Film School (32 page)

On our last day of 508 class, Pablo has us gather in a circle. He turns down the lights and asks us to meditate together. At first, the class nervously giggles
. Oh, it's Pablo doing his granola thing again.

I groan, too. This gather-in-a-circle stuff seems so contrived and, well, phony. But I go along with it. We breathe in. We breathe out. The giggles subside. In the darkness, I reflect back on the semester. It started with me in a hospital bed. Now I'm focusing on meditating with a graying hippie and thirteen other people who have come to know me very well. I breathe in and out. I hear the others breathing in and out. We keep meditating and focusing on what the past four months have meant to us all. We go on for quite some time in the darkness, and eventually I hear a woman softly crying. Everyone is into the moment, including me.

The lights come up. Everyone looks chastened, and maybe a bit embarrassed. Pablo quietly asks us to talk a bit about what the semester meant to each of us. We are all serious, touchingly so. When it comes my time to talk, I feel my throat tighten. I breathe deep again. I tell the class I appreciate them all, and I appreciated them being supportive of me and upbeat with me despite all my medical crud. I thank Dan for his talent and for putting up with my constant need for food. I feel my voice catch—it is really a bit emotional—and I explain how my second time at USC has been so much more satisfying, so much more collaborative, and so much more rewarding in ways I can't put a finger on. I say I've changed for the better. I stop because my voice won't go any further. I look around and I feel real friendship with the others in the class, and I know I'll be going through the rest of my time in school with these same thirteen people. I am grateful.

When we have finished going around the circle, Pablo speaks. “This class has been the most exceptional class I've ever had in my years of teaching,” he says quietly. “There were cases where some of your partnerships looked in dire straits”—he can't help but glancing at Dan and me—“but you turned it around and had truly phenomenal results. The films in this class are very strong. I'm very pleased, and I'd like to thank you all for what has been a really exceptional experience.”

I mentioned in the introduction
that I know two Hollywood actors, both college pals. One is Pete Krause of SIX FEET UNDER and DIRTY SEXY MONEY (and currently PARENTHOOD) fame. The other is Pete Breitmayer, another Gustavian who has made a career in Hollywood. Breitmayer is a comic song-and-dance character actor, and he's been in films by Clint Eastwood and the Coen brothers and a lot of TV shows and a bazillion TV commercials. If you see a rubber-faced guy on TV who makes you laugh, there's a chance it's Breitmayer.

For WTF, my 508 masterpiece, I want to add a voice-over. I want it comic, I want it serious. I want it to be in the first person. The Boss will be telling the story, giving his side of what happened, as if he's reminiscing from a smoky bar. I call Breitmayer and ask him to voice it. He's glad to, and he meets me at USC one morning right before we sound-lock the picture. Breitmayer is wearing a porkpie hat, and we catch up on family talk—his wife and son are doing well, thank you. I'd given him the script the night before, and when we enter a soundproof room to record, he asks me if he can ad-lib a bit. I tell him to ad-lib as much as he wants. I turn on a microphone, get a sound level. Then I open my laptop and project a silent copy of WTF so he can time his voice-over to the action. Then I leave the room. An hour later he's done. We have lunch, and he drives off to an audition.

That afternoon I listen to the tape. It's freakin' perfect. His ad-libs are simply right on.

I cut together the best of his voice-over and lay it onto the soundtrack. It's the last piece of the puzzle. Shortly after that, I do my final sound mix. A professional sound technician does the mixing of the score, the sound effects, and the voice-over—it's the one concession to keeping the schedule moving. My technician listens to the musical score with Frank, the sound teacher, hovering nearby. She listens to Breitmayer's voice-over. She listens to my background sound effects track. She shakes her head. “These are all really good,” she says.

I shrug and give Frank a wink. “I know,” I say.

J
ulie arrives in California the day before the screening of WTF. I'm so nervous about the screening I take her swimming at the USC pool to stay active, and I walk into the pool with my cell phone in my swim trunks.

Hundreds of students and crew and cast members turn out to watch these 508 films. I throw a party beforehand, right outside the auditorium, for the cast and crew and significant others. We eat Irene's cookies and quickly drain a mini-keg of beer. Then we tramp inside and sit together. There are sixteen of us. When the film comes on, the crowd laughs hard at the movie and gasps when the woman is hit by the truck. At the end, the applause is loud.

Really loud.

I walk to a podium with Dan after the film to make a short speech. It's the USC way after screening. I call up everyone who was part of the film, and soon Robert and Dream and Jeffrey and Mikey and the surveyor and the surveyor's wife and Niall-Conor and Breitmayer gather around us. It's like every awards show you've ever seen, and it probably looks just as hokey to an outsider. On the inside, though, it's a good moment. I point out that this is truly how many people it takes to do one small student film, and how they all worked for not a penny, and how, without them, there really wouldn't be a film. And then I point to Julie, who is sitting in the crowd next to Carl and Irene, and I thank her.

T
he screening is a smash, I feel great, and my briefcase is stolen.

After the bigger USC student screenings at the Norris, there's a wine and cheese soirée outside the theater. During this gathering, I put my briefcase down against a wall so I'm not lugging it around while I socialize. When I return, it's gone.

My phone is kaput from the dip in the pool. My briefcase—a very cool and distinctive red bicycle messenger bag that I got as a gift from Julie—is stolen. After Julie flies home, I have to remain on campus several more days. I check the campus police department. Nothing. Luckily, I did not have my laptop in the briefcase . . . and whoever stole it got nothing more than a lot of personal notes and a version of CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS. I keep my eyes peeled on campus, hoping to find someone carrying my bag.

When it comes time to fly back to Minneapolis, I'm in a quandary. I can leave the Suburban at long-term parking at LAX for a month (for more than $200) or take a cab from La Cañada to LAX (more than $200 round-trip). Then Manny tells me that USC has a shuttle program to the airport. I can leave my truck in a campus parking lot for free and catch a free student shuttle to the airport. Sweet! I look up the shuttle timetables and one matches my flight perfectly.

A hard, cold December rain is pounding Los Angeles the day I'm flying out, and I realize my free shuttle trip means lots of hoofing it from the campus parking garage to the shuttle stop in the pouring rain. I'm soaked waiting for the airport bus, and surrounding me are thirty undergraduates. I feel so old, so out of place. The bus pulls up and the driver gets out holding a clipboard; she asks the students to check their names off the list as they get on the bus. A list? I didn't know anything about any list! I thought space on the bus was on a first-come, first-served basis. The bus is huge, and the crowd isn't going to fill it, but we're supposed to have a reservation. It's pouring. I wonder how long it would take to get a cab in the rain.

I make my decision: students are having trouble getting their suitcases into the bus. I'm carrying a light carry-on bag. I see a young woman struggling to get her suitcase up the stairs, and I skirt around the bus driver and help her, Mr. Chivalrous. The driver never sees me. Then I take a seat at the rear of the bus. I keep my soaked head down.

Now I feel really old, and a bit like one of those weird, smelly outcasts who sit all day at the free computers at the public library, gazing at who-knows-what for hours at a time. I'm surrounded by dozens of young bubbly undergrads who are going home to Mom and Dad for winter break. I'm sneaking my way aboard so I can go visit my wife and kids. They giggle and chat. When we get to LAX and stop at Terminal 2, I make my way for the door. As I pass the bus driver, she glances up at me with surprise on her face:
Where did you come from?
I give her a smile. “Thanks for the ride, ma'am,” I say as I exit.

M
y winter break is good but tempered by more mediocre medical news. Dr. Flaata tells me additional tests show my autoimmune disease seems to be worsening. The numbers are inching in the wrong direction. I'm also having problems keeping my blood thinner doses regulated. I'm getting my blood tested every other week, and sometimes my blood is too thin, other times it clots too quickly. I regulate my diet: limited greenery and no more grapefruits. Those foods interfere with the warfarin I take daily. Every time I get bad medical news, it's a kick in the shins.

I tell Dr. Flaata I'm also suffering from extremely sore feet and knees. I'm barely able to do my daily three-mile runs, and I keep several different kinds of shoes in the Suburban so I can switch them during the day. I read a great deal about my ailment—and it seems my body is attacking my joints. Despite my issues, everyone who sees me is relieved to find I'm healthy-looking and tan. My brain also seems to work just fine—no problems there, except for the nagging worry that my stupid little mistakes—submerging my phone, leaving my briefcase unattended, not noticing that the USC shuttle bus needed reservations—were due to some deficiency in my memory bank.

The good news is the kids and Julie are doing well . . . and have survived four long months of my absence. They've all become swimmers and train at nights at the local YMCA pool. It feels so peaceful to be home. My feet and knees are so sore I begin swimming with them at the Y. The water feels good. Christmas comes and goes, and then New Year's, and the days until my return to USC count down. Julie works a ton, and she's saved lots of her on-call weekends for when I'm around, so she's gone more than usual. There's a long list of home repair projects; it's hardly a leisurely vacation, but I take Julie and the girls out cross-country skiing as often as possible. Skating is out for me—I'm wary of whacking my head on the ice while my blood is slow to clot with warfarin. But skiing is gentle or so I tell myself.

Leaving for L.A. is never easy. The kids hug me and cry. Julie hugs me and bites her lip. There's always a strong pull to abort the trip, to spin on my heel at the airport security checkpoint and return home.

This time, this semester, no one is depending on me. I'm not doing any major film projects. If I hadn't done so well in 508, I don't know what I would have done. Perhaps I would have listened to the voice that said,
Enough, this is stupid
. But I did do well. My reputation on campus has risen greatly, and I feel so much more connected with my classmates than I did after 507.

So I walk through security and get on the airliner flying to L.A.

When I land, it's a copy of the day I left: hard, cold rain. I land near midnight, and I have a cab drive me to USC, and I feel like an adult as I pay the cabbie instead of like a sneaky freeloader on a campus bus. On the upper floor of a USC parking garage, I find my Suburban. The garage is almost completely empty, and my boots click on the cement. It's a lonely place, and I cross my fingers that the Suburban will start after sitting for a month. It does, and I arrive at Carl and Irene's house early in the morning of my first day of classes. In my carry-on is a fresh supply of blood thinners, a new cell phone, a new briefcase, and a new pair of swimming goggles.

I
'm not making any major films this semester. I'm going to focus on course work and fulfilling required classes. Many of my 508 classmates are crewing on fiction films or documentaries, but a handful of us are spending the semester focusing on specialized areas of filmmaking. This semester, for me, is all about focusing on writing and cinematography.

When I get back to USC, construction crews are digging a giant hole, the site of an upgraded film school building. We students had earlier seen a mock-up of the new facility, and none of us paid much attention to it. But the growing hole in the ground gives us an indication of how big the structure will be.

The building is being funded by George Lucas, who donated a cool $175 million. The gift from Lucas is the biggest ever to any film school anywhere. It's also the largest donation to USC in its history. Industry heavyweights such as 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and The Walt Disney Company kicked in another $50 million.

The interior of the new building will total a hundred and thirty seven thousand square feet, or more than twice the space of two football fields, end zones included. Judging by the scale model on display, it will have a Mediterranean vibe and a grand entryway.

Lucas later tells
The New York Times
: “The only way you are going to get respect on a college campus, or a university campus, is to build something that is important . . . Schools and universities mainly understand money.”

The new facility looks like it will be stunningly different from our current building, which is an ugly, cramped, and abysmally designed structure less than a third the size.

Our space is woefully overcrowded. Counting all majors and specialties, graduate and undergraduate, there are more than fifteen hundred film students at USC. As a result, many of my classes are held at a distance from the film school proper. I have classes in the school's education department building, in a general classroom building, in the Norris Theater, in the Zemeckis building. Before the new construction got under way, I'd never paid much attention to the fact that the USC School of Cinematic Arts spills over into the surrounding USC campus like a well-fed amoeba.