Film School
All of the events described in this book happened as related; some time frames were altered slightly and many names and identifying characteristics have been changed.
Copyright © 2011 by Steve Boman
Foreword © 2011 by David Howard
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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ISBN 978-1-936661-05-3
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What use is it to speak of inspiration?
To the hesitant it never appears.
If you would be a poet,
Then take command of poetry.
You know what we require,
We want to down strong brew;
So get on with it!
â J
OHANN
W
OLFGANG VON
G
OETHE
, from
Faust
4. Superbabe,
GeezerJock
, and Steve All Fall Down
7. Nice to Meet You, Donald Sutherland
One of the basic tenets
of good storytelling is that an author must make life very difficult for his characters. The closer to the impossible those challenges are made, the stronger the dramatic tension and the deeper the audience's connection with the characters in the story will be. By thisâor anyâmeasure, Steve Boman tells a whopping good story in FILM SCHOOL. It's made all the more harrowing and compelling by being fact, not fiction. Steve, his family, friends, and classmates suffered a great deal to give us an exciting and unpredictable story. They did so with moments of both anxiety and grace, plus humor, perseverance, and ever-present doubt on their relentless march through calamity, triumph, epiphany, and more than anyone's share of medical hurdles.
Many of the conflicts and obstacles dramatically depicted in this book had already been faced, for better and worse, by the time I first met Steve. In fact it was his last semester as a graduate student at USC when he enrolled in my advanced scene writing course, a small and intense seminar taken primarily by film students who harbor serious aspirations as screenwriters. When we first met, none of those trialsâor their scarsâwas evident in Steve. He just seemed like a good-natured guy from my home state. We bonded over Minnesota lore: “Ya, you-betcha.” We've both had the fabled, and mostly apocryphal, accent surgically removed.
Film schools didn't even exist a century ago, and they only came into their own as a means of entering and excelling in film and television when a handful of film school alumni in the 1970s surged to the top of the entertainment industry. Their names are now universally known, and several of those grace the buildings that form USC's School of Cinematic Arts. As a result of those early successes and an ever-growing stream of talented and ambitious film school graduates, “going to film school” has come to be a crucial step on the trajectory to success behind the camera.
Like many before him and more yet to come, Steve set his sights high and chose the most efficient path available to those of us without connections and easy opportunity: a few years of intense study, trials, errors, failures, disasters, learning, networking, alliance building, goal setting, and endurance testing. He chose film school and was accepted by the oldest and best of the growing array of choices: USC.
What followed would far exceed the typical experience of film school, but at the same time, in the hands of a talented storyteller, Steve's journey focuses the reader's attention and compassion in unexpectedly intimate ways. His approach is reminiscent of the Harvard student who became an able-bodied seaman in the 1830s and sailed in a tall ship around Cape Horn to write the classic of experiential journalism, TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST. Richard Henry Dana grants his readers the real experience along with the insights of a trained observer. In FILM SCHOOL, Steve Boman does the same: You will learn what film school really means, how it unfolds, how it impacts the dreamers and drivers who find themselves there, and how it gets the better of everyone at some point. You will become part of a family as it faces incredible challenges, you will discover how some friends rise to some occasions and others fall by the wayside, and you will explore the deadly serious business of learning how to entertain.
Like a good film or a good TV program, FILM SCHOOL will give you an experience well worth having. Enjoy it.
David Howard
Founding Director of the Graduate Screenwriting Program
School of Cinematic Arts
University of Southern California
When I was accepted to
the film production program at the University of Southern California, I was in my late thirties. One of my brothers was a bit skeptical. He asked me what actually happens in film school.
“I dunno,” I told him. “I'll find out when I get there.”
I wasn't being snarky. I really didn't know.
Before I applied to USC, I tried to find out as much as I could about film schoolâ
any
film school. But there wasn't much of any depth either on the web or at bookstores. Going to USC's School of Cinematic Arts as a graduate student in film production meant I was going on a three-year journey, and I wanted to know what I was facing on that journey. Sure, universities put out glossy brochures and feature websites that make the whole enterprise look just wonderful, like the world's most exciting cruise ship adventure, full of smiling students and attentive instructors. But they made
me
skeptical. I wanted to see a photo of, say, a student sitting in the rain, a broken camera at his feet, with another student yelling at him.
That
would have seemed more realistic.
I also didn't know anyone who had gone to film school, anyone who could give me the inside dope. As an adult, I had worked as a reporter in the Midwest and on the East Coast for both newspapers and radio. I had covered thousands of stories, but the film business wasn't on my beat. I do have a couple of close college chums who are successful actors in Los Angeles, and although they are a great help, they hadn't gone to film school either.
So I was mostly in the dark about what I was facing. When I got to USC, I found many of my classmates were in my same position. We were like travelers without guidebooks or even a decent map. I found the journey was much different than what I expected. From the time I was admitted I planned to write a book about my experiences. What you're holding is the result.
This is a personal book about my time at USC. I graduated from USC in 2009 with a master of fine arts degree in film production. This book explains what happened to me and some of the people I met in film school and in Hollywood. I'm not providing an encyclopedic overviewâjust one person's story.
There are obvious shortcomings to this method. Like the fable of the blind men describing an elephant, whose descriptions depend on which part they touch (
It's as thick and immovable as a wall! . . . No, it's thin and flexible like a whip! . . . No, it's a sharp spear!
), my observations are incomplete. I went to one specific film school to study film production. Hopefully, others will write of their observations so the entire elephant can be fleshed out.
Now, most retellings of the parable of the blind men and the elephant are high-minded. They don't include a blind guy who yells:
That elephant is nothing but a huge pile of manure! And I stepped in it!
When I went to USC, I stepped in plenty of manure. You'll hear about it in the book. I don't intend to run for office. I just aim to tell a true story.
I wish I had read something like this before I went to USC. I would have been better prepared, quicker to focus on what is important at film school, and quicker to brush off the unimportant stuff.
A key part of going to film school is learning to hustle yourself and your ideas shamelesslyâsomething that doesn't come naturally to me, a somewhat self-deprecating Midwesterner. So I'll merely say this book is
completely and unbelievably awesome
! It's a perfect companion for anyone who wants to know what it's like to have a second chance at a new career, or who dreams of selling a television show to a major network, or who wants to know what it's like to navigate Hollywood as an outsider. Or for those who want to know what it's like to keep moving forward after bad medical news. I write about all of these subjects because I experienced them.
By the time I finished my first semester at USC, I knew I had a pretty good story on my hands. Film school is an inherently interesting subject. In school, we make short films and TV episodes and write scripts, and these activities clearly fascinate lots of people. When I mentioned I was going to film school at USC, it seemed everyone wanted in on the action. Other soccer dads said they wanted to visit me in Los Angeles. Friends wanted to act in my films. I was offered scripts by neighbors. A coworker ruefully told me, “I'd trade my left nut to go to film school.”
I knew I was on to something. I was going to an institution that prepped students to work in that big, glamorous world of moving pictures, and that's interesting to plenty of people. Film school is to Hollywood as baseball's minor leagues are to Major League Baseballâbut with a lot more smoking.
This book is greatly aided by the fact that students and staff at USC are exceedingly colorful. And I witnessed plenty of conflict. I was sure I had a good story to tell. Little did I know
how
good it would be. By the time I finished at USC, I:
