by Steve Boman
My classmates’ main worry seems to be finding actors. Yes, there are thousands of actors in Los Angeles, but actors are loath to spend their time on tiny, low-quality student exercises because they want to stack their demo reel (and résumé) with good material. An in-camera exercise by a new grad student isn’t likely to look very good—or make them look very good.
Thus, if someone agrees to be an actor in a class exercise, it is a labor of love. As film students, we’ll often be too busy to act in each other’s class projects. Because of that, friends, roommates, and relatives get pressed into service. My classmates who grew up in Los Angeles—like red-haired S.—have an advantage because they have so many friends and family to lean on. Newcomers to L.A. are at a disadvantage.
I smile because I have an ace up my sleeve. I will use my own children as actors! For such a simple and short exercise, they will be perfect. And because I don’t live in a cramped student apartment but rather in a nice sunny rental house in the far suburbs of Ventura County, I have plenty of places where I can shoot.
A story immediately pops into my mind, one remarkably true to life. In my story, my four-year-old will covet her big sister’s training-wheel-equipped bicycle while she sits on her tiny tricycle. Then, during a nap, my four-year-old will dream about the bike and ride it through a grassy suburban park. I know my four-year-old will light up the screen with her big grin.
Every camera partnership has to decide how to split up the camera for the three-day weekend: My partners agree I will take the camera first, shoot my film Saturday morning, then drive the camera back to USC for a handoff Saturday afternoon to Shorav, the PhD student from India. He will shoot Sunday, and then Fee Fee will have the camera all day Monday. The school-owned Sony is in a protective plastic case the size of an airline carry-on bag. We are also sharing a heavy-duty tripod, which also comes in a rather large carrying bag. Together, they weigh about twenty pounds. I carry a bicycle messenger bag with my laptop and class books and legal pads. It weighs another fifteen pounds, at least.
After class, I carry all of it to my car, parked on the fifth floor of the Shrine Auditorium ramp. It’s another hot day. I walk up the parking lot steps, carrying some forty pounds of gear. My clothes are too warm. The Shrine has a big ramp—the place used to be home to the Academy Awards and still gets used for events like the Screen Actors Guild Awards. I finally get to my car. I’m sweaty.
As I stand next to my car, taking in the view of campus from the parking deck, I realize I’m a real film student, finally. I am one of those people who walk the sidewalks of USC towing heavy cases of film equipment behind them.
I am a film student. Suddenly, I feel a wave of excitement pass through me. It’s taken nearly two years of planning and applications to get to this point, and here I am, putting film equipment into the trunk of my Oldsmobile.
I admire how professional my equipment looks. It’s all stamped with U-S-C, and both camera and tripod look as if they’ve been on a hundred shoots. I actually dance a little jig in the quiet parking ramp, I’m so dang happy.
I’m also exceedingly thirsty! All day I’ve been walking, walking, walking, and sometimes racing to get to classes on time. In the trunk of my car, I have a quart of apple juice and a few bottles of water. It’s been a long day and a long week. I love apple juice. I drink the whole bottle. I load the equipment in and take a breather. My legs are tired, and it seems I’ve walked a hundred miles during the first week around campus.
I inspect the camera one more time: it’s heftier than a standard consumer video camera, and I’ve got an extra lens and a charger in the eggshell-foam-lined case. I get in my car and slowly circle down to the ground floor.
Then my stomach takes a jump. I realize the quart of apple juice is not settling well. Not well at all. I realize I have a problem.
I park illegally outside the Zemeckis building and waddle past the front desk attendant. I cross my fingers that a bathroom is available—one is!—and close the door as fast as I can. I have a massive attack of diarrhea. As my guts contract and my forehead sweats, I worry if I’ll get a parking ticket and I worry if I’ll be able to navigate the freeways without soiling my pants and I wonder how my kids are and how Julie is and I realize on this day I paid another $200 of money I don’t have to go to class with a bunch of people half my age.
I calculate between cramps that it’s costing me five dollars of tuition money just to sit in this lonely bathroom stall.
T
rying to measure the importance of moving pictures on our society objectively is impossible. Their influence on pop culture dwarfs their economic value. For example, I once wrote speeches for executives at Cargill, the largest privately held corporation in the United States. Cargill’s yearly revenues now hover in the $120 billion range. By comparison, total yearly revenue for CBS, the most successful broadcast network, is in the $13–14 billion range. By revenue, Cargill absolutely dwarfs CBS. It’s almost ten times bigger! But when was the last time you heard anyone talking about Cargill? Most people have no idea the company exists. Yes, it exports a quarter of the country’s grain and supplies a fifth of the country’s meat supply and shapes every single egg in every single Egg McMuffin. But Americans ignore it. They have food in their stomachs, so they can concentrate on more important matters, like Brad and Angelina.
The biggest entertainment companies are Walt Disney, News Corp., and Time Warner. The ranks of these companies according to the Fortune 500 list in 2010 are fifty-seven, seventy-six, and eighty-two, respectively.
Film and television punch far beyond their weight class. They are like professional sports. Millions of kids dream of being pro athletes, yet a nearly infinitesimal slice of them actually become pro athletes. And millions of people dream of being in the moving picture business. A few actually make a living at it. I know the odds when I start. They suck, almost as bad as the odds of making a living as a newspaper reporter.
Saturday morning comes and my kids are thrilled. I’ve been away from home all week. I arrived home late Friday night, my stomach fully settled after my encounter with the apple juice. Julie and I live only fifty-five miles to the northwest of USC, in the suburb of Camarillo, which is in Ventura County, but it’s too far for me to commute in L.A. traffic. If I drive in rush hour, it can be a four-hour roundtrip. So Monday night through Thursday night I sleep in a house in La Cañada, an upscale suburb located next to Pasadena that’s about seventeen miles from campus. When Carl and Irene Christensen heard I was accepted to USC, they called me and told me I could stay at their home. For free.
It was a stunningly generous offer. I worried I’d be intruding on their lives and making too much of a ruckus, but my worries were overruled by the simple math of it: I saved serious time and lots of money. I soon realized their house offered much more than merely a place to sleep. Their neighborhood is an oasis of peace and quiet—so different from USC. Horse trails wind through the neighborhood. At night, I sometimes hear the plop of oranges falling off a nearby tree. And in the evenings and early mornings, I chat with Carl and Irene.
Weekends, I’m home in Camarillo with Julie and the kids—and her mom, Jean, who is living with us while I go to school and taking care of the kids while Julie is at work. So I live a life in triplicate. There’s my USC life, my life in La Cañada, and my life in Camarillo.
On Saturday morning, I explain that Maria, my four-year-old, will be the lead character. Lara, who is eight, thinks that is a great idea because she really isn’t interested in acting. I do warn Maria (with all my vast wisdom of film shoots) that acting for film can be pretty boring. She brushes off my warning. She wants to get going. Sophia, who is two, doesn’t understand what we’re doing. She just grins and races around the house.
My first film shoot is a playful lark. The day is sunny and warm. My kids and Julie are excited to see my official USC camera and tripod. Julie is amused by the crudely drawn storyboards (all stick figures) I created in preparation for the shoot. I spend the
morning in the house, carefully setting up shots. Then I call for Maria, the star. She looks wistfully at her big sister’s bike, right on command, and glumly pedals her tricycle in our suburban garage. It takes only an hour or so to shoot a minute of tape.
When it comes time for the dream sequence, I direct Maria to act as if she’s asleep. She does a great job of not giggling. Then I pull out the special effects: I smear a little Vaseline on the edges of the screw-off lens dust cap. Our whole crew—me, Julie, and all three kids—heads to the local park just down the street. When we get there, Lara climbs on the monkey bars while Sophia toddles around. I stand nearby, my camera and tripod ready. Maria rides Lara’s bike on the sidewalk, past the monkey bars, grinning widely. I stand next to other dads with my camera. No one has any idea what I am doing. I look like any other suburban dad videotaping his kid learning how to ride a bike. Yes, I’ve got a tripod, but no one gives me even a sideways glance. One hundred feet away a woman is videotaping a birthday party. To the unpracticed eye, my boxy Sony looks like any other out-of-date camera.
An hour later, we’re home again. I check what I’ve shot on playback. It’s far from perfect, but it’s good enough. I know using a dream sequence is the biggest cliché in moviemaking. (Look, it didn’t happen, it’s only a dream!) Yes, I’m being lazy and not very original, but my goal is just to get a base hit, not a home run, and move forward.
With this film, I mainly want to show my class—and my
instructors—my kids. They are such an important part of my life, and I want to use this film as a two-minute brag session. When I plug the camera into our television set and we watch the completed film, Maria beams. Sophia claps. Even Lara agrees her annoying little sister did a good job.
If this is film school, I think, this is not hard. For my two-minute film, I did no more than twenty different setups. That works out to six seconds a shot—a pretty slow pace. Watch any TV show or film and count how long each shot lasts. In television, it’s rare for a shot to last more than four seconds on-screen, most are less than that. My short film is a slow-moving affair, and, if I remove my bias, it’s actually pretty dull. But I’m happy. I’m guessing film school is a game of attrition: I just need to survive to fight the next battle and not flame out early.
The next week we show our two-minute films in class. The Zemeckis classrooms have large pull-down screens and overhead video projectors. As we sit in the dark, our videos play out on the screen, larger than life. The smallest details are enormous. It’s the first time I’ve seen my camera work displayed on such a large screen. Small bobbles of the camera make images look like they are going through a magnitude 8.7 earthquake. Flaws in lighting, in acting, in set design all jump out.
No one has a masterpiece. Most are, like mine, silly things. I feel relieved watching them spool out on the big screen that I’m not completely outclassed. Fee Fee, a production major in college, features a woman being chased, horror-movie style, by what turns out to be a fluffy stuffed animal. This is par for the course.
My film has the effect I hoped for on my classmates. I hear ooohs and aaaaaahs as my three daughters appear on the screen. My five female classmates seem especially appreciative. I get a nice round of applause. I feel like I’ve got a two-minute family talent show on the screen. Von Trapp Family Singers, watch out.
The lights come up. FTC clears his throat. He holds a long dramatic pause. He is frowning. His lips are tight.
Finally, he speaks. “Steve.” He exhales. “Steve … Steve … Steve.” He shakes his head.
He looks at me for several seconds. I look back, confused. Did the story not make any sense? Is he going to hammer me for using the lame It’s Only a Dream concept? Did my technique stink that much?
FTC finally speaks. “Did you have a studio teacher?” he asks.
My brain races. I do a quick mental survey of the term studio teacher. I had read about them in some of the material we received in class. They make sure actors under eighteen don’t work beyond union-specified time limits on a set, and they’re also supposed to make sure a child actor is tutored while on set if a shoot takes place on a school day. A studio teacher costs about $400 a day.
Did he really mean I needed to spend $400 to hire someone to watch me shoot a video of my kid riding a bike at the playground?
“No,” I answer, slowly. “I used my wife. She is a pediatrician.” I smile wanly.
“That’s not good enough,” FTC snaps. He stares straight at me. “The rules here at USC are very explicit. You needed a studio teacher. You did not have one. This is a very serious breach of filmmaking.”
He pauses, then adds: “The rules say you are to be expelled from school for doing what you did.”
The room is silent. Completely and totally silent. I feel every face in the class staring at me. I can hardly see FTC’s eyes under his cap. He jaw is set.
I feel my face flushing. My heart, which has been beating fast, now starts pounding. Oh, Lordy, I’m about to get kicked out of film school for making a home movie.
3
The Backstory
How did I get here, at USC, as a graying father of three? Part of the reason I’m loath to say much during our classroom introductions is because I can’t imagine turning on the spigot and explaining my background. When I applied to USC, I had to write several essays. One was a personal statement. It started like this:
On a sweltering August morning in the 1960s my mother is in a Minneapolis hospital, about to deliver her third child. That would be me. A young doctor feels her stomach and wonders aloud if the baby has two heads and one body. My mother is very upset. Luckily, a more experienced doctor goes into the delivery room and assures my mother I don’t have two heads. My umbilical cord is wrapped around my head and I survive.
My parents name me Stephen Gregory Boman. If I could have talked, I would have said: “I prefer Steve instead of Stephen. So many people mispronounce Stephen (Steff-en) it’s kind of embarrassing. Saint Stephen got stoned to death by an angry mob just for mouthing off. And that young actor named Steve McQueen seems like a good egg. So, please, just make it Steve.”
I could not talk, of course, until much later, about the time my parents move north to Duluth, Minnesota. They have one more child and buy a small house. I now have two older brothers and a younger sister. My dad is a newly minted professor at the local university. My mom stays home. We have a pretty normal existence. I never came home to find the car on fire and my parents brawling on the lawn. My brothers and sister and I are outside playing constantly. We rarely watch TV. I am teased by my brothers, and I learn to use my mouth as a weapon (blame my namesake). I become the family joker. We are highly competitive. We have sibling competitions to see who can run the fastest, who can shoot BB guns the most accurately, and, among us boys, who can pee the farthest in the woods.
We all turn out pretty well. No jail time, no front-page scandals. Just the usual family sagas of marriages and heartbreaks and laughter and minor grievances. My oldest brother becomes an orthopedic surgeon, marries, has two kids. My other brother is in the Air Force for years, and then he, too, becomes a doctor. He has five kids. My younger sister is the brains of the family, a PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and a successful medical researcher.
I am the reader, the storyteller. I am always curious about the outside world. I read Papillion in the fifth grade, and give a book report about it. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Johnson, has also read the book. He does not ask me to explain to the class some of the finer details in the story, such as how prisoners stuffed valuables up their assholes to hide them.
When I am in high school, the school guidance counselor sits me down during one of his rare bouts of sobriety. We go over my record: I have been a good student. I have been a jock. I play trombone. I act in plays. He wants to know what I want to do. I have my choice pretty well narrowed down. I don’t like science. I am very good at math. In junior high, I wanted to be a forest ranger but mainly because I w
anted to drive around in a Jeep all day. But by high school I have ruled that out. I tell him I want to be a writer. He nods vacantly.
Duluth, the town I grew up in, is then a town on the skids, just like my guidance counselor. It’s a blue-collar town with a recently closed steel mill, high unemployment, and limited options. My idea of being a writer probably sounds dreamy and stupid, like students saying they’re going to be a rock star or an NBA player.
The counselor doesn’t give me any advice, or any that I remember anyway. With all the wisdom that seventeen-year-olds have, I know—absolutely know—the best way to pursue my career is to load up a motorcycle and head west and work as a menial laborer. I am going to spend at least a year traveling, working, and, most important, renting a really cool apartment somewhere in the Rocky Mountains where I can work during the day at a ski resort and write fascinating stories in the evening as Count Basie plays on the stereo. I assume there will be many beautiful women visiting. I imagine I will be smoking a pipe, like a young Hugh Hefner.
I go on the trip with my former seventh-grade locker partner, Scott. Scott has his own beat-up motorcycle, a bike even more prone to breakdowns than mine. We work as dishwashers in Wyoming. We live in a single tiny room in a trailer. We work full time and spend most of our wages for food and rent and motorcycle repairs. I don’t write one word. Then it starts to snow. We are cold. We dump the idea of working as ski-bums. (What were we thinking? We were on two-wheelers.) So we ride toward Los Angeles where Scott has relatives …
Feel free to cut and paste it for your own application essay. It wasn’t the whole story. I didn’t write about how I was a disinterested and bored student who spent much more time dreaming about motorcycles than on finishing school assignments.
In contrast, my sister, Annette, was focused like a laser. She was just a year and a half younger than me, and in many ways we were yin and yang. I ducked out of class as often as possible; she got perfect attendance marks. I spent my summers on a ladder painting houses, dirty and sunburned, to earn money for college; Annette was on a full-ride scholarship and did research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. When I graduated from college, I owned a motorcycle and a few suitcases of clothes, and I started looking for work. When she finished college, she headed to Johns Hopkins for graduate work, and she was invited to Stockholm to witness the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. She interviewed several of the Nobel winners for a Swedish television program. She asked them about their thoughts on God, which sounds a bit presumptuous, but she was so young and straightforward that the people she interviewed answered her with great earnestness. She got a PhD from Johns Hopkins in biophysics when she was twenty-six. She wanted to be a scientist, you see.