Film School

by Steve Boman

  I’m looking forward again to shooting near home. I can spend weekend evenings with my family, and frankly, it’s far easier to shoot away from Los Angeles. L.A. is home to an incredible number of film shoots. True, there are more and more films and television shows shot away from Los Angeles than in past decades, but the city remains a hotbed of filmmaking. Student films, porn films, low-budget films, television shows, blockbuster films … you name it. And because of that, everyone in town seems to be a filmmaking expert, including the police, and merchants, and neighbors, and even that guy walking his dog down the street. As a result, shooting even an incredibly small student project means you are dealing with:

  Police who want to see a film permit. Los Angeles police operate under an ordinance informally called the “rule of three,” which means that no permit is needed for shoots that involve three or fewer people, as long there is no disruption. However, there are lots of stories of police shutting down a shoot that doesn’t have a film permit, despite this informal rule. And getting a film permit in Los Angeles means you have to deal with FILM LA, the city’s awful permitting agency. FILM LA marries Stalinist warmth with south-of-the-border efficiency. Imagine the slowest, least motivated employee at your local post office counter or city hall office. Now, put them in a cool shirt, expensive jeans, and add a big helping of smug “I’ll be out to lunch for the next two hours” attitude. They hate dealing with film students. They’d clearly rather be setting up permits for the next Jerry Bruckheimer film than talking to another nervous and ignorant film student.

  Residents who want to “help out” or offer advice or simply want you gone because the last student film crew in the area urinated on the bushes or left behind garbage or did whatever unseemly things students do. Then they’ll call the police, who will arrive and ask where your permit is.

  Merchants who figure they can get paid.

  A dog walker who will stop and want to watch, while the dog starts barking. Its owner will explain that it’s a free country, and besides, do you have a permit?

  I’m gearing up for the weekend when I get bad news. Julie’s brother, who is mentally ill, has disappeared from his halfway house. Julie’s mother is beside herself with worry. I decide to skip Casper’s class and drive home to help out, and I selfishly worry that the issue will affect my weekend shoot. Then my brother-in-law turns up. He’s fine. I focus on my weekend shoot. The next day, Julie comes down with the flu.

  I had planned on using her mother for two days of shooting while Julie watched the kids both Saturday and Sunday, but I have to trim the shot list to one day. Julie feels lousy with a 102-degree fever.

  My plan to use an antagonist goes out the window, as do several locations. I’m feeling frustrated at the bad luck and what feels like my nonstop family drama. I feel so burdened with family obligations compared to my single fellow students. It sounds like a joke: well, my brother-in-law went AWOL from his halfway house, and my wife came down with the flu, and I have to take care of my kids ’cuz my mother-in-law needs a little break. If we had a dog, I’m sure he’d eat my homework.

  I feel sorry for myself, and I’m concerned about Julie. She rarely gets sick, even though she is surrounded by sick children all day at her clinic. I’m learning that cancer survivors get jumpy about any routine illnesses.

  The film is a disappointment. It is so short, with so little material. I edit it together—a snap—and title it LESS THAN I EXPECTED.

  When I screen the film in front of my classmates, they give it a tepid response. It looked good in the first few minutes, just like MY CRAZY DAD, but it is as filling as water and rice cakes. The film is only four-and-a-half minutes long—barely half as long as other class films. My classmates are diplomatic. I sense everyone is underwhelmed. Even FTC doesn’t say much about the film.

  It just slips under the water like an exhausted swimmer.

  Three films so far, and all three have been barely adequate, nothing more. I’m guessing how other students view me: I’m the guy who knows all the answers in Casper’s film history class but on the screen puts up mediocre films. I leave class that day biting my lips in frustration. I want to kick a garbage can (or a Dumpster).

  I’m more than half done with the semester and my films all have roughly the same story line: a person imagines something better, and it either turns out to be untrue or just a dream. If there’s any consolation, it’s in seeing that the rest of the class is struggling, too. J.’s third film is a disappointment—as a class we have huge expectations, and the film is a simple affair about a businessman sharing food with a homeless guy. It looks no better or worse than the class average.

  A

  fter my third film, I can feel my reputation in 507 starting to congeal like turkey fat. I’m falling on my face. I came to USC with dreams of doing incredible films, real stunners, and all I’ve done so far is make three forgettable snoozers. I console myself with the realization that no one in 507 is a Mozart of the film world. Some of my classmates are immensely intelligent and driven people. Yet no one is making consistently great films. It shows just how hard the process is. In 507, the films are very simple exercises. The crews are tiny, and in theory it should be possible for a good film student to make a series of good strong films.

  In reality, it doesn’t turn out that way. The semester turns into a slog. The only real surprises come from Fee Fee. One day she brings a swimsuit calendar to class. It’s got a dozen bikini-wearing Asian women. The calendar is the kind you’d find in mechanics’ bays or college dorms. She giggles and shows us one of the months. There she is, in a tiny suit, strutting her stuff for the camera. She looks nothing like she does in class. The straight guys pick their jaws off the ground and paw at the calendar. She later tells us she’s a DJ at a downtown club. We should come, she says. She starts her shift at midnight, she adds.

  That week when I enter Casper’s class, I’m in for a treat. I had missed the previous class what with my missing-brother-in-law/ill-wife family issues. I’m walking down the aisle when Casper spots me.

  “Oh, how nice to see you, Steve!” he says with a bite in his voice. “It seems you chose not to skip today like you skipped last week. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  He’s mocking me, of course. And he’s wearing his microphone. I have no answer, and even if I did, there’s no way to be heard without shouting. He knows how to own the room and how to use the elements of power. I go to my seat and get ready for the lecture.

  That day, as the lecture goes on, Casper repeatedly chides me in front of the class for missing the previous week, but he never asks me a question. Several times he makes references to the film the class saw seven days earlier, and then adds: “Of course, Steve wouldn’t know that.”

  It’s very funny, and I take my lumps. I know he enjoyed testing me in previous classes, and I assume he took it as a sign of disrespect that I missed the previous class. During a break I debate approaching Casper and explaining why I missed the lecture, but I don’t. I dislike people offering excuses short of death or disfigurement. I missed the class, period. I made my choice. Now I suffer the consequence. I’m in Casper’s doghouse.

  In Ross Brown’s writing class, I get no such guff. Ross is always upbeat and grinning. I realize partway through the semester I’m on an easy first-name basis with him. Whereas Casper is Dr. Casper, and Tomlinson Holman is Professor Holman, Ross Brown is … Ross.

  As our 507 class gets more edgy every week and the students get more testy, my writing course becomes a little oasis of support for me and for others in the class. In the first few weeks of writing class, I disliked going. The writing from my classmates seemed juvenile and crude. Then … the class got better. The writing improved, at least a bit. Mainly, we talked about how we felt relief to be away from our other 507 classmates. It wasn’t that there was anything toxic about the people in my 507 class—or apparently in the other two 507 groups—but the constant interaction and the constant critiquing in 507 wore on us all. We were
like soldiers on a long march. The writing class was a little island of calm. We shared our stories and laughed and critiqued in a way that was less caustic than in 507.

  I

  n the days after 9/11, I was a house dad. I changed diapers, cooked, cleaned, and walked Lara to elementary school, taking the others along for a ride in their stroller. The days became weeks, and the weeks became months. Julie underwent radiation treatment. Then she had a third surgery on her neck at UCLA, where doctors attempted to repair her damaged vocal cord. Life became a series of dirty diapers and doctors’ appointments. Even little Sophia seemed to want to get in on the action, as a small sore she was born with on the small of her back became a large bleeding sore, which didn’t scab over until she was nearly a year old. Diaper changes often became a bloody affair—which just added to my feelings that life was spinning out of control.

  One night in 2002, Julie and I sat down to talk. “You’re going stir crazy here,” she said. I agreed. She noted I had written a script, done some freelance video production, and had enjoyed both immensely. I agreed again.

  “I think you should apply to film school,” she said. I blinked. Film school? It did have a nice ring to it. “There’s some good film schools right in Los Angeles,” Julie added. “Right?”

  Yes, there were. I researched them all and one place kept rising to the top: USC. So I applied, ignorant about what I might face and blissfully unaware of how unlikely I was to get in.

  Applying to USC’s production division is all about words and test scores.

  The application required several essays, one a personal statement. Mine was sixteen pages long. It started with the observation that, when I was in high school, the idea that I might go to film school seemed as likely as becoming a flying monkey. It ended with the following paragraphs:

  This is one of my dreams: I look at my arms. They’re hairy, intensely strong, and I’m holding a banana. I am on the edge of a cliff. I jump and then … I start gliding through the air, my hairy wings gently beating in the sun. I am a flying monkey.

  In another dream, this happens: I am admitted to USC. I do well. I write and direct many good short films. I write screenplays. I sell a screenplay. A studio knows I have attended USC, and they give me a chance to direct the film. I am well trained, so I agree. I direct the film. The film is very good. I hold a statuette at an awards ceremony and thank USC.

  And as I walk away from the podium, my hairy monkey wings quietly slide out from underneath my tuxedo, and I flap into the air.

  Another essay asked for a character study. I wrote the following, a character for a script I had sketched out, using some of what I had learned hauling human organs for the University of Chicago.

  John Calvetti is a thirty-nine-year-old former cardiac surgeon who was ousted from the medical profession three years ago after he was convicted of felony narcotics possession.

  Perhaps you saw him on the news. The cops stopped him for running a red light in Baltimore. They found a half-dozen doses of medical morphine in the glove box of his BMW and two rocks of crack on the floor. The bigger problem came when Calvetti, stoned and sitting in the back seat of a police cruiser, told the cops they had better also check his trunk. The police found more than 600 doses of morphine he’d stolen from a hospital pharmacy. His face was in all the papers.

  The headlines said those who knew Calvetti were “shocked.” It was true. He was known as a meticulous person. Always perfect. At high school in a little town in Western Pennsylvania, Calvetti got all As. He did the same in college, at Penn State: a perfect 4.0. He was stunningly focused. At medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, he continued his streak. Calvetti was smart, there’s no doubt, but he made his mark by studying harder than anyone else. Calvetti liked to say he would even outwork the Asians.

  Calvetti wasn’t a popular guy. He was too cocky, too arrogant, too smart and—to prove there is no justice in the world—much too handsome. Calvetti was distantly friendly with nearly everyone he met, but he had no close friends. No wife. No ex-wife. No long-term girlfriends. After his arrest, his lawyers told him to call on his best friends to be character witnesses. He didn’t come up with a single name. In court, his lawyers brought up the fact that his mother had died when he was young, that his father, a nursing home administrator, drove him hard as a boy. The jury returned a not guilty on intent to distribute but guilty on felony possession and theft. Calvetti was sentenced to six years’ probation. He lost his medical license.

  Calvetti first became addicted to painkillers during his residency at Johns Hopkins. He was visiting the room of a seventy-six-year-old patient, a guy who was hardly lucid in the best of times. A nurse came in with a pair of painkiller tablets, but Calvetti shooed her out before she could give the pills to the patient. She left them beside the bed. Calvetti hadn’t slept in three nights. He’d been in the hospital for eighteen of the past nineteen days. For the first time in his life, Calvetti admitted to himself that maybe he was drowning, that maybe he couldn’t reach the surface fast enough to fill his lungs. Calvetti stared at the pills for several long seconds. And then, carefully but quickly, he swallowed one of the pills. He started taking more pills, and then discovered morphine on his rare off days, and then cocaine on his on days. The spiral was in motion.

  The predictable happened after his conviction. His former acquaintances reveled in his misfortune. They laughed about him at the bars, at the sports clubs, at medical meetings. John Calvetti was just wound a little too tight, they would say, chuckling at their own good fortune. But they all thought Calvetti would bounce back, that he would take his licks and come back a chastened surgeon. He was a great one with his hands, they said. He’ll come back.

  He didn’t. He found cocaine just too strong. He loved crack. He loved the way it made him feel, the smartest guy in America, stoned out of his mind on a shitty street in the ghetto. He felt powerful at first, in total control of his destiny, and then, slowly, he just felt wasted.

  He sold everything. His guilt and his pity drove him on a two-year journey into the gutter, which is where he was when the twelve-year-old was shot. The boy was a crack runner, innocent as the morning, who got a bullet in the chest when a buyer started waving his Glock around and the thing went off. Calvetti, coming off a high and sitting on the curb, just watched the boy bleed to death.

  When the police cleared the scene, Calvetti walked away, puked, and took a bus to his old hospital, where he checked into rehab and made his first attempt at staying clean.

  He failed, and failed a second time.

  It was after his second drop-off into crack that John Calvetti, one of the best heart surgeons in America, met in a Burger King with one Jose Cardinal, who had an offer: one million dollars if Calvetti would sober up and perform a heart transplant on Luis Mercato de Silva, the vicious and ailing drug kingpin of Tijuana.

  USC also wanted an essay about an emotionally powerful moment. I wrote about the day Julie gave birth to Maria, without sedatives, and tried chewing on my arm because she was in so much pain.

  USC also wanted my GRE scores, transcripts from my undergraduate days, and at least three letters of recommendation. The essays were easy to do. Taking the GRE was not. I hadn’t taken a math class in decades. So I picked up a study guide at the local Barnes & Noble and spent several weeks going through it while the kids napped during the day.

  I figured I might have a leg up on the all-important diversity issue, as I guessed not many middle-aged suburban family men applied to film school. The thought that I might be a minority candidate made me smile with a sad sense of irony. In my days as a reporter, there was always the blunt and rarely discussed reality that it was hard to get promoted or hired as a white guy in newspapers. Newsrooms had plenty of old white men, and hiring editors didn’t want more if they could help it.

  Still, diverse or not, I figured my chances of getting admitted to the production program were still very slim. I had only one real ace in the hole: my letters of
recommendation. The USC guidelines state an applicant must provide at least three letters of recommendation, with one being from a former instructor. I thought if three were the minimum, I would send ten.

  And what letters they were. I had letters from a Milwaukee television news anchor; a Chicago Tribune reporter; a friend who wrote about third-world poverty; a designer with a piece in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection; a lead actor on the TV series SPORTS NIGHT; one of my brothers, a former air force captain who was on the flight crew of the world’s fastest ten thousand kilometer flight; a pal who’d worked for National Public Radio and now taught at Duke University; my former college English teacher; a former Saltmine pal who worked at Vanity Fair; and finally, my old college traveling chum named Tom, who had been the best man at my wedding. They all knew me very well, and all of them wrote exquisitely funny and touching letters. My age was an advantage here. I felt bad for my fellow applicants who didn’t have such a deep bench.

  I sent my application package off to USC late in the summer. I would find out in the spring. Meanwhile, there were diapers to change, meals to cook, bathrooms to clean, laundry to ruin, and bills to pay. Life went on as normal, whatever that was.

  I

  n 507, time moves forward with amazing speed. We receive a lecture about the next semester, and the next big production class, 508. With 508, we leave behind solo filmmaking and work at all times with a partner. The quality in 508 is expected to be much greater, as we’ll be spending more than five times as long per minute on our work. Instead of shooting on a relatively cheap video camera, we’ll be shooting sixteen-millimeter color film. We are told to think wisely about choosing partners. Whatever the stress of 507, the stress of 508 is worse, we are told—much worse.

  We learn a few details about 508. We will be locked at the hip with our 508 partners. A 508 partnership shares the same grade. If one fails, both fail. If one partner quits, the other partner is out for the semester and has to repeat the entire class again.