Film School

by Steve Boman

  I pitch a story of a young man and woman, the woman extremely pregnant, who walk into a room at the Vagabond where film students are shooting a sci-fi drama. The students and the couple both have keys for the same room. During the argument over who gets the room, the pregnant woman’s water breaks. Surrounded by film equipment and costumed sci-fi characters, the now-screaming woman is aided by a lowly film student who was once an emergency medical technician. It’s a scene in which the director and producers know nothing, and the lowliest grips and costumed actors save the day.

  The kicker comes when other film students, peering into the room and unaware of what’s really going on, compliment the woman in labor for her acting.

  Students vote on the pitches. Mine doesn’t get chosen. Instead, we choose a script that hits the film school high notes: a young couple shoot heroin in a cheap motel and talk about breaking up.

  The Vagabond shoot takes over much of the motel for two days. One day is pre-prep and rehearsal. The second day, a week later, is the shoot. I’m recording sound for the shoot, a job I volunteer for because I want to spend as little time as possible involved with a film about a couple talking about heroin and breaking up.

  Our story is very simple and contains almost no movement or action. The day of rehearsal, the two actors show up and they know their lines. We run through several rehearsals, check the lights, check the sound. It’s all good.

  At this point, I come up with what seems an obvious suggestion: let’s shoot the scene, I say. We have our actors, we have all the equipment. Let’s strike now while the iron is hot! I gather our group together and explain my thoughts. I’m not the director, however, and she doesn’t want to. She wants to wait a week. I’m mystified—it seems to invite disaster. What happens if one of the actors doesn’t show up in a week? Plus, I point out that all of us are busy, so why don’t we do this shoot now and have a free day to work on our other projects. My fellow students look at me like I’m speaking in tongues.

  We don’t shoot. We instead sit on our hands and run through several more rehearsals, not shooting any video. I feel frustrated.

  A week later, we gather in the same room. Luckily, the actors show up. Unluckily, the day is hot. We have to turn off the AC while shooting because the cheap AC unit roars and blots out our sound. Given that we have roughly a thousand watts of extra lighting in the room, it quickly becomes stiflingly hot. It also soon stinks—there are eight of us in the small room. We spend the next four hours shooting take after take after take of the same scene. From my perch next to the bed, holding the boom mike over the two actors and listening to the dialogue through my headphones, I try to discern if there are any noticeable changes in the acting or if we’re just recording the same thing over and over. The hours tick slowly by. Sweat runs down my back. Eight hours total shooting time over the two weeks, and we have a very short, one-location, one-scene film.

  As I watch my much younger classmates agonize over every minute detail and spend long stretches trying to decide what to do, I formulate an observation based on something I learned long ago in chemistry. Nature abhors a vacuum, and film students will often use every minute of time they are given. Give some film students an hour to pound a single nail, and they’ll spend fifty-nine minutes discussing how to hold the hammer before swinging it.

  It’s an oversimplification, but I’m so sick of being in the motel room I want to scream. At the rate we’re shooting, it would take six months to wrap a low-budget feature film. When the shoot finally ends, I leave as quickly as I can, carrying a heavy load of sound equipment the block back to Zemeckis in the heat. I’m hot, I’m dehydrated, I’m glad to be done. When I return my load to the equipment room, a student technician inspects it. He shakes his head over the badly coiled electrical cables and a microphone wind cover that is in pieces. “Who did this?” he demands. I just want to get out of there. “Showbiz,” I say. Everyone knows Showbiz.

  He shakes his head. “F’ing Showbiz.”

  M

  y paper on TEACHER’S PET is finished. Casper wants twelve pages. Mine is twenty-nine. I have gone overboard, and when I drop it in a cardboard collection box, it hits the bottom with a meaty thud.

  I take Holman’s sound exam. I’m sure I pass it easily. We study the textbook he authored, Sound for Film and Television, which has become standard reading material at most film schools around the country. I’ve read the entire book, some parts twice, because it gives an exceptionally clear-eyed view of sound and the physics of sound. His teaching shows the importance of sound—and its woeful underappreciation by the public. Just reread my last two sentences: I describe sound in entirely visual terms: clear-eyed view and shows the importance. Sound doesn’t even get any respect in the English language. But Holman’s class emphasizes how vital good sound design is.

  Holman worked for George Lucas, and he’s the man behind the Lucasfilm THX sound system. Holman jokes in class that if he got a nickel for every time the THX promo appears at the start of a film, he’d be so rich he wouldn’t be teaching at USC. And then he adds that he probably wouldn’t be as happy, either. Holman likes to teach. He heads the sound department at USC, and he won an Academy Award in 2002 for Technical Achievement in Sound.

  Most of the class is technical. It reminds me more of an engineering class than an art class. It’s objective material. Sound is wavelength, which we can learn to our advantage and ignore at our peril.

  There’s plenty of artistry displayed in the class, however. Holman brings in the dailies of famous films to emphasize his points. One day he brings production dailies from STAR WARS. The dailies have the sound recorded on set. He shows the scene where the storm troopers take control of Princess Leia’s starship. It’s the opening battle scene, familiar to anyone who has watched STAR WARS, and it introduces us to Darth Vader. But in the dailies the sound is atrocious and comic. The storm troopers sound as if they are running on plywood, which they are. The voices are dreadfully bad. Darth Vader sounds like a skinny asthmatic talking from under a mask. There are no sound effects for lasers and explosions and beeping robots. It sounds like a really low-budget sci-fi film—and because of that it looks like a really low-budget sci-fi film.

  When Holman shows us how different STAR WARS looks with good sound, we understand a bit more about the importance of our ears. He also gives a few insider tidbits, like how some of the sound effects of that film were recorded within earshot of the USC campus.

  He continues the demonstration with a scene from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. First we watch the scene with no sound. In the scene, Indiana Jones takes the carved head from the pedestal inside the cave and makes his escape, avoiding darts and spears and a chasm and a rolling boulder. With no sound, it’s a somewhat dull scene. Then we watch the scene with successive layers of sound added. The darts now have some zing. Indy’s whip cracks with authority. The boulder sounds enormous. Over and over we watch the clip. Each time the sound becomes more rounded. Each time the action gets more exciting. Finally, we watch it with dialogue and music added. By the time we see the final version, we want to keep watching, which is to say, listening.

  Holman’s class makes me feel like I’ve learned something truly exciting, a bit of moviemaking magic. To laypeople, filmmaking is always about the image. Film schools capitalize on that. Every school advertisement I see shows people operating a camera. Sound? That’s not sexy. In class one day he asks how many of us want to direct. Nearly everyone in class raises a hand. He tells us the straight truth that only a tiny handful of us will ever actually make a living as directors. Holman gives us advice: if we want to make a living in Hollywood, work in sound.

  Holman’s sound class is an example of why film school is worthwhile. The director Robert Rodriguez famously spent just $7,000 to film EL MARIACHI on sixteen-millimeter film, but the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) estimates a total of $220,000 was spent in postproduction, and much of that was to improve the original film’s soundtrack.

  I like Holman’
s class because it is primarily technical, but it often veers into the realm of art. Holman’s class lifts the veil on a lot of the magic of movies.

  Earlier in the semester I had a discussion with several students and FTC about the notion of art vs. technique. I explained I came to USC for practical reasons: I wanted a more stable career, and I wanted the hands-on training to do that.

  “If you want that you should have gone to a technical college, that sort of place,” FTC said to me. “You’d be better off getting that training there.” I disagreed with him. I thought USC should be putting as much of an emphasis on teaching technique as any technical college does.

  FTC shrugged. He said film school is there for us to find and pursue our artistic vision.

  The idea chafes at me. Implicit in that idea seems to be that, although technique is teachable, art can’t be taught. Art is, according to this view, something that flows from a mysterious source. To extend the view further, either you’ve got it, or you don’t. Those without the genius are doomed to mediocrity, to non-art, to being hacks or replicators. Those with the genius are the Ubermensch.

  This argument was put forth most prominently in the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Romantic movement, by Byron and Keats and Blake. And that movement, the belief in the artist as a gifted Ubermensch, has been lapped up ever since by the creative class. And no wonder! In this view, artists are special, with a genius that comes from elsewhere, and thus can’t be understood by the unwashed nonartists of the world. The masses don’t have that it, whatever it is.

  There’s a serious side effect to this, of course. It breeds elitism and gives the artist a ticket to behave anyway he or she wants, for better or worse. Artists, in this view, are temperamental like Lord Byron, and it just can’t be helped. Hollywood seems to embrace this because the list of directors and writers and actors who behave poorly is long. It is a Romantic conceit, this notion that the rules of society stifle and bind the true artist. It’s a notion that emerged only a few centuries ago, long past the era of William Shakespeare and Leonardo daVinci. DaVinci was a scientist, a mathematician, an artist, a teacher … and he was fully enmeshed into his Florentine society. Shakespeare, for what little is known of him, never trashed a hotel room.

  O

  n the last day of Casper’s class, he takes the stage and explains his grading. He says he’s sick and tired of grade inflation, and he’s grading accordingly. He warns people that a C means average work, that he’s giving out a handful of Ds and only a tiny sprinkling of As. He tells us to be happy if we get a B.

  His assistants hand out the papers. Our grades on the paper will be our grades in class. It’s a chaotic scene in the auditorium with 120 students milling about and excited to see their grades.

  One of Casper’s assistants stands on the stage and points at me. “Are you Steve Boman?” I nod and work my way to the front of the milling crowd. “That was quite a paper,” he says. I hope he means that in a good way … and when I look at the back of my paper I see my grade: “An Easy A,” it says. I feel my chest expand.

  Everyone in the auditorium spills outside to compare notes. A handful of undergraduate girls are crying. My 507 classmates gather in a clump and I join them. They want to know my grade. I reluctantly show it—I don’t want to gloat, but it does feel mighty good. A serious-minded classmate who did a stunning stop-animation film, a guy who already had an MBA, also got an A. The others got Bs or Cs, and there were a lot of Cs in our group. Some of those who got the grade are angry; one woman wipes away tears. One guy wants to confront Casper.

  I look at my classmates, and the very informal polling of grades doesn’t surprise me. I know some people hardly put any time into the paper. I put in a lot of hours. The USC School of Cinematic Arts has an annex in the basement of the massive Doheny Library, and I had a pretty good idea of which ones were putting in some serious time working on their papers.

  My last class of the semester is a Friday, with Ross Brown showing the film THE THIRD MAN. Our class wants to throw a party, and we ask Ross if there is anything wrong with celebrating over pizza and beer. He thinks it’s a great idea. So we bring in a case of beer and watch Orson Welles in black and white and eat pizza. I drink only one beer, simply because I am so tired that if I have any more I know I will fall asleep. I have my Friday-afternoon slog through traffic to get home to Camarillo. Attendance in class is sparse. It isn’t that much of a party. And then the semester is done.

  O

  ver the summer, Julie and I packed our furniture, left our rental house, and moved to Minnesota. Julie has a job that pays twice as much as she made in California. I’m going to commute to USC from Minnesota. Now I am going to spend seven days a week in California while going to grad school. I’ll fly back home once or twice a semester. It’s a plan held together by duct tape and crossed fingers. We’re not broke anymore, but money is still extremely tight. Julie’s mom will be living with her, helping with the kids.

  That next fall, I fly into Los Angeles International Airport at 10 A.M.

  When I arrive in Los Angeles, I feel a knot in my stomach.

  I’ve got my orientation for 508. I go to the same meeting room where we gathered for 507, but this time I know many people. Everyone is partnered up. Only one person is not there: my partner.

  I sit through the orientation with a red face, the seat next to me empty. It was bad enough to have to be shunned during the 508 partner dance, and now I find the woman who publically begged for a partner is missing. I call her cell. She doesn’t answer. I hide my frustration and worry and calmly explain to an instructor named Pablo that everything should be fine. It’s a serious breach of protocol not to show up on the first day of class. Pablo is not happy.

  A few hours later, I get a call from my partner. She sounds breezy, and explains she was running late and didn’t bother to come to orientation. “It’s not that important, you know,” she says. My knot grows larger.

  The next day, my partner shows up on campus. We meet with a directing instructor and go over our 508 film ideas. My partner is going to shoot first. She explains she wants to shoot a film with dancing zombies. I make certain I hear her correctly. Dancing zombies?

  Along with angry dad films and breakup films, zombie films are a staple of USC student film subjects. It’s easy, I suppose. Get some actors. Put some whiteface on them, make their mouths drool blood, and have them shuffle. Bingo, instant zombie. Such films strike me as not funny and not clever. What worked for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has gotten very stale.

  She explains she wants to create a dancing zombie movie to dispel, she explains, “the negative connotations of zombies.”

  I want to put my head in my hands when I hear this.

  That day we also go to our first class. We’re given the schedule for 508. We are expected to work seven days a week for every week except Thanksgiving. We shoot every weekend, on Saturdays and Sundays. We have class every day of the week.

  That night I sit beside the pool at USC and listen to the swimmers splash their laps. My family is now two thousand miles away.

  I decide to quit.

  I can’t take four months of 508 in Los Angeles with my tardy partner, with a film about dancing zombies, with a group of people I just don’t feel close to. I love so many aspects of film school—the instruction, the creativity, the freedom—but the good does not outweigh the bad. I’m spending way too much money. I’m too far from my family. I don’t want to be with my partner for four months.

  I meet with Pablo, a friendly, bearded professor who reminds me of the actor Richard Dreyfuss. He’s head of the 508 program, and when I explain to him I want to quit, he simply looks at me and sighs. I’m sure he deals with this often. I then tell him I’m not going to quit until I can find my partner a new partner.

  “I don’t want to burn any bridges here,” I tell him, “and I certainly don’t want to leave my partner high and dry.” Pablo sighs again and gives me the name of a woman whose partner bailed out
on her. I call the woman and my partner and ask them to meet at Pablo’s office. Later, they both show up, unaware of what is going on. I meet them and say, “You’re going to be partners for this semester. I’m quitting.”

  Pablo looks satisfied—a potential logistical mess was averted. I thank them all, shake Pablo’s hand, and fly back to Minnesota.

  I have spent $17,000, made five little films, started a feature script, and I feel a tremendous amount of relief and sadness. I remained enrolled in my screenwriting class, and the instructor is gracious enough to let me complete the semester-long class from two thousand miles away. Still, there is no mistaking what I am doing: I am walking away from the best film school in the world.

  TAKE 2

  6

  Surprise!

  I am driving down a freeway in Minneapolis on a gorgeous spring day with Sophia, who is now four years old. It’s just after noon, and we’re heading home to get some lunch after her morning at preschool.

  Since I quit USC, life has stabilized. Julie has been in great health, and she took a new job at the best pediatric hospital in Minnesota. We have nice neighbors. Lara and Maria walk to the nearby elementary school. I take Sophia to preschool several times a week. I’m splitting my time between being a housedad again and working on GeezerJock, which has risen from the dead. A new financial backer put some money into the machine, and our monthly circulation is approaching sixty thousand. We’re still not making a profit, however, and there’s only so much a person can write about sweaty old people before running out of ideas.

  Today, Sophia is chatting away, telling me about a boy who was hogging the swings at outdoor playtime when a car coming toward me in the northbound lanes skids sideways and flips into the air.

  Pieces of metal and plastic and glass go flying. The car cartwheels along the freeway toward us. The cartwheeling car settles on its roof in a puff of smoke. It has skidded into the concrete dividing wall separating the northbound and southbound lanes. I stomp on my brakes and pull quickly over to the right. I’m directly across from the smoldering car.