Film School Read Free Page B

studying at a place that is so well known. He goes on and on. The class laughs along with him. His speech is great. He’s very funny.
    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