Film School (9 page)

I'm now asking S. to act as if he's going out of his mind with frustration. He's throwing himself into the role. I'm laughing so hard I have to take a break from shooting. We're losing daylight and, with the last minutes of sunlight, I direct S. to lie in the dirt, filthy, and utter his one line: DAD!

I'm shocked at how much effort S. puts into the role. In class, he's always laid-back, seemingly low energy. Out here, he's going nutso in the dirt. And he's nailing the part.

As we walk down the trail in the twilight, S. explains he went to Columbia College in Chicago, studied filmmaking, then applied to USC. His knowledge of hands-on filmmaking far exceeds mine—which is why he gently offers me advice as I'm shooting. (“Steve, you should check your white-balance again.” “This would be a great time to use a tripod. I don't think you'll be able to handhold this shot very well.”)

On the drive back to Los Angeles, I query S. about his background. This was the first time I'd spent considerable one-on-one time with any of my classmates. We were already three weeks into the semester and I'd had lots of group discussions and plenty of short one-on-one chats, but I never found myself with much extra time to just . . . talk. I always feel like the White Rabbit in ALICE IN WONDERLAND
. I'm late. I'm late. I'm late!

Now, on our postshoot road trip home, there is time to talk. As we drive along Highway 101 in the darkness, S. admits he comes from a show-business family. He says he doesn't want to name-drop. After some prodding by me, S. sheds more light on his background: his grandfather was a well-known actor who ran a well-known acting studio for comics until he died in the 1980s.

S. says his father is also in the business. He's a director, won an Emmy, and is now doing feature films.

In the dark car I glance over at S. I tell him I had no idea about his background—none. I'd never heard a word of gossip on campus. S. says he doesn't want to be treated any differently in class. He says he wants to be judged on his own merits.

I drop S. off at his yellow SUV and thank him again. When the door shuts, I breathe a huge sigh of relief. I can spend the weekend at my own house, seeing my kids and Julie. I have studies to do, but I'll be home before midnight Friday, and I have enough footage to cut together my second film. I feel I've dodged a bullet.

B
eing a transplant coordinator is a bit like being a firefighter. Long stretches of quiet are punctuated by frantic action. It was an odd job, no doubt.

I oversaw an organ harvest in a small hospital that was running on emergency backup generators because tornadoes were sweeping through the region. Another time, I scrubbed in and assisted a surgeon doing a dissection of a liver during a then-experimental living donor operation on Christmas Eve at the University of Chicago—a time when the hospital was short-staffed. Over my tenure, I learned how a handful of surgeons—well-meaning, talented people—would bend the rules to help their patients or, sometimes, their careers.

I knew my experience of being swept up in the excitement of the transplant world was a good story. It was too good to be limited to a small story. I held my experiences close to my vest, waiting for the right venue.

What didn't wait was romance. While working in Chicago, I fell in love. She was a gorgeous woman with long brown hair and big brown eyes named Julie. She was just back from the Peace Corps. We had both gone to Gustavus, but we were both dating others and the mutual attraction had never burst into flame. Then she came to visit me in Chicago. We went out one night and—poof!—just like that, we were engaged. She was going to go to graduate school in ecology at the University of Pennsylvania. Our marriage was a happy place, filled with laughter and kisses and dancing.

And then a little surprise occurred during our honeymoon. She decided she wanted to go to medical school instead of pursuing a PhD in ecology. With love-sparkles in my eyes, I said,
That sounds like a great idea, honey! I would love to support you. Medical school sounds fantastic!

In the film version of this book, a scene of two newlyweds kissing would now dissolve. We would hear a small child crying. A title card would announce:
Nine Years Later
. And the next scene would be Julie heading off to the hospital, stethoscope around her neck, white doctor's coat bulging with notepads and pens and pagers. She would have dark circles under her eyes. There would be a four-year-old girl at a breakfast table. I would be holding a baby in my arms. I would need a shave. I would be wearing Winnie the Pooh slippers and an old T-shirt and shorts. Julie would give the girls a kiss, peck me on the cheek, and rush off to work, her pager squawking. As soon as the door closed, there would be silence. The four-year-old would ask me: “What are we going to do today, Daddy?”

E
diting MY CRAZY DAD is conceptually easy. There's not much reordering needed, just trimming the long minutes of footage into an eight-minute journey. My story is simple, probably too simple. When I get to the Zemeckis editing room with its dozens of computer stations, I find I'm all thumbs. The computers are running AVID software, an industry standard, but I have little experience using it. Like all modern editing software, it's nonlinear. Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, OpenShot, and others are similar nonlinear programs.

I'm used to linear systems. In radio, way back in the twentieth century, when I wanted a cut from a piece of tape, I'd literally cut it out, with a blade. If I wanted a cut from the back of a reel, it meant winding through the whole reel. Like walking down a long dirt road, it took time.

Film worked the same way. Linear film editing was in place for a century. Editing rooms would be filled with hundreds of pieces of film, hanging from racks. A film was built, piece by piece by piece, all spliced by hand. Editing was slower; editors worked with the original source material, and going back to a previous cut was time-consuming.

Since the early 1990s, film editing has moved nearly universally to nonlinear systems. Imagine that same long dirt road but instead of having to walk from beginning to end, you could push a button and—zap—be anywhere on the journey.

With AVID (as with all nonlinear systems), it's possible to find a cut by moving a computer mouse or hitting a few keystrokes. In an instant, you can be at that particular spot, make a virtual clip, label it, and move on. With nonlinear systems, you can move from the beginning of a film to the end in a heartbeat.

The computerized system is much faster, and it makes it possible to move clips around, trim or lengthen cuts in an instant, save multiple versions, do a cut and immediately reverse yourself, and save multiple versions.

It's similar to using a computer versus using a typewriter. (My children have never seen a typewriter. They are mystified by a machine that uses thin metal rods that slam down a metal key on an ink-covered ribbon that hovers over the paper. As a cub reporter, I wrote all my copy on an IBM Selectric typewriter.)

I find AVID a hindrance. I'm not being a Luddite: I love my laptop. I'm just extremely slow when I first use AVID. Compared to my editing-savvy classmates, I feel like I'm going to journalism school without ever having learned to type. It takes me hours just to download my tapes and figure out how to create “bins.” I'm the slowest editor in my class. I console myself with the realization that we students all have various strengths and weaknesses. I like to think I'll have a leg up in other areas, like writing and directing.

I start to make a list of things I would do differently before enrolling in film school. Top of the list is spending time on a non-linear editing system.

I'm slow as molasses at editing, but I appreciate the importance of it. Good editing is an art, maybe the most underappreciated part of filmmaking other than sound. The great Robert Wise, director of WEST SIDE STORY and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, was originally a film editor. And Stanley Kubrick, director of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and FULL METAL JACKET, explained that he loved editing more than any other part of filmmaking. He also noted that editing is unique to moving pictures. The other components of moviemaking—writing, photography, music, and acting—all predated motion pictures.

When I finally finish cutting together MY CRAZY DAD, instead of feeling relieved, I feel a bubbling sense of anxiety creeping back into my gullet. I have barely completed the film on time—I spent every available hour in AVID lab for a week. It had just one primary actor. A couple of different locations. What happens when I start shooting more complicated films? Maybe the doctor-turned-film-student was right. Maybe it
was
harder than medical school.

I had watched my wife go through medical school. That was hard, no doubt. But I saw her divide each week up into manageable sections. If she studied, she would pass the test, and move onto the next subject in lockstep with her classmates. Medical school is highly regimented, and students all follow roughly the same path. As long as they stay on the treadmill, they keep moving forward.

In film school, there is no lockstep formation. We're more like mice in a corridor trying to get to the next room before the cat comes back. Most of us are going in the same direction, but we're arriving at different locations, going at different speeds with vastly different talents. Some of us are moving backward, some are cleaning their whiskers, some are eating fermented berries. And there never seems to be enough time to get down the corridor! I think about the cat. I wonder if I'm going to get eaten by the cat.

I also wish USC put more emphasis on editing right off the bat. It seems a little absurd—we're making films from week one—and there's almost no instruction in the basics of editing. It seems they assume everyone already knows how. I'm definitely in a program that emphasizes trial and error . . . and I'm making plenty of errors.

When I finally finish editing the film, late the night before it is due for class, I show it to the husband of a classmate. I tell him it's a comedy and give him my headphones so he can watch it on the monitor. As he watches my little film, he starts laughing. I go to bed late that night, excited about my second film's prospects. I'm hoping the audience in my 507 class reacts the same way.

The screenings always follow a specific ritual. The students and instructors sit in a semicircle facing the projection screen. We watch the film. Then when it's done, the director goes to a chair in front of the entire group, and waits while everyone silently writes critiques on standardized 8½” x 5½” pressure-sensitive forms that we've all purchased from the USC equipment department. The double-sheeted forms, which look a bit like blank parking tickets, seem like throwbacks to the 1950s. They're white on top, yellow on the bottom. We write the director's name, film title, and date, then the following:

• Intention
  
• Synopsis
  
• Strengths
  
• Weaknesses
  

Then, after five or six minutes of jotting down comments, the writing stops. And the talking starts. We critique the films, reading to the director what we wrote.
Critique
is derived from a Greek word that means, roughly,
to discern the truth or value of things
.

While this is going on, the director sits in a chair facing everyone.

At first, we're all leery of being too negative. Our criticisms are laden with positives.

It doesn't take long for FTC to lose his patience. He urges us to be harder hitting with our criticism. This is not a popularity contest, he says. He doesn't want to hear soft praise (“I just loved that! It was great!”) or flattering commentary. FTC is quite exasperated.

Once again, I don't entirely disagree with FTC. I don't mind being direct—my editors in the past were pretty direct. Mike Waters at the
Daily Southtown
, a great editor, once whipped a phone to the ground in disgust and swore a blue streak at me when the
Chicago Tribune
beat me on an important story. Once when I was a radio reporter, I was sent to the Dominican Republic to do a story and blurted out over the air, live, that women in an overcrowded and filthy birthing hospital “really squirt their babies out.” When I returned home, my boss yelled and threatened to fire me. But both those bosses were also free with their praise when I didn't mess up.

In 507, we start hitting harder. It becomes a bit of a sport to see who can have the smartest critique.

Directors on the hot seat cannot speak until the very end, after the class and the instructors have spoken. (In addition to FTC, we have a student assistant and a quiet cinematography instructor.) Then the directors explain what their intent is. If their intent matches what the
audience
thinks the intent was, the director has succeeded in one very important area.

When the time comes for me to present MY CRAZY DAD, I'm really surprised by my nervousness. I spent a decade writing articles for thousands of people every day. A news story of mine on National Public Radio would play from coast to coast. Now I'm doing a short film for fewer than twenty people. And I'm nervous. This feels much more personal.

The most rewarding part of the screening is watching the audience. It's something I rarely got much of as a reporter. When I wrote or voiced a story in the past, it was consumed by people I rarely if ever saw. I occasionally wished my stories would be read simultaneously by a stadium full of people. I wanted to know when they laughed, when they groaned, when they lost interest, when they fell asleep in their Cheerios. I see why comics want to do stand-up in front of a live audience and why actors love the theater. It's the immediate response.

So when MY CRAZY DAD starts playing on the big projection screen, I'm stoked when I see appreciative nodding. The footage from the funeral home looks very good, and what a location! Then S. appears on the screen, and he gets a big laugh of recognition. So far, so good. Only a few people in class have any idea what the film is about, which is normal. We don't really know what the others are up to during the week. We might get a sneak peek at someone's project on an editing screen or hear gossip about it, but generally the film on-screen is new and fresh for everyone.