Film School (8 page)

It seems at first like a luxury of time. Twelve weeks to make just four short films? It sounds almost routine. Easy, in fact. Until I start making them.

In the past, I'd burned up eight minutes of film shooting a birthday party before the candles were even blown out. That, I quickly learned, is not making a short film; that's recording something, just as jotting down a list of things to be picked up at the grocery store isn't the same as writing a short story.

Now, just a few weeks into classes, I'm already feeling a time crunch. In film school, I spend a lot of time in classes, more than twenty hours a week. Add a few hours of getting to and from those classes, standing in lines (waiting for equipment or an editing booth or food), and thirty hours a week is down the drain before doing any actual filming. I also have lots of studying and assignments for my other classes. My screenwriting class requires me to write several scenes every week. My 507 sound class requires several hours of reading a week, and my 507 acting class takes up an astounding amount of time. For that class alone, I'm required to memorize scenes from various films, practice acting with small groups of students, and direct scenes with the same students.

Of all my class work, my acting class eats up a disproportionate amount of time. The school wants to have student directors know what it's actually like to act, and USC puts a heavy emphasis on understanding acting theory, especially the theories put forward by the well-known instructor Uta Hagen, author of
Respect for Acting
. It's a dandy idea, but I'm one of the few students in my 507 class who has done any acting. In high school, I wrote and acted in a few silly comic skits and got the lead in a one-act comedy. I spent a year at Exeter University in England, and I got a role in a student production of
The Merchant of Venice
. I played the foul-mouthed and hot-tempered Gratiano. I even got talked into playing, ahem, a horse in
Equus
. I've also got good friends who are actors, and I've been behind the scenes on stages and at readings. I feel I can communicate pretty effectively with actors.

Luckily, my Casper film history class hardly eats up any time outside of class, at least for now. I'm supposed to do prelecture readings, but I don't do them. My knowledge of postwar history is good. I hope it will be good enough because Casper knows my name. Every other bit of time goes into my next 507 film.

I
n college, I underwent a transformation. I studied. I worked hard, really hard. It paid off. I even got a National Endowment for the Humanities scholarship to Tufts University to study the rise of Hitler.

When I graduated, I wanted to tell stories. I got a job at Minnesota Public Radio. On my first day, I was handed a tape recorder and a microphone and told to cover a presidential candidate who was making the rounds in northern Iowa. For nearly three years, I used the same tape recorder and the same microphone and covered hundreds of stories. I wrote fifty-second news stories; I wrote eight-minute feature stories. I voiced my own stories and produced them and was eventually made news director and anchor.

I learned many things, among them the cardinal rule of journalism: don't expect to get paid much. I started at $12,000 a year and lived in a $180-a-month apartment. I shared my bathroom with a mentally ill man who lived next door.

But money didn't really matter. I was single. My girlfriend lived in Germany. I didn't care if I shared a reeking bathroom. I liked journalism. And journalism was starting to like me. More of my stories went national on NPR, and I won a few moderately prestigious awards.

Then an odd thing happened. One dreary winter day, I drove with my German girlfriend to Chicago. She had pals there. The husband of one of her friends was a transplant coordinator for the University of Chicago.
What kind of a job is that?
I asked him.

He explained he retrieved organs from brain-dead people all over the country and brought them back to the surgeons in Chicago, where they were transplanted into sick and desperate patients.
That's an odd job,
I said.

I
n class, FTC is explaining that we can focus on specific aspects of filmmaking on each of our films. If we want to emphasize lighting, that's great. Or if we really want to work on our cinematography, ditto. He says we don't need to be constrained by traditional ideas of filmmaking. Feel free to experiment, he adds. But, he tells our class, we have to follow these rules:

• In our second film, we can use only one spoken word on-screen.
  
• In our third film, we can feature one sentence on-screen.
  
• In our fourth film, we can feature one short bit of dialogue—no more than a paragraph.
  
• In our fifth film, we can have more dialogue but no more than a page. (A script page equals roughly a minute of screen time.)
  

There's also a wildcard: We can do one documentary if we wish as a substitute for any of the fiction films. The documentary has no dialogue limitations. It can be up to eight minutes long, just like our fiction films.

FTC explains that the smaller the box we work within, the easier it is to focus on the art of filmmaking. Hearing the limitations causes me to experience a wave of anxiety. One word in an eight-minute film? I'm a wordsmith, for cripes sake! Words are the only thing I know! I've never done pictures. I've never been a photographer, and my drawings are pathetic, worse than a preschooler's scribbling.

I am obviously going to have to focus on my weaknesses. I desperately wish I had known these were the rules for the first semester. I had come to USC with dozens of ideas in my head for film. All of them were wordy—and, it turns out—all of them were overly complex and too difficult to produce. Had I known I would be doing essentially silent films my first semester, I would have been a lot better prepared. I'm a bit frustrated by my own ignorance. And now I need to come up with a plausible story for my next film.

B
efore I left Chicago, the husband of my girlfriend's pal asked if I was interested in joining him as a transplant coordinator. I thought he was joking.

Two weeks later, I completed my morning anchor shift at the radio station and raced out to the Rochester airport. The husband of my girlfriend's pal had chartered a plane to fly me to Chicago for the afternoon. I spent the day being interviewed by some of America's most elite doctors for a position I knew nothing about. I was an English major in college and a radio reporter. I knew nothing of surgery. I was twenty-five years old.

For reasons that remain inexplicable to me to this day, the University of Chicago hired me. They paid me much more than MPR ever had. I would live in Chicago. I would retrieve organs from dead people.

M
y second 507 film presents me with a dilemma. Before I came to USC, I jotted down lots of film ideas, aided by friends and family who pitched me stories. In my time in newsrooms, I was never at a loss for ideas for stories. I was normally a one-man story-pitching machine. Now I have to make an eight-minute film that includes only one word, but every idea I have involves lots of chatter.

I spend several days jotting new ideas down and then throwing all of them away.

Finally, I come up with one that seems workable: A young man goes to a funeral for his father. Afterwards, he gets the will. The father's handwritten scrawl claims he hid some treasure. The will includes a crude map. The letter and map look as if they were created by a crazy person. The son, a straitlaced young office worker, goes on a long journey to find the hidden treasure. By the time he reaches the map's end, having overcome various obstacles, he's a dirty mess and he finds . . . nothing. But he has become as insane as his father appears to have been. The one word the son will utter is “DAD!”

It's a dark comedy. I name it MY CRAZY DAD.

Early in my shooting week, I find a funeral home willing to let me shoot inside their parlor. The funeral home director is even willing to drive his hearse for me.

I discover a gorgeous Catholic cathedral just a few blocks from USC. With a few shots, I figure I can approximate a funeral.

For the treasure hunt, I'll shoot in the mountains above Malibu. The area has a gorgeous state park, filled with hiking trails I've taken my kids and Julie on many times. I know a site with an abandoned windmill—it looks like the remains of a farm. The park has a valley with uninterrupted vistas—no power lines, no houses, no roads on the horizon.

For the son's workplace, I have an office I can use at USC.

I have everything I need . . . except an actor. My other classes are taking up more time than I planned, and the first few days of the week quickly pass as I start searching for talent. I need someone for a full-day shoot.

Tuesday comes and I'm able to go to the funeral home and shoot some amazingly authentic scenes, just me and my camera and the tripod. A real dead guy is in a casket, awaiting a memorial service. The funeral home director discreetly closes the lid before I roll the camera, but otherwise he offers me the run of the funeral home. He says he appreciates I'm an older family man who has returned to school. I am careful not to disrupt his business. The hearse looks great, too, and he agrees to act for me a bit, shutting the doors to the hearse.

At the start of the week, I put out some calls to student actors at USC who had advertised their willingness to work for student directors. I need a full day from an actor. But none of the student actors I speak to are game.

I go through books of actors' headshots inside the USC Student Production Office—SPO, as the students call it. I'm new to the casting game, and I'm clueless. No one returns my calls. I'm told to put a casting notice online, but I put it off, hoping to get a USC acting student.

When Thursday comes, I'm still actor-less. I have to shoot Friday—it's when the office I'm using is open—and I've got nothing. I feel the pressure rising. I was hoping to spend the weekend with my family in Camarillo. I feel the tension grabbing my innards. With my first little exercise, I was able to use my kids. Now I'm coming up with nothing for film #2, and I know FTC is watching me closely.

I feel surreally out of my element. I'd spent a decade as a reporter convincing people to be interviewed; I spent a year organizing life-and-death transplant operations; I've raised three kids . . . and now I'm starting to freak out because I can't find an actor willing to spend a day in front of a camera, in Los Angeles. And only have to say one word.

In my 507 class on Thursday afternoon, I'm thoroughly anxious. In class, I ask a few classmates if they know anyone who could act for me. They shake their heads
no
.

As class lets out, I feel awful. The sun is going down. I feel my time is running out. S., the comic kid with the red hair, asks me what's wrong. I tell him I can't find an actor. S. shrugs and says, “I'll act for you.”

I want to hug him, plant a kiss on his forehead. I don't, but suddenly the sunset takes on a beautiful glow. The cracked sidewalk leading from Zemeckis becomes a gorgeous pathway. I run down the sidewalk to my car. I have some clothes to buy for my character, and now I know what size to buy.

Friday morning dawns sunny and clear. I understand why early filmmakers loved this city. The weather so predictable, so stable, that it means one less worry when making a film. The cloud cover is exactly the same as it was Tuesday, when I shot at the funeral home, and Wednesday, when I shot at the cathedral. Now, Friday, S. meets me at Zemeckis at 9
A.M.
I bought some clothes for him the night before at a T.J. Maxx. I have a white dress shirt and a pair of dress slacks. I brought my own black shoes. S. changes into the clothes, puts his pile of red hair into a tight bun, and the transformation is total. The alt-rock artist is now a conservatively dressed white-collar worker.

For the film, I ask him to be very reserved, not to display any emotions at the cathedral for the funeral or when he's reading his father's handwritten scrawl.

In the earliest days of film a century ago, actors really projected their emotions: a character about to be run over by a train emoted by overamping the screams, the knuckle biting, the arm waving. Today, to our modern sensibilities, it looks comic.

But in the twenty-first century, student films have their own version of overacting. Most student films are dramas. Many of the dramas are about breaking up with a boyfriend or a girlfriend. In student films, a woman who discovers her boyfriend is leaving her will generally do one, some, or all of these:

1. Sob uncontrollably while holding a breakup letter.
   
2. Stare out the window, with tears flowing down her cheeks.
   
3. Sob while clutching a pillow.
   
4. Smoke and stare at a picture of the former boyfriend, then drop her head and sob some more.
   

The remaining dramas generally involve bad dads—overbearing and narrow-minded assholes, guys who spend their evenings like I do, watering their pathetic little patch of suburban grass, a beer can in one hand and a garden hose in the other.

In the bad-dad films, the male actors playing Dad glare like their eyes are shooting death-beams. I had no idea of the prevalence of bad dads until I came to USC. They're everywhere! They're always glaring and finding ways to make their children's lives miserable—they're probably not even paying the tuition for film school.

I don't want S. to overact. I don't want him to sob or glower. I want him to underact. I want a dry comedy.

As the day goes on, we shoot our film. I'm shooting it pretty much in sequence because I don't have extra costumes. We drive out of L.A., S. behind the wheel of my car. I film him driving: expressway, two-lane highway, narrow road, dirt trail. Then I film him hiking, following the map. He climbs a mountain, the trail getting ever harder. His slacks and white shirt become dirty. Soon there's no trail left. He gets more desperate, tripping, falling, running up hills. He gets to the windmill and can't find anything. He frantically digs with his bare hands, looking for the treasure.