Ah, My Younger Days…

Writing yesterday about my film school pilot, I thought about our terrible professors for the first time in years. They were all pretty old, and set in their ways. They wouldn’t let us do anything unusual, like, oh, say, move the camera in the shot. They drained every ounce of originality from the production. Like network executives, only not paid as well.

At the time, I also worked for the school. I asked my grizzled old boss what he thought of the situation. Was it going to be this hard to get things done in the real world? He assured me no studio is run as inefficiently as film school. They’d go out of business.

“Everyone is here because either they’re too old to hack it any more,” and he included himself in this group (he was old enough to be on a first name basis with Walt Disney), “or, if they’re young, they never will.”

I looked around at my professors and saw that he was right. When I checked credits on imdb, either I didn’t recognize anything they’d worked on, or their last project of note was done before I was born.

After I graduated, I had an AD who was an asshole (not all that uncommon for ADs, sadly) and had no idea what he was doing. I later found out he taught a directing class at our alma mater. I felt bad for his students.

This obviously calls to mind the old saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Out of curiosity (and lack of anything to do), I tried to figure out who coined that phrase. Apparently, everyone did. On further researching, I discovered it’s actually a bastardization of a quote from Aristotle: “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.”

While I think the latter is nicer (my wife is a teacher, after all), the former one applied to my professors much better.

(On an unrelated note, I’m excited to learn I’m not the only one in Hollywood who votes Republican.)

Learning Experiences

In film school, I worked on a sitcom pilot for the campus TV station. It was for a class, so if you wanted to be either the director, the writer, or the producer, you had to interview with the professors. They made three highly questionable choices.

There were a lot of funny people on our crew, but the writer wasn’t one of them. It’s not that he had a strange, Andy Kaufman-type sense of humor; nor did he make obscure, Dennis Miller-style references. No, his dialogue was just… words. That weren’t funny.

The director had terrible instincts. We found an actor who was able to draw some humor out of the terrible script by creating a layered performance. He essentially treated his character’s public persona as a different person from his private one, and that tension built comedy. (Trust me, it was funny.) The director saw this and naturally decided the actor should do it completely differently. And less funny.

To complete the trifecta, we had a lousy producer. He was totally disorganized. He never knew what was going on, or when it needed to happen. It was amazing we got the show finished at all.

Did I mention I was the producer?

So, you see, Dawn, there’s a very good reason why I don’t want to be a coordinator, UPM, or anything along those lines. Besides the very obvious fact that I’m not good at it, I don’t enjoy it, either.

Being good at, and enjoying, producing is so far removed from my own experiences, that I really do not understand people who are good, and do enjoy it. Of course, my parents don’t understand how I can stand finding a new job every six months.

It’s not an insult. It’s genuine confusion. But I am glad there are people out there who do produce. Nothing would get done without them.

Wanna Know How Sausage is Made?

My freshman year at film school, I knew at least a half dozen people who dropped out of the program, if not college altogether. Even more changed majors in the years following. After picking films apart for class after class, they found that they just couldn’t enjoy going to the movies anymore, which was probably the reason they signed up for film school in the first place.

This attitude carries over into the professional world, too. I can’t tell you how many people I know who don’t go to movies, or don’t ever watch TV. They know too much about the bullshit going on behind the scenes to take any of it seriously.

It’s sort of like learning the secret to a magic trick. Once you know the trick, there’s no longer any magic.

Somehow, my brain doesn’t work that way. I can shut the analytical part off when I watch a movie. When I sit in a theater (or switch on my TV), I forget about those four years in college, and my years behind the scenes. I get transported into a different world for an hour or two, and only when I re-emerge, blinking in the sunlight, do I realize, “Whoa, wait a second. The flying suit is cool and all, but you’ve got a computer that can speak natural language, crack jokes, and make aesthetic judgments. Why isn’t this a big deal to… everyone ever?”

So, unless you’re like me, I highly recommend that you not seek a job in the entertainment industry.

Making Movies for Fun and No Profit

First of all, Ken Levine somehow stole a blog post idea directly from my head. (This fits with my theory that Rupert Murdoch has a chip my brain, and he’s stealing all my good scripts before I even write them.) Ah, well, it’s probably for the best– he’s a better writer than I am, anyway, and his views on the writer/director subject are more insightful than mine would have been.

Anyway, on to my real post.

I like making movies. It’s why I moved to Los Angeles, why I went to film school, and why I’m willing to work for idiots for less money than what a grocery clerk makes.

The problem is, making movies is a collaborative art (unless you animate it and do all the voices yourself).

Growing up in a small midwestern city, I didn’t know many people who were interested in making movies, let alone willing to put the time and effort it takes to actually write, shoot, and edit one. But once I got to film school, finding collaborators was easy.

That, to me, is the main advantage to film school. You’re surrounded by people who don’t want to do anything but make movies. I was shooting all the time, sometimes my movies, sometimes other people’s. Sure, they were universally lousy, but at least I was filming.

The problem I had working at a production company was that I was the youngest person there. Nobody else was interested in spending their weekends with a DV camera and actors cast from Craig’s list. Once I got into PAing on movies and TV shows, I finally got back to filming just for fun (or artistic expression).

This year, I’ve worked on two friends’ projects, and done two of my own. It’s always a fun way to burn a weekend or two.  It’s hard to get stressed, like you do on a real shoot, because everyone’s working for the love of it (and maybe a slice of pizza).

Even better, in the years since film school, the projects have ceased to suck, and progressed to merely disappointing. In a couple more years, I may attain the vaunted sphere of “adequate.”

Here’s hoping.