Film School (10 page)

This creates a dilemma. For us student filmmakers, there's no advertising our film beforehand. That is, no one knows if a film is supposed to be a drama or a comedy, serious or flippant. The directors don't announce to a class:
this is my comedy!
It's an artificial situation. After all, everyone in the real world has some idea of what a movie is about before they see it in a theater or rent it from Netflix, especially today, where even the most casual moviegoer has ample opportunities to find out every detail about a new film.

In our case, no one knows what will be appearing on the screen. As a result, no one knows whether to laugh or be serious. Our small audience is reserved and waiting. They're looking for obvious clues—certainly no one wants to laugh at a film that's supposed to be serious. With MY CRAZY DAD, there's no outward evidence this is a comedy. There's no comic music, no bug-eyed acting, no pranks or pratfalls. There's S., looking buttoned down and serious at a funeral. There's nothing funny about it, at least on the surface.

When S. goes on his journey, the audience is silent. Only two people in the class have an idea what is coming—me and S. Finally, there's some chuckling as S. begins his hike and begins to fall apart. The location is awesome, and a shot of S. walking far in the distance through a large field, his bright white shirt glowing in the setting sun, gets some appreciative murmurs. Finally, when S. begins digging in the dirt, scratching at it with his bare hands and failing to find any treasure, there is some laugher. It's not the kind of raucous laughter I had hoped for.

But it's enough. At least people aren't sitting on their hands. The lights come on and I get a round of polite applause. S. gives me a thumbs-up.

I move to the hot seat. I'm facing a dozen-and-a-half of my classmates plus FTC.

FTC asks a couple of students for their synopses of the film. That brings some chuckles because the film couldn't be more straightforward. The students duly note the plot.

When FTC asks for suggestions and critiques, a few others speak up, suggesting the pace could be faster, with less walking. I agree with them. Eight minutes is a long time. A few others chime in with concerns about some soft focus at times, and a couple of instances where my exposure was off. But the tone from the students is positive. One student notes I have “lots of control over your craft and good performance from the lead actor.”

I sit in the hot seat feeling good.

Then FTC clears his throat. Uh-oh. Here we go again. I wonder what I did wrong this time. He's frowning. He doesn't like the film. He tells me very directly. Here's the entirety of his written notes:

The continuity of the shots are very clear. So I followed the sequence of events very clearly. But at the end I knew no more than I knew at the beginning—a son (?) looks for treasure (?) with a map. Who is the son? Why does he want the treasure? What was his relationship with his mother? With his father? Was his father crazy? Does it matter? Why did we watch this?

Please have reasons that are evident in the film for your next go-around.

A
few months after Julie and I got married and moved to Philadelphia, I received an offer from
the Philadelphia Inquirer
. They needed a part-time freelancer. I said
yes
immediately. Julie was deep into her graduate studies in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, even as she was readying her application for medical school. We moved into a tiny apartment in Center City Philadelphia.

Two weeks into my gig, I was assigned a feature story about a kayak race in eastern Pennsylvania, on a Sunday morning. No other reporters were eager to take the assignment. Lucky for me, the temperature was below freezing. Ice lined the river. I got a great feature story and my first front-page Metro story, and from then on I was a go-to guy for human interest stories. Within a few months, the
Inquirer
promoted me. I covered a county courthouse, crime, and cops, and did a lot of feature stories. It was swell working for a place that had a good reputation and deep resources, and where if you put a phone call out, it generally got returned quickly.

Meanwhile, Julie planned to finish a master's degree in ecology, then go on to doctoring. She was accepted to some very good medical schools. Her favorite was the University of Chicago. Perhaps she had fond memories of the time I sneaked her on the plane to a liver harvest.

With love-sparkles still in my eyes, and while in my second year at the
Inquirer
, I started applying for reporting jobs in Chicago.

Yet I didn't get a nibble from the big Chicago papers. Yes, the
Inquirer
liked me, but the recruiters at the
Tribune
and
Sun
-
Times
didn't.
The Wall Street Journal's
Chicago editor called me, said he liked my clips, and invited me to lunch but emphasized they weren't hiring. I had offers from newspapers in New Jersey and North Carolina and Pennsylvania—places where Julie was also accepted to medical schools—but no offers from any of the big Chicago media outlets.

Yet one newspaper in Chicago did offer me a job:
The Daily Southtown
, circulation fifty-five thousand. It covered Chicago's South Side and the southern suburbs, a working-class paper for a working-class audience. It was a big step down from the
Inquirer
, which had nearly ten times the circulation. It was supposed to be a temporary gig. I ended up working at The
Daily Southtown
during all four years of Julie's medical school. I called it
The
Daily
Saltmine
.

And the characters in the newsroom! There were foul-mouthed miscreants, neurotic workaholics, the politically connected, the very talented, the inebriated. And those were just the women.

What the paper lacked in prestige, it made up for in character. The newspaper's billboards on South Side Chicago expressways showed a toilet, a razor blade, and a rolled-up
Southtown
. The not-so-subtle message: a shit, a shave, a
Southtown
.

I had great friends at the
Saltmine
. I think being at such a journalistic underdog made us tighter. My colleagues and I played tennis at 6
A.M.
, dealt cards at night, went to dingy South Side bars on weekends. And never underestimate the skills of people at a smaller paper. Two of the people I worked with have since won Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's highest award. Michael J. Kelley, who hired me at the
Saltmine
, later became managing editor of the
Las Vegas Sun
. Under Kelley's hand, that paper won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2009 for investigating the high number of construction worker deaths in Las Vegas. And my fellow reporter and sometime-lunchmate M.L. Elrick later moved on to the
Detroit Free Press
, where he won a Pulitzer for Local Reporting, also in 2009. Elrick, funnier than most professional comedians, reported on the text-messaging scandal that resulted in the jailing of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. In addition, my
Southtown
pal David Heinzmann is now a big wheel at the
Chicago Tribune
and an acclaimed crime novelist. (In the spirit of full disclosure, Dave wrote one of my letters of recommendation for USC.)

Working at the
Southtown
put me in some of Chicago's most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Once, while working a night shift, I covered the story of a young woman who had worked her way out of a bad neighborhood only to be shot in the head outside her new job in the supposedly safe suburbs. The shooter was her ex-boyfriend; he hid in her car and ambushed her.

I was sent to interview the woman's mourning family and neighbors in the heart of a South Side ghetto. It was dark. I was the only reporter on the scene. When I got out of my car, I was approached by five men, all older teens. They demanded to know what I was doing there—a white guy wearing a dress shirt and tie. I explained I wanted to learn more about the woman and her successes. They listened, five gangbangers. They told me they knew the woman well and that she never gave anyone any trouble. They were sad and, it seemed, furious. I drove back to the newsroom physically untouched—but emotionally touched—and wrote the story. I made my hundred bucks for the day, and saw another hard example of life in Chicago's South Side.

Julie got pregnant in her third year of med school, and I told Kelley I wanted a cushier job when the baby came. He moved me from the news desk to the features desk. No more breaking news, but I had an easy nine-to-five schedule. It was, however, yet another step down in the journalism world. When our baby was born, a lovely little girl we named Lara, Julie could take only a few weeks away from school. I took three months off work to stay home with our infant. Raising a baby seemed so much more important than covering the news.

When Julie graduated, she received a residency position at the University of Minnesota. For my going-away party, my reporter pal Heinzmann wrote an invitation touting me as “St. Paul's brawniest soccer-mom.”

He was wrong on one point. We moved to Minneapolis, not St. Paul.

I thought paradise awaited us. I even planned to write a film script.

I was wrong on the paradise part. Residency for Julie meant ninety-hour weeks, working overnight at the hospital every fourth night. That went on for three years. I freelanced and juggled the domestic duties.

Our bright spot was when we had another daughter, a beautiful girl we named Maria.

T
he different levels of talent in our 507 class are starting to show. In the first class exercise, the little two-minute film, we all did roughly the same kind of work. Now that we're on the second film, we see a real difference in quality.

J., the guy with the great story about his dying grandfather, remains an enigma in class. He's opinionated and irritable at times, supportive and friendly other times. His second film is a revelation.

It's a play on the silent films of the 1910s. A lady and a robber meet and have a relationship. It's a great-looking work. He's using lots of locations and several actors, all in early-twentieth-century period costume. The video looks very film-like, and the acting and editing seem lifted from 1915. It's very amusing, and the class loves it from the first few seconds. We start clapping and shouting during the film, we're so impressed. The film uses old-fashioned title cards to get around the use of the one-word-only restriction, and the number of the title cards keeps increasing until by the end of the film, title cards are literally raining down on the characters. It's a postmodern take on early silent films, and it's breathtaking how much effort J. put into the film. In a final scene, the characters dodge dozens of three-foot by two-foot title cards that appear to be falling from the sky. When I watch it, I'm wondering how many people J. had helping him throw title cards. And how did he print that many cards in the first place? I'm impressed, and so is the class. My comments are typical: “Very funny and VERY clever.”

J. is beaming in the hot seat as he hears us students talk. We are all, I think, taken aback by his talents. I know I feel suddenly unworthy.
Who is this guy?
In the back of my mind, I know that somewhere in our class there may be a real talent, someone who will later turn out to be big, someone in the pages of
Variety
, someone we'll see interviewed at the Oscars. When I watch the film, I can't help but think,
Damn, this guy is good.

As always, we students critique first, then the instructors get the last word. J. is beaming when FTC begins to talk. FTC is not smiling. In fact, he looks positively angry. He's angry at J., and he lets loose a tirade against the film. The gist of it is this: FTC thought the film was just a clever exercise in getting around the one-word rule. The longer FTC talks, the more upset he becomes. He accuses J. of mocking the process, of not taking the film or the class seriously.

When FTC is done, the class is silent. So is J. He looks shell-shocked. I'm wondering what the hell FTC is talking about. Yes, J. did get around the one-word rule, but incorporating title cards into the action of the film was brilliant and funny. It was raining title cards! In my notes, I had told J. it was “sort of cheating by using all those title cards.” But FTC seems to be going overboard. Way overboard. J.'s work was fantastic, and FTC had not a word of praise for it. Could FTC have felt threatened? Jealous? Upstaged by some cocky student with an outlandish story about his dying grandfather and a big helping of talent who makes it look easy?

After screenings, our class gathers for a dinner at the 2-9 Café, a restaurant just a few blocks off campus. The dinners had started a week before, and they were a nice way to spend some time together and socialize. For those screening films, Thursday nights marked the end of an often-frantic three-week push. I drive Fee Fee from the Shrine parking lot to the restaurant in my Oldsmobile, and we talk only about J.'s treatment at the hands of FTC. Neither of us understands it. At the restaurant, we are all there—all but J. We sit at an outdoor table and wonder if he is going to show up. Perhaps he's going to lick his wounds in private.

Fifteen minutes later, J. enters, looking downcast. Almost in unison, we rise to our feet and give him a standing ovation. We are loud, and we hoot and high-five him. I start chanting his name. He looks extremely glad to be surrounded by us. In class, J. had been rendered mute by FTC's criticism. Now in the outdoor bar, he loosens up.

I look at the group of us, smiling and cheering on J. We are cohesive as a group in a way we never were in the first weeks. It seems to be the happiest I've seen any of us. We're having beers, talking excitedly, and the sense of togetherness is tangible. I wonder if FTC staged the outburst as a way to build unity among the class, the same way a drill sergeant will harangue new recruits to create a brotherhood in the barracks. I doubt it, though. My guess is he was just angry.