FILM SERIES : Life Before Fame: Student Works of 6 Filmmakers

Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and David Lynch typify the new breed of filmmaker that has risen out of film school. As students fueled by little more than a passion for film, they managed to make films that became springboards for bigger and better things.

Tonight and Saturday night at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, “Back to Film School II” will offer audiences a rare opportunity to see the student films of six major filmmakers. The program follows up on last year’s highly successful “Back to Film School,” a festival organized by 24-year-old San Diego State University student filmmakers Ken Apperson and Dave Tanaka.

For the new program, Apperson and Tanaka have again chosen films from Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Scorsese’s “What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” (1962) focuses on a man fixated on a painting. Scorsese had been an English major at New York University but switched to the film department, where he made three award-winning shorts, “Nice Girl” among them.

Scorsese went on to produce his first feature, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?,” while teaching at NYU in 1968. Since then, he has made such critically acclaimed films as “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver” and last year’s box office hit “The Color of Money.”

Lynch, whose film “The Grandmother” was a favorite of Apperson and Tanaka at last year’s show, returns with a four-minute animated short called “Alphabet” that he made as a student on the East Coast in 1970. Lynch later directed the cult horror classic “Eraserhead,” as well as “The Elephant Man” and the controversial “Blue Velvet.”

The roots of Brian DePalma’s darkly comic horror films can be found in his 1962 film “Woton’s Wake,” which offers a satiric, mock-horror film. DePalma began making films while an undergraduate at Columbia University. “Woton’s Wake” earned him the Rosenthal Foundation Award and led to a writing fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College.

DePalma’s professional films include “Carrie,” “Scarface” and last year’s “The Untouchables.”

USC film student Robert Zemeckis won an Oscar for best student film for his 1973 short “A Field of Honor.” The film, made with his friend Bob Gale, follows the adventures of a young man released from a mental institution. The film impressed another USC alumnus, Steven Spielberg, who hired them as writers for “1941.” Three years ago, they wrote and directed “Back to the Future,” which was produced by Spielberg.

Other filmmakers represented in this year’s festival are John Waters (“The Diane Linkletter Story,” 1970) and John Carpenter (“The Resurrection of Bronco Billy,” 1970).

Waters’ film typified the kind of problems Apperson and Tanaka had in finding these films.

“Waters’ film wasn’t anywhere,” Tanaka recalled. “We found out that it had been sold from one company to another and we feared it had been lost in transit. When we tried to find Francis Coppola’s student films, we met with a hush and were then told that a lot of his early films were blue movies.”

Apperson feels that the research and persistence has paid off.

“I love the novelty of the show,” he said. “Everyone has their favorite director and they see a student film like Scorsese’s ‘The Big Shave’ and they say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense that it’s Scorsese.’ ”

The films will be shown tonight and Saturday at 7:30 and 9:30 in the museum’s Sherwood Auditorium. General admission is $5.