by Steve Boman
It’s tiny, but I like it. We have complete control over shooting. We don’t have to contend with bad weather, darkness, sunlight, nosy neighbors, police, thieves, or noise.
The studio has a damaged ceiling. Dan had his own pipe leak, and there’s a section of the ceiling that features exposed rusty pipes and missing plaster. Dan doesn’t tell his landlord because he likes the effect, and because he doesn’t want his landlord snooping around while we transform his apartment into a shooting stage.
We spend all day Friday prepping his apartment. We tape aluminum foil on all the windows to block light. I buy an old nineteen-inch TV at Goodwill for $35. The only props we have are a couch, the TV, a guitar, a pot, and a few cinder blocks. We move lights into the studio. The camera and tripod. Some Tstands and flags. Some more lights.
We spend Saturday shooting. We have no actor, so we shoot leaky water pipes. A pot of boiling water. A TV with static. I use my own video camera to shoot Dan’s hands playing a guitar, in close-up. We hook the video camera into the old television and play the tape, then shoot film of the TV showing Dan’s hands playing the guitar. His hands move from chord to chord. It looks pretty cool.
At night, we move some lights to the outside of the building and cut a hole in the aluminum foil on the window. We shoot a beam of light into the room. I film a wall as Dan “chops” the light with his hand.
That’s it. That’s all we have.
As we shoot, we notice the apartment gets extremely warm with just the two of us. There’s no air-conditioning, and all the windows are closed and blocked. During the shooting, Dan can be a pain in the ass, and I wish he’d relax a bit. He’s probably wishing I wasn’t disappearing all the time. Dan doesn’t talk much. He’s very intense. We have only a few boxes of crackers and some diet soda. I get very hungry.
I’m operating the camera, and on every shot I carefully meter the light and adjust the lens aperture to the proper setting. We use a high-intensity Maglite flashlight to focus instead of measuring distance. We unscrew the cap from the flashlight, leaving the bulb exposed. Then Dan holds the lighted bulb precisely where we want to be focused. Through the eyepiece of the camera, it’s easy to focus on the bulb. If I’m a little off focus in either direction, the bulb appears to be fuzzy. It allows us to have the focal plane exactly where we want it to be. During our test shoot, I used a tape measure, and many of our images suffered from soft focus. We hope the Maglite bulb works better.
Every time I’m finished setting the focus, I tell Dan I’m ready. Invariably, he answers, “Are you sure?” Often, he walks over to check my calculations. After him saying “Are you sure?” a dozen times, I shoot back somewhat testily, “That’s what ‘I’m ready’ means. It means I’m ready.”
The apartment is hot. My patience gets shorter by the hour. I get hungrier. My irritability is magnified by the fact that Dan hardly eats a thing. I tell him I’m going to stretch my legs no matter what, every hour. I don’t want more blood clots. He sighs when I announce it. We spend a very long day shooting just two hundred feet of film. We save the additional hundred feet for the next week, simply because we don’t have anything more to shoot.
On Tuesday, we watch the dailies. Everyone in class is nervous. No one knows if their film turned out. We will find out in class, together. It’s exceptionally exciting, as if we’re all waiting to open a mysterious gift.
The other groups show their footage. Everyone else shoots three hundred feet—about nine minutes of footage. They all have actors. Everyone else’s footage is okay, for the most part, although some of the shooters are having trouble with focus. The old German Arriflexes are a much different animal than modern video cameras.
Then we show our footage. It lasts only about five minutes. We have a dripping pipe. A pot of boiling water. A TV playing static. A TV with hands strumming a guitar. A wall with flickering lights.
Some of the images are slightly underexposed, but the focus is much better than our testshoot with Mikey. The Maglite system works. Technically, it’s all okay. There is, however, absolutely no story. It’s just cutaways from the inside of an apartment.
The class is silent. Dan and I are silent. Pablo looks at us like we’re treating the class as a joke.
Pablo later talks to us privately. “I’m very concerned about you two,” he says while folding his hands. Dan says our actor will be available the coming weekend. Then Pablo talks to me alone. I’ve kept him abreast of my medical issues over the past few weeks. He knows I’ve been gone for nine days now early in the semester.
“Do you think this is a good idea for you to be here?” he asks me. “You’ve had some very significant things happen to you.”
I tell him yes, it is a good thing for me to be back. He shakes his head. “I’m worried about you.”
I force a smile. “I’m worried about me, too. I just don’t want to dwell on the negative.”
Pablo sighs. “You certainly seem persistent,” he says.
I leave. I feel bad for Pablo. First, I quit under his watch, now I’m back and I have a feeling he wishes I had never come back.
I
mmediately after the screening of the dailies, I’m responsible for putting together a rough cut of our dailies for Thursday’s class. Because we have merely a small collection of stationary objects, there’s not much there.
I edit our footage into a tiny directionless film. On Thursday, we show the rough cut to the class. It meets the same response as our dailies: a deafening silence. Dan and I are new to the class, and we’re not doing much to earn the admiration of our classmates.
Here’s the bottom line, the dirty truth about film school: film school is a constant competition. People respect the winners and avoid the losers. It’s a simple Darwinian response. Although some may find it unpleasant to admit, it’s the way life is at USC. The entertainment world has thousands upon thousands of wannabes. The odds of success are so long that people instinctively gravitate toward those they think might better their odds.
In the first few semesters, we students feel like we’re floating in an ocean. There’s land somewhere, we hear, but no one knows exactly where. We’re treading water and instinctively making our way to those who seem to know how to swim the best. Everyone is hoping to find something or someone to hold onto and float. Everybody tries to avoid weak swimmers for fear they’ll drag them down. In my first semester at USC, I found myself swimming alone.
After my time away from USC, I thought a lot about my experiences. I realized that instead of thrashing and drifting in the water, we’d have been much better off by banding together and keeping each other afloat. After all, every year, fewer than a hundred people like me are admitted to the production program at USC. We’re just a tiny fraction of those trying to make it in the moving picture business. In 507, I felt more animosity toward my fellow students than was warranted. I loved the competition, but I began to think the SURVIVOR-like behavior fostered at USC is counterproductive in the long run.
Before I rejoined 508, I wrote an email to all fifty students who were then in 507. It was when I was looking for a partner. This was part of my email:
I suffer from being irreverent most times and I’m a contrarian at heart, but I have been a dad for 11 years now, and that changes a fella. I stop and look both ways very carefully at intersections now. I don’t care if you’re male, female (my original 508 partner was female), what kind of people you like, who you voted for, and what you eat as long as you can reciprocate the feelings. I view film school as a chance to build partnerships and relationships with all sorts of types. If USC had a problem, at least in my semester, it was that the school seemed to foster a spirit of pitting student against student. I saw it differently. The real wolf at the door isn’t another student—it’s the world outside of USC. The more people can work together in film school, the better chance they have of succeeding outside those iron gates.
When I meet people planning to go to film school, I tell them this: be generous, a
nd try to work as a team because you never know how the future will turn out. Today’s irritant may be your ally tomorrow. I tell them to help other students as much as possible, and to be a giver instead of a taker whenever possible. In 507, I was a taker. Now I want to be a giver. Granted, it’s vastly easier with my family two thousand miles away. I simply don’t have family conflicts and responsibilities. The USC production program takes up nearly all of my time. I work seven days a week, and I’m almost always out the door at 7 A.M. I’m not done until 9 P.M. at the earliest.
With Dan’s film barely moving forward, I should be losing sleep. I’m not. Dan’s smart, and I like him, and though he’s silent as a Sphinx when it comes to future plans, with all that is going on in my life, the fate of a 508 short film doesn’t rank that high.
I
’m continuing to pursue screenwriting this semester. I missed my first class because I was in the hospital, but nothing much happened. So many students drop or join electives that the first week of school is almost always a lesson in hurry-up-and-wait. I join the class the second week and find myself moving at full speed with the others—and there are only a half-dozen of us in this class.
In the production division, students can choose which specialty to pursue. There’s directing, editing, producing, sound, and screenwriting. Screenwriting seems to be the oddball branch. Not many production students pursue it, perhaps because USC offers a two-year degree focused entirely on screenwriting. Those who only want to write gravitate toward that degree. The number of us in the production division who want to write is small.
I consider us the true filmmakers, of course. Along with these other students, I believe everything starts with the word. Dan is also pursuing screenwriting, and so is a student named John Thompson, whose brilliant 508 film SONGBIRD wowed Sundance just a year earlier.
The instructor is a former television writer. She’s formal and precise in her bearing, and I’m excited to have her as a teacher. I’ve learned quickly that the adjunct instructors at USC are normally excellent teachers. A great many classes are taught by these adjuncts, nearly all of whom have extensive experience working in the trenches of Hollywood. It’s one of the great advantages of going to USC.
The adjunct instructors have a different attitude than many of the full-time faculty. I never find any sense of academic elitism from them. They’re generally more fun; they’re impossible to pigeonhole. Their politics range from right to left, their income ranges from barely-making-it to wealthy. They’re engaged in The Industry, with all its sleaziness and bile, and they’re not ashamed of it. My adjunct writing instructor wrote for THE A-TEAM, one of the great campy TV masterpieces of the 1980s. She’s proud of the work she did on the show—and her stories of writing entire episodes on extremely tight deadlines are exciting and inspiring.
The full-time faculty in the production division has a fairly unified outlook. Dan and I call them The Aging Hippies, which fits much of the student body as well because many USC students are avid readers of the Daily Kos and firm believers in the wisdom of Che.
One day, Dan and I are walking across campus when he makes a comment that sums up the zeitgeist found at USC: “You know what the perfect trifecta for a USC film is?” Dan asks. “It’s a pair of lesbians who run an abortion clinic on an Indian reservation.”
I laugh. He’s hit the nail on the head. There’s a lot of emphasis within the school to be “serious” and to do important work. Yet so many times what we watch from other students is just an easy PC cliché. We both agree we don’t want to do cliché films. In screenwriting, nobody is writing a cliché.
Dan is working on an awesome comedy that involves a man who wants his wife kidnapped so he can rescue her and add some zing to their marriage.
I’m writing about an accident-prone waterski jumper who takes a summer job at a going-out-of business Wisconsin resort … and who hires the mentally ill to fill some openings in his waterski show. I title my story CRAZYHOUSE ON SKIS.
T
he next shooting weekend arrives and so does our actor. He’s a cute kid, about the same age as my middle child, and he’s escorted by his mother. She’s a single mom who looks to have fallen on hard times. She wants her child to succeed as an actor. We also have a studio teacher, an annoying older lady who reads a novel the entire time and doesn’t care what we do with the child actor.
The five of us are in Dan’s tiny apartment. It was hot with two of us, now there are five, and the weather is hotter, and we’ve brought more lights into the apartment. It’s a sweatbox. I’m the camera operator, and I often have my back up against a wall. I’m on my knees constantly because we’re shooting from a very low position. Luckily, I have the same knee guards I used in my 507 acting class.
Dan has given me the script, but it changes so often I’m still not entirely certain what we’re doing. I tell Dan I’m his hired monkey and to just tell me what shots he wants. I know I’m supposed to be aware of what the story is and give cinematic feedback based on that, but I don’t know what the story is about. Maybe it’s my muddy brain, maybe it’s Dan being tight-lipped. Dan rarely eats, and he seems very uptight. He’s nervous, I reason. I suggest he eat something. He refuses. I shrug and eat.
We film the child actor strumming a guitar, making macaroni and cheese, watching TV. We push the camera very close to him, in some cases within just a couple feet, sometimes even closer. I’ve got the camera aperture opened as large as it will go to let as much light as possible into the film. I’m being extremely careful in focusing.
Dan is getting on my nerves, however. It starts when I’m changing a roll of film. I’m doing it in the dark, behind a folding door. I’m being careful not to expose the film to any light. I hear Dan’s voice: “Aren’t you done yet?” His voice is a mixture of irritation and condescension. “No,” I answer, “I’m not done yet.”
I hear him sigh. “Well, how long is it going to take you?” he asks. At this point, I’ve practiced changing rolls of dummy film so many times I can do it with my eyes closed. In cinematography class, I’ve become the go-to guy for film loading. And now Dan is harping on my film-loading speed?
Every hour, it gets hotter in the apartment even though it’s raining outside. On the first evening, the power cuts out. We’re in the dark, and we think we blew a fuse in the apartment. Then we realize the entire neighborhood is out. An hour later, the power comes on again, and we’re in business.
It takes all weekend to shoot our three hundred feet. Dan is highly focused during the shoot, but he’s in his own world.
On Tuesday, we see the dailies again. The preteen actor looks good on film. The set looks decent, too. Dan deliberately wants as little color as possible in the set—everything is black and white; the kid is dressed in black; and he’s got pale white skin. The only color in the set comes from the screen of the TV.
Our only problems are action and focus. There’s still no action. The kid isn’t doing anything. Some of the shots are slightly out of focus. The face of the boy is fuzzy in some takes. I’m really upset—I spent so much time trying to nail it. I’m embarrassed in front of my classmates, but I’m hardly alone. Many of the cinematographers in the class are having trouble with focus and exposure. This is the first time most of us are shooting film, and it shows.
I’m also irritated I’m giving Dan ammunition to keep harping on me and watching over my shoulder.
After class, Dan and I are both upset. I’m upset with him because there’s nothing in the film so far but static images. I’m still in the dark what the story is. He’s upset with me because of focus issues. Every other partnership is showing footage that tells some kind of story. We have random images with no conflict and one child actor. It seems worse than any of my 507 films. We leave class hardly talking.
I take the Arriflex the next day to the old Russian to have it checked out. There must be something wrong with it. Some of the images “breathe” a bit, that is, the focus slowly goes in and out. The old Ru
ssian pulls it apart. Shrugs. “Nothing wrong,” he says. “You are the problem.”
I talk to my cinematography instructor. I’m hoping he can help. As I diagram my shots, he interrupts me. “Steve, you have only a tiny area that can be in focus with the way you’re shooting.” He opens a book on focusing charts. He shows me that with a wide-open aperture, low light, and the camera just a few feet from the actor, I have in many cases only an inch of depth where I’m getting clear focus.
He says no wonder I’m having trouble focusing. If the actor moves a tiny bit, I lose focus. He advises me to bring in much more lighting so I can close down the aperture and increase the depth of field. He also suggests I study the depth of field charts in the back of our cinematography textbooks. For the next four days, I do just that.
Part of the problem in film school is we often learn stuff after the fact. The learning curve is steep, and it always seems we discover something important—like depth of field and lighting—a day after we need it. It is why school projects should be viewed by outsiders as works-in-progress. The whole point of these films is to teach, and to give us students a place to make mistakes. It’s like waterskiing: if you’re not crashing, you’re not pushing it.
I edit the footage for Thursday’s class. There’s still almost nothing to stitch together. I put together a quick compilation of the boy playing a guitar, making macaroni and cheese, boiling it over. It’s really dull. Dan reviews it and hates it. “No! That’s way too short,” he says. He scribbles out the exact shot list he wants. I make it longer. Dan isn’t happy about the result, but at least he’s not as unhappy as he was.
When we show the cut, it is the worst of the class, by far. We’ve gone through two shooting weekends, with only one to go.
With class done, Dan and I head outside to the school’s courtyard. We’re both pissed. Other students take a wide berth around us but watch us out of the corner of their eyes. It’s a Film School Argument. I’m really frank with Dan and tell him he has to have some action in the film. The actor has to do something. Dan tells me I’ve got to figure out the focus issues. He’s also pissed at me for using the term hired monkey on the set. He says it sets a bad example for the actor, that I’m making fun of my job. And he hated my edit.
