Film School (6 page)

The campus is also very much
in
Los Angeles. The high-rises of downtown are just a few miles away. On a clear day, it's possible to see the Hollywood sign far to the north if you stand on the upper floors of a campus building. The rejuvenated Staples Center (home of the Lakers) is a short bike ride away.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts is located on the north side of campus, very close to the dental school, the music school, and the athletic offices. It's a sweet and funny mix: football players and dental students and music students and film students share the sidewalks of the north side of campus. The athletic dining hall—the Jocketeria—is just a few hundred feet from the film school. Ditto with the athletic hall of fame, a glass lobby where you can see the treasures of USC football history. The USC football program and the USC film school are the two highest profile programs on campus; they are located cheek by jowl, and there is absolutely no mistaking who belongs to which program. The muscular mastodons chowing down on tall stacks of pork chops in the Jocketeria are not film students. The thin guys smoking and drinking coffee while sitting on boxes of camera and lighting equipment are not football players.

N
or are there many graying students sitting on those camera boxes. Very few people over forty have gone to film school at USC. It seems understandable.

• It's expensive. Every year I'm at USC, for the same amount of money, I could buy a nice new automobile and drive it off a cliff.
  
• There's a little rumor floating around that Hollywood is not welcoming to
  older
  people. In 2010, many of the major networks, studios, and talent agencies agreed to a $70 million payout to settle an age discrimination lawsuit filed by Hollywood writers. Those awarded monies in the class-action suit were writers
  forty and older
  .
  
• There's no guarantee of work when a student graduates with a degree in film production, no matter what the age. None. Before I applied to USC, I spoke with an admissions director and asked if they had data on what happens to students after they graduate. He said the school did not track that information other than anecdotally. It seemed a polite way of admitting that many students don't work in the industry after completing their degrees. Comparing film school to law school or medical school is like comparing apples and oranges to beef liver.
  
• The entertainment industry is heavily based on relationships. Starting in the field with a ten- or twenty-year disadvantage in cultivating relationships is hard to overcome.
  
• Film and television are not family-friendly fields. The days are long. Work can be sporadic; travel is often required. It is a game for those with energy and perseverance. While at USC, I hear many stories from successful graduates who said the years immediately after leaving film school are ones of poverty and constant struggle.
  
• Film schools are hard places to fit in socially as an older student. I'm married. I'd like to stay that way. Clubbing/barhopping/going to the strip club is not on my schedule, which makes it hard to socialize with some of the younger students.
  

Perhaps someday, older film school students won't stick out like sore thumbs. At one time, law schools were mainly places for fresh-faced college grads. But now no one bats an eye when a cop or a housewife goes to law school. A neighbor of mine, a woman with five kids, went to law school in her forties. It's the new normal.

As to being married—in case you missed it, people in the moving picture industry seem as attracted to marriage as Superman is attracted to Kryptonite. Just a scattering of my classmates are married. Less than 5 percent by my count—a far smaller percentage than in my wife's medical school class at the University of Chicago. There, more than a quarter of the med students in her class were married by the time they graduated.

And kids? Forget it. During my years at USC, I knew of only two other production grad students who had children. One was a Korean who was going to return to Seoul; the other was married to an NFL player. They each had one child.

Then there was me, who had three.

A
t my next 507 production class, there is a break in the ice. FTC seems a little more cheerful this time around. Maybe he had a cup of coffee with the upbeat Ross Brown. Whatever the reason, the frown is missing. I'm fully aware, more than I was in college, that instructors are regular humans, prone to having—gasp!—bad days. In college as a nineteen-year-old, I was once surprised when an English professor, his eyes lined with tiredness, said we might someday understand what it was like to sleep on a couch after a marital spat. I didn't understand him at the time.

FTC gives us our first assignment. We are to make a two-minute silent film, edited in the camera (which means we have to shoot every scene in order—no rearranging scenes). We each have one day to shoot it over the weekend.

We are limited to one day because every camera will be shared by three students. We will air the films on Tuesday. It is now Thursday. We are assigned our class equipment: a well-used Sony PD150, a basic digital camera that we are told to operate in manual mode. No auto-focus, no auto-white balance is allowed. My camera partners are Fee Fee and an exchange student from India who is pursuing his PhD in critical studies.

In the hallway during a class break, a few of my classmates express their fears. They hadn't expected to have to do a film so quickly, with such short notice and with such limitations (no dialogue, no real editing, and having to shoot in sequence). They are worried about finding locations, actors, writing a story. They worry about having just one day to shoot.

I look forward to the shoot. I figure the shorter and more elemental the project, the less chance there is for me to screw up. I've never done this before.

My classmates' main worry seems to be finding actors. Yes, there are thousands of actors in Los Angeles, but actors are loath to spend their time on tiny, low-quality student exercises because they want to stack their demo reel (and résumé) with good material. An in-camera exercise by a new grad student isn't likely to look very good—or make them look very good.

Thus, if someone agrees to be an actor in a class exercise, it is a labor of love. As film students, we'll often be too busy to act in each other's class projects. Because of that, friends, roommates, and relatives get pressed into service. My classmates who grew up in Los Angeles—like red-haired S.—have an advantage because they have so many friends and family to lean on. Newcomers to L.A. are at a disadvantage.

I smile because I have an ace up my sleeve. I will use my own children as actors! For such a simple and short exercise, they will be perfect. And because I don't live in a cramped student apartment but rather in a nice sunny rental house in the far suburbs of Ventura County, I have plenty of places where I can shoot.

A story immediately pops into my mind, one remarkably true to life. In my story, my four-year-old will covet her big sister's training-wheel-equipped bicycle while she sits on her tiny tricycle. Then, during a nap, my four-year-old will dream about the bike and ride it through a grassy suburban park. I know my four-year-old will light up the screen with her big grin.

Every camera partnership has to decide how to split up the camera for the three-day weekend: My partners agree I will take the camera first, shoot my film Saturday morning, then drive the camera back to USC for a handoff Saturday afternoon to Shorav, the PhD student from India. He will shoot Sunday, and then Fee Fee will have the camera all day Monday. The school-owned Sony is in a protective plastic case the size of an airline carry-on bag. We are also sharing a heavy-duty tripod, which also comes in a rather large carrying bag. Together, they weigh about twenty pounds. I carry a bicycle messenger bag with my laptop and class books and legal pads. It weighs another fifteen pounds, at least.

After class, I carry all of it to my car, parked on the fifth floor of the Shrine Auditorium ramp. It's another hot day. I walk up the parking lot steps, carrying some forty pounds of gear. My clothes are too warm. The Shrine has a big ramp—the place used to be home to the Academy Awards and still gets used for events like the Screen Actors Guild Awards. I finally get to my car. I'm sweaty.

As I stand next to my car, taking in the view of campus from the parking deck, I realize I'm a real film student, finally. I am one of those people who walk the sidewalks of USC towing heavy cases of film equipment behind them.

I am a film student. Suddenly, I feel a wave of excitement pass through me. It's taken nearly two years of planning and applications to get to this point, and here I am, putting film equipment into the trunk of my Oldsmobile.

I admire how professional my equipment looks. It's all stamped with U-S-C, and both camera and tripod look as if they've been on a hundred shoots. I actually dance a little jig in the quiet parking ramp, I'm so dang happy.

I'm also exceedingly thirsty! All day I've been walking, walking, walking, and sometimes racing to get to classes on time. In the trunk of my car, I have a quart of apple juice and a few bottles of water. It's been a long day and a long week. I love apple juice. I drink the whole bottle. I load the equipment in and take a breather. My legs are tired, and it seems I've walked a hundred miles during the first week around campus.

I inspect the camera one more time: it's heftier than a standard consumer video camera, and I've got an extra lens and a charger in the eggshell-foam-lined case. I get in my car and slowly circle down to the ground floor.

Then my stomach takes a jump. I realize the quart of apple juice is not settling well. Not well at all. I realize I have a problem.

I park illegally outside the Zemeckis building and waddle past the front desk attendant. I cross my fingers that a bathroom is available—one is!—and close the door as fast as I can. I have a massive attack of diarrhea. As my guts contract and my forehead sweats, I worry if I'll get a parking ticket and I worry if I'll be able to navigate the freeways without soiling my pants and I wonder how my kids are and how Julie is and I realize on this day I paid another $200 of money I don't have to go to class with a bunch of people half my age.

I calculate between cramps that it's costing me five dollars of tuition money just to sit in this lonely bathroom stall.

T
rying to measure the importance of moving pictures on our society objectively is impossible. Their influence on pop culture dwarfs their economic value. For example, I once wrote speeches for executives at Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in the United States. Cargill's yearly revenues now hover in the $120 billion range. By comparison, total yearly revenue for CBS, the most successful broadcast network, is in the $13–14 billion range. By revenue, Cargill absolutely dwarfs CBS. It's almost ten times bigger! But when was the last time you heard anyone talking about Cargill? Most people have no idea the company exists. Yes, it exports a quarter of the country's grain and supplies a fifth of the country's meat supply and shapes every single egg in every single Egg McMuffin. But Americans ignore it. They have food in their stomachs, so they can concentrate on more important matters, like Brad and Angelina.

The biggest entertainment companies are Walt Disney, News Corp., and Time Warner. The ranks of these companies according to the
Fortune 500
list in 2010 are fifty-seven, seventy-six, and eighty-two, respectively.

Film and television punch far beyond their weight class. They are like professional sports. Millions of kids dream of being pro athletes, yet a nearly infinitesimal slice of them actually become pro athletes. And millions of people dream of being in the moving picture business. A few actually make a living at it. I know the odds when I start. They suck, almost as bad as the odds of making a living as a newspaper reporter.

Saturday morning comes and my kids are thrilled. I've been away from home all week. I arrived home late Friday night, my stomach fully settled after my encounter with the apple juice. Julie and I live only fifty-five miles to the northwest of USC, in the suburb of Camarillo, which is in Ventura County, but it's too far for me to commute in L.A. traffic. If I drive in rush hour, it can be a four-hour round-trip. So Monday night through Thursday night I sleep in a house in La Cañada, an upscale suburb located next to Pasadena that's about seventeen miles from campus. When Carl and Irene Christensen heard I was accepted to USC, they called me and told me I could stay at their home. For free.

It was a stunningly generous offer. I worried I'd be intruding on their lives and making too much of a ruckus, but my worries were overruled by the simple math of it: I saved serious time and lots of money. I soon realized their house offered much more than merely a place to sleep. Their neighborhood is an oasis of peace and quiet—so different from USC. Horse trails wind through the neighborhood. At night, I sometimes hear the plop of oranges falling off a nearby tree. And in the evenings and early mornings, I chat with Carl and Irene.

Weekends, I'm home in Camarillo with Julie and the kids—and her mom, Jean, who is living with us while I go to school and taking care of the kids while Julie is at work. So I live a life in triplicate. There's my USC life, my life in La Cañada, and my life in Camarillo.

On Saturday morning, I explain that Maria, my four-year-old, will be the lead character. Lara, who is eight, thinks that is a great idea because she really isn't interested in acting. I do warn Maria (with all my vast wisdom of film shoots) that acting for film can be pretty boring. She brushes off my warning. She wants to get going. Sophia, who is two, doesn't understand what we're doing. She just grins and races around the house.

My first film shoot is a playful lark. The day is sunny and warm. My kids and Julie are excited to see my official USC camera and tripod. Julie is amused by the crudely drawn storyboards (all stick figures) I created in preparation for the shoot. I spend the morning in the house, carefully setting up shots. Then I call for Maria, the star. She looks wistfully at her big sister's bike, right on command, and glumly pedals her tricycle in our suburban garage. It takes only an hour or so to shoot a minute of tape.