Film School Boom Proves Fast but Still Rocky Road to Big Time

Murray Cohen and Mary Beth Fielder got out of graduate school not long ago.

The couple were happy enough at USC, where they managed to scrape by on student loans. But they’re even happier now.

Cohen has an office at 20th Century Fox and $200,000 in movie writing and directing deals. Fiedler is at Lorimar, also well fixed.

Both are among the latest crop of film school graduates to strike it rich in Tinseltown.

After decades of struggling to establish their validity, the nation’s top film schools--including the Big Four at USC, UCLA, New York University and Columbia University--are enjoying an unprecedented boom.

More students and recent film school graduates are landing glitzy jobs as movie and TV writers and directors--and more applicants are clamoring for admission to the schools than ever before.

“I’m guessing we’re going to see 300 applicants” for about 20 graduate screenwriting slots at UCLA, says screenwriting program head Richard Walter. “We had to hire someone to help open the envelopes.”

In short, film education has become a glamour business. As such, however, it has also become one of the riskier and more trouble-fraught corners of the American university system.

Costs are rising, competitive pressures are at the boiling point and some schools are becoming mired in contentious debate about ethics and educational mission.

Despite the growing list of successes, moreover, it is still true that only a small number of film school graduates ever hit the big time, even after accumulating the sort of debt that used to be associated with professional education in somewhat more secure pursuits like medicine and law.

Educators say there are about 1,200 university film programs in this country. About 50 such programs, including those at Stanford, the University of Texas and Northwestern University, offer a wide range of production courses in addition to critical studies. But the schools in New York and Los Angeles have generally been preeminent because of their proximity to centers of the movie and TV business.

The American Film Institute, a conservatory funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and private donations, also has about 160 students enrolled in its film and TV program. The institute offers a master of fine arts degree, but isn’t associated with a university.

Yet even in USC’s Peter Stark movie producing program, known for its tight ties with the industry, only about one-third of some 20 annual graduates get full-time film work, often as low-paid script readers for the studios or independent producers. Another third may work part time in the industry, while the rest “are probably not going to go anywhere,” says the program’s supervisor A. D. Murphy. “People want to know, ‘What do you estimate my annual income will be two or three years out?’ We tell them, ‘Zero,’ ” says Murphy.

Many educators nonetheless say the schools are becoming a powerful force for the improvement of Hollywood and should tighten their ties with the entertainment business even more.

“We can be a kind of laboratory for the industry, a place where hard questions can be asked in a way that can’t happen on the outside,” says Charles Milne, chairman of the movie and TV department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (named for the family with interests in theaters and CBS Inc.). Milne suggests, for instance, that solutions to some union and management problems might come easier in an academic environment than in contract negotiations.

Yet critics claim that the schools, by moving closer to industry, have only made it increasingly difficult to distinguish deal-hungry, would-be film makers from young investment bankers.

“When you deal with the newest crop of film school alumni, you sense they’re looking for that quick killing,” complains Peter Bart, an independent writer and producer who has worked as an executive for Paramount and other studios.

“It’s as if they had faced a choice between business school or another kind of quick hit. Their attitudes are in no way conditioned by a love of craft. This is a domain of money and power in the ‘80s.”

At the Big Four, most students regard themselves as directors-in-training. And what they want is simple: to direct feature films, as early in their careers as possible.

“There’s no mystery. We want to work,” explains Fielder, 31, who attended medical school before enrolling at USC. She is now writing what she describes as a “Smooth Talk”-like story about sexual awakening that she hopes to direct for Lorimar.

The vast majority of graduates are usually forced to settle for less, whether that means part-time work as a production assistant or dreary years of writing scripts on “spec.”

“If there are 250 pictures made in an ordinary year, maybe 10 of those are by first-time directors. How many of those are students? Two?” says Jonathan Krane, a producer who has used recent graduates on low-budget films.

Still, a rush of youth-oriented hits and the glut of independent productions in the mid-1980s made it easier for new talent to catch, if not hold, the industry’s eye.

“(Students) have been getting their first or second shot,” says James Berkus of Leading Artists agency, which had major success with NYU-educated writer-director Joel Coen (“Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona”). “If it doesn’t work, then nobody’s interested. It’s almost a better shot for a young person with a terrific short film than someone who’s done a couple of features that weren’t that great.”

Nowadays, the “terrific short” is very often a 16-millimeter miniature feature that mimics the structure, look and themes of mainstream commercial movies.

Some faculty members claim such films are getting technically better, but lack the intellect and edge of earlier-generation work like George Lucas’ “THX-1138,” a weirdly futuristic short that eventually became the director’s first feature. “There are a lot of competent people around. But the ideas are just not here anymore,” complains USC production professor David Johnson, who taught Lucas and Robert Zemeckis (“Back to the Future”) at the school.

Eleanor Hamerow, head of NYU’s graduate film-making program, also says her students are “certainly not political” in their art. For example, she says, “most of them intellectually are against (the U.S. position in) Nicaragua. But they don’t do anything about it on film.”

A favorite form of the moment is comedy, generally without serious undertones. For example, “The Birthday Fish,” written and directed by Columbia’s Alex Zamm, goes a step beyond “Splash.” It tells the story of a sentimental nerd who falls in love with a goldfish that he bought as a present for his cold-hearted wife.

Meanwhile, USC student Peter Gould’s slickly humorous “Dirty Little Secrets” explores the dilemma of a young foot fetishist who is assigned to sell women’s shoes in a big department store. He’s fired but finally deals with his problem by opening a shoe store of his own. “You can’t live your whole life worrying about what someone else is going to think” emerges as the film’s moral.

Others get their punch from a clever twist at the end. For instance, Columbia’s Tom Abrams, writer and director of “Shoeshine,” recently nominated for an Oscar, cast comedian Jerry Stiller as a well-worn shoeshine man who dispenses advice to a young investment banker. The banker turns out to be the shoeshine man’s son, and is played by Stiller’s own son, Ben.

“Spielbergian” science-fiction is out of fashion in the schools, along with the horror genre and gratuitous violence. What plays in academe is “character development,” although it is sometimes development in a minor key.

“The kind of films we’re going for are more about people,” explains Ari Taub, a recent NYU graduate. “We like things like ‘The Breakfast Club,’ ‘Blue Velvet,’ ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’ ”