Film School (15 page)

In classes, discussions regarding the Hollywood blacklisting era are common, as are discussions about the current lamentable state of American democracy. The bogeymen are the standard punching bags of the American Left (McCarthy, Bush, capitalists). I understand their frustration, but I'm intrigued at the lack of a rounded discussion. For example, I never heard any mention of filmmaking conditions in other countries. Sure it's fun to complain, and people are absolutely right to expect nothing but the highest standards in American political discourse. But a
little
comparative analysis would be helpful in film school. Consider Boris Shumyatskiy. I bumped into his name while I was doing a paper on early Soviet filmmaking. Shumyatskiy was the head of the Soviet film industry and the boss of filmmaking greats Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Unfortunately for Shumyatskiy, he failed to please his boss, Stalin. In 1938, Shumyatskiy was executed by firing squad, a blacklisting that was undoubtedly more permanent than the one accorded screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. And on that tiny vexing issue of Islamic radicalism, there was silence on campus, at least from my perspective. From what I witnessed, the only terrorists in student films and scripts were Americans in uniform. Given that my dad was an army officer before getting his PhD, and my brother was a captain in the air force before he went to medical school, it rankled me a bit. I never witnessed a discussion about the fate of Dutch filmmaker and provocateur Theo van Gogh, who was shot, stabbed, and nearly decapitated in 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri as a protest against van Gogh's criticism of Islam. That's a subject apparently too prickly to broach, as was the controversy that resulted when the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
printed a series of cartoons depicting Muhammad. From my perch, I witnessed only nothing-to-see-here whistling from ostensibly daring filmmakers. If van Gogh had been murdered by, say, a pale and fleshy Kansas Baptist, ideally a banker at that, I can only guess how many student films would have been spun from that narrative.

So, in the halls of the film school, George W. Bush quite naturally is reviled constantly as a gun-packin' cowboy. Yet a
real
gun-packing cowboy, Che Guevara, is seen as a stud. Che Guevara shirts are popular here. I find it disquieting, and illogical, that historical figures who represent the very antithesis of artistic and academic freedom are often the ones who are enshrined by the academics and artists. Sometimes there's even a passing appreciation of Mao that gets aired. So strange.

The writer Tom Wolfe was right about radical chic. Many filmmakers seem to love asshats like Mao and Che, both in film school and in the real world, and they generally ignore the current messy reality of Islamic fundamentalism. Imagining a film student wearing a T-shirt depicting, say, a Lincoln or Churchill or George Washington is supremely laughable. Che? He's cool. So what if he jailed gays, banned free elections, hated free speech, and unloaded his pistol into people he didn't like? What matters is that his hair was sexy, and he looked great in photos, the hard-Left's Christ.

When I put my application
package for USC in the mail, it was early fall 2002. I wouldn't hear whether I was accepted until March. My life went on as normal: getting the kids ready in the morning, walking Lara to school, coming home and doing laundry and going shopping and changing diapers and cleaning the house and putting the kids down for a nap and picking Lara up from school and feeding them snacks and getting dinner ready. I know the thrill and joy and utter monotony of being a stay-at-home parent. I loved being with my kids, and I valued deeply the time I had to share with them and play with them. I was glad I was home with my kids, raising them, reading to them, guiding them.

Yet I didn't have a Plan B.
GeezerJock
was dead in the water. Julie had another year in her government-mandated job. Newspapers were laying off my friends.

Month by month, Julie got stronger. That fall, I took her and the kids down to USC, and we explored the film school. It seemed such a foreign place . . . all these film students who seemed so familiar with each other, smoking and sitting on an old rickety picnic table and talking. I walked by with my family and the film students ignored us.

One Saturday night, Lara had a friend over to watch a movie. During the film, I got a phone call from my parents. They were crying. My younger sister, Annette, was in the hospital in Duluth. She had leukemia, diagnosed just that evening.

Her cancer was very aggressive. She had two young children, a boy and a girl, and a husband.

When we were young, Annette and I would pour water on our sloped driveway and watch the rivulets stream down toward the curb. We named the rivulets and urged them on like we were watching a horse race. With the peculiar logic of preschoolers, our favorite names were Nixon and Snoopy, both dogs in our world. We'd stand there and yell, “Go, Nixon! Go! Go, Snoopy, faster!” I don't recall us choosing sides. They were just two water rivulets slowly running down an asphalt driveway.

In early March I traveled back to Duluth with my three daughters. During the day I was a sad Pied Piper who led around Annette's two small children and my own kids. At night I would visit Annette in the hospital. She was very sick. Four months earlier she had been a vibrant, healthy woman without a hint of problems.

She died a painful death. It snowed hard the day before her funeral. It was late March.

When we flew back to California after the funeral, we seemed to be on the other side of the world. The sky was blue and sunny, and the temperature was in the seventies. Our mailbox was stuffed with bills and junk mail and catalogs. Then I spied it: a thin letter with the USC logo. With a shock, I remembered my application.

I ripped it open. It was a form letter, thanking me for applying, but the length of the letter itself had already told me all I needed to know: I wasn't accepted.

I tried not to show my disappointment. I realized that the sun was shining, my kids were healthy, and Julie was healthy. After all that had gone on in the previous few months, and the death of Annette, graduate school at USC seemed a petty issue. Maybe next year, I thought.

That night I tossed and turned. I dreamed about a surreal journey that involved me being in film school—it was a fantastic place—and when I woke I felt a painful ache in my chest. I wasn't going to film school. That was reality, just like Annette's death. I didn't want to admit to myself how disappointed I was by the rejection. The next day it was back to normal: Julie went to work, I walked Lara to school. A few more days like that went by. Then there was another letter from USC. I ripped it open. Longer this time—it said I was
accepted
to USC. I read it slowly. I called USC's admissions office. A nice woman answered the phone, and I asked her in my most mellow radio voice if the letter was legitimate.

Yes, she said.

I asked her about the previous letter. She apologized and said there had been a clerical error and that some people on the acceptance list had inadvertently gotten rejection letters. (Some of my classmates later reported the same thing.) She apologized again. I thanked her, hung up, and jumped around our living room, whooping and pumping my fist into the air.

Three-year-old Maria and one-year-old Sophia, both with big eyes, started mimicking me. They pronged around the house, excited. Maria finally asked me what I was yelling about. I picked her up and held her high in the air. “I'm going to USC, honey, the best film school in the whole world!” She squealed and laughed as I tossed her in the air.

When I put her down, she asked me another question: “What's film school?”

M
y fourth film is coming up and I want finally to hit one out of the park. The three 507 groups hold an informal film fest, but I'm too embarrassed to show any of my first three films. On the night of the screenings, nearly every 507 student is there. I don't want to go. I make up an excuse not to be there. I feel like a complete outsider.

Meanwhile, the 508 partnership dance has been quietly going on behind the scenes. We don't have to formalize the partnerships until after spring break, but from what I'm picking up on, most people are already in partnerships.

One day at the end of Holman's sound lecture—the only class that has all three groups of us 507 students in one place—a trio of students takes the podium. They're from the previous semester and they're looking for 508 partners. They go onstage, one by one, and give short speeches that explain their predicaments. They give rather pitiful “choose me” pleas.

The presentations drive home the point about how serious these 508 partnerships are. Three students from an earlier 508 class are forced to beg to find new partnerships, all because their original partners failed to make the journey all the way through the semester. Wow. We understand USC isn't joking about this joined-at-the-hip thing.

I'm glad I've got my partnership set up. I'm also pleased with my progress on my fourth film. I'm going to get around the language barrier by using animals as actors and having human voice-overs. I'm going to create a doggy detective film, shot as a noir film. I'll have a dog-napping with a Sam Spade-like dog detective on the case. I intend to shoot it in black and white. I spend hours day after day on the phone, calling dozens of animal trainers in the area. L.A. has a
lot
of animal trainers who provide cats and dogs and mice and elephants and bears to the moving picture industry. Think of it the next time you see a cute little kitty in a commercial or a bear in a movie. Someone in L.A. is training that animal, and transporting it, and hoping it acts on command. I cold-call these places and pitch my idea. I tell them I want to use their animals, for free. I finally find a dog trainer who is willing to play along. She has several younger dogs she's training for Hollywood roles, she says, and they could use the practice. She doesn't have a lot of dogs, just three that would work. I'm ecstatic. This will be an awesome film.

This is what happens to people in the middle of 507. They think absolutely terrible ideas are brilliant. At least this is what happens to me. I've got my shooting weekend coming up and I'm swamped with work and I'm going to make a film using dogs. What a knucklehead I am! There's a long-running joke in Hollywood: never work with kids or animals. My first little film was with my kids. Now I'm planning to work with animals.

My schedule is just jammed. I'm rehearsing a long scene from THE PLAYER for my acting class. I'm doing a recording exercise for sound class and catching up on class reading. I'm writing fifteen pages for Ross Brown's screenwriting class. In Casper's class, I have the class term paper due at the end of the semester, and I'm setting aside time to do research at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' film archives museum on Vine Street. My paper on TEACHER'S PET needs to include the production history, social impact, historical setting, and critical reaction to the film.

Spring break is fast approaching, and I'm going to be taking part of it to drive to Arizona to meet up with my brothers and parents. We're gathering on the first anniversary of Annette's death.

The stress is getting to me. One morning as I drive to USC, I think about Annette. I'm lost in thought when I arrive in University Park, but I see I need gas, so I pull into a service station near USC. It's about 7
A.M.
, and as I push a nozzle into the Oldsmobile, I see a good-sized guy in shabby clothes approaching other people filling their cars. He sneaks up on people as they pump their gas and corners them against their cars. He's an extremely aggressive panhandler, and I watch him receive several dollars from a smaller woman who seems frightened. From where I'm standing, the situation is on the razor's edge of robbery.

The panhandler is maybe thirty, handsome, and amazingly strong-looking for a junkie hitting up people at a Shell station. As I watch him, I feel a flash of anger. How come this guy is still alive? My sister got a horrible form of leukemia and died. She spent her life helping people. She had her own research lab and, in the irony of all ironies, had just gotten a nearly one-million-dollar grant to do research into the type of cancer that killed her. She didn't extort money from people at dawn at a gas station near USC.

As the guy walks toward me, I step toward him. I want to fight. I feel rage and sorrow well up in my chest. I want him to absorb the unfairness that was dealt my little sister. I get in front of him and unleash a stream of colorful and insulting profanities.

He stops in his tracks. I don't think he's used to this from USC faculty. He's about my size, and we stand just a few feet apart. I want him to try to hit me. I'm just itching for him to make the first move. I know the gas station has the parking lot videotaped, and I want him to give me a justified reason to kick his ass. I insult him, tell him he's pathetic. I know if he moves toward me, I'm going to hit him hard, right in the ribs, and I know he'll drop like a stone.

A little voice in my head is aghast. I'm not a guy who picks fights. But part of me—a big part—now wants to battle with something tangible, and I want to fight this douchebag who's putting the lean on fifty-year-old women refueling their Civics.

He's surprised, and he starts backing up. He shakes his head and calls me crazy. I follow him out of the parking lot, calling him a litany of colorful and profane names. I
am
crazy.

Later, when I park on campus, I take a few minutes to compose myself. I realize picking fights at gas stations with druggies at 7
A.M.
is not good behavior.

Meanwhile, others in 507 seem to be losing it, too. One of the women in class goes to the hospital for an extended stay because of a kidney infection. She blames it on overwork and her nonstop consumption of Red Bull Sugarfree. One of the men suffers from a bad bout of food poisoning. He says his immune system is down. Everyone looks tired. When we do short assignments in class, Fee Fee says she just wants to sleep. The dynamic in 507 is becoming more confrontational. My elbow still oozes blood from the “acting” I did under H., so I can't look at him without questioning his judgment. The fundamental fact is we are tired of each other. We are in class together seemingly all the time. Ideally, we could be gelling as a group, but we're not. At least, I'm not gelling with the group.