prone to breakdowns than mine. We work as dishwashers in Wyoming. We live in a single tiny room in a trailer. We work full time and spend most of our wages for food and rent and motorcycle repairs. I don't write one word. Then it starts to snow. We are cold. We dump the idea of working as ski-bums. (What were we thinking? We were on two-wheelers.) So we ride toward Los Angeles where Scott has relatives . . .

Feel free to cut and paste it for your own application essay. It wasn't the whole story. I didn't write about how I was a disinterested and bored student who spent much more time dreaming about motorcycles than on finishing school assignments.

In contrast, my sister, Annette, was focused like a laser. She was just a year and a half younger than me, and in many ways we were yin and yang. I ducked out of class as often as possible; she got perfect attendance marks. I spent my summers on a ladder painting houses, dirty and sunburned, to earn money for college; Annette was on a full-ride scholarship and did research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When I graduated from college, I owned a motorcycle and a few suitcases of clothes, and I started looking for work. When she finished college, she headed to Johns Hopkins for graduate work, and she was invited to Stockholm to witness the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. She interviewed several of the Nobel winners for a Swedish television program. She asked them about their thoughts on God, which sounds a bit presumptuous, but she was so young and straightforward that the people she interviewed answered her with great earnestness. She got a PhD from Johns Hopkins in biophysics when she was twenty-six. She wanted to be a scientist, you see.

I
n 507, we are to make five films. The first has landed me in hot water. During a class break after the screening of my little two-minute bicycle dream, I approach FTC. He isn't eager to talk. I tell him I had no clue I needed a studio teacher to oversee my own kids for such a simple shoot. He tells me the rules are what they are. I ask him if he's going to have me expelled. I'm not pleading or begging. I just want to know what's going to happen.

He pauses. Then he says no, he's not going to bring up the issue with the school. But he warns me that he could have me expelled—and I'm left with the realization I'm on thin ice.

I go get a drink of water. I can understand his position. He doesn't know me—for all he knows, I'm a stage parent who would push his infant into a cage of hungry polar bears if it meant a chance at fame. He doesn't know my wife and he doesn't know anything about how I treat my kids. He's only spent a few hours with me in class, and he saw that the first film I did used minors, without a studio teacher. I don't blame him for coming down hard on me. I thought the studio teacher rule wouldn't apply to me for this small exercise, in part because of the genteel nature of the shoot and also because I figured my wife is a better monitor than a hired studio teacher and because we were filming under the agreement that our work wouldn't be publicly shown. We could use copyrighted music without permission on these little exercises, for example, something we couldn't do for later films. The bottom line, I learned, was this: the rules are not to be ignored. When at USC, follow the playbook.

I'm also learning the role I'm starting to play in 507. Just as Casper is using me as a foil in his film history lecture, I get a strong sense FTC is using me to set examples. I'm guessing it's because both instructors expect I'm not going to go sobbing into the hallway when I am criticized. For better or worse, I come across as a durable guy. Whatever role I'm being cast in, I'm not going to fret about my relationship with FTC. He is very direct, which I appreciate. If he doesn't like me, so it goes. Besides, I have to prepare for my next project.

Our next four films in 507 are to be much larger in scale. Each film can be up to eight minutes long. We will edit on AVID and have three weeks to do each film. One week to write and produce, one to shoot, one to edit and mix. On screening day, we will show our films to our class. The three-week schedule allows each person in the camera partnership to have a week with a camera and a week with our computer hard drive for editing. In my case, I'll be shooting second in the rotation. Thus, a third of our 507 class will finish and screen a film one week, a week later the second third will screen theirs, and the final third will screen the third week. Then we'll repeat it all over again until the end of the semester. Each week, we'll watch five or six films, and spend thirty minutes or so discussing each one.

This is how the semester will go: sixteen students showing five films each. During the semester, I will watch eighty short student films, comment on them, study them, critique them, make them.