The Film School of Hard Knocks : Cinema: While USC and UCLA strive to produce superstars, CSUN takes the common man’s approach to film.

The scene opens in the bright fluorescence of a local pizza parlor kitchen with young Kathy McWorter kneading, tossing and spreading pizza dough, smothering its pale face with sauce, cheese and sausage before sliding the disc into a wide oven. Her apron is smudged, certainly, but she still looks late ‘80s cool with long fake fingernails painted a mix of pink and orange. Fittingly enough, it’s the very color of pepperoni.

McWorter is momentarily content here in this latest fast-food gig, happy just to be earning some much-needed money between film and screen-writing classes at Cal State Northridge. That is, until she realizes three of her fingers are missing their fancy acrylic nails. And now, standing at the counter with his partly eaten pizza is the unsmiling customer who found them, like some exotic extra topping.

He seems a little confused, perhaps even a bit hurt, and asks only, “What is this?”

It’s the end, actually, of this real-life screwball comedy scene, and of another job for McWorter. This was a year or more ago, when she was still a screen-writing student at Cal State Northridge. And it was definitely before her life would be taking another kind of cinematic twist, a very Hollywood-like climax with the sale of a script to a major studio for $1 million. But at the time, she was more like the 700 other majors in the CSUN radio-television-film department, aiming for a serious career in the movies.

As with others looking for film careers, she landed at CSUN largely because the tuition at the prestigious USC film school was far out of reach, and the UCLA film department was notoriously difficult to get into. Although lesser known, and saddled with a more limited budget, the CSUN undergraduate film program has nonetheless fed a consistent stream of writers, directors, cinematographers, film editors and others to the insatiable local entertainment industry. And within five months of her graduation from CSUN in May, McWorter had suddenly joined the screenwriters million-dollar club for a script she titled “The Cheese Stands Alone.” The $1-million sale to Paramount Pictures is believed to be the highest ever paid for a woman’s script.

“I was always kind of wondering about if I didn’t make it as a writer, what am I going to do with my life?” said McWorter, who had written an endless number of stories and scripts since attending high school in the mid-80s. “Either I’m going to be rich or I’m going to be a bag woman. I knew there was no in-between.”

But at CSUN, department faculty agreed that much of the program’s strength comes from shaping students for work at every level of the entertainment world. The nearly 20-year-old program can also boast the largest department of its kind west of the Mississippi, Chairwoman Judith Marlane said. And she suggested that USC and UCLA were geared more toward developing a few fortunate stars.

“They are looking for the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. We here have a more common man’s approach,” said Marlane, who came to CSUN after working as a producer and consultant in public affairs and news documentaries for the major networks and local stations in New York. “Our kids are talented and hard-working, and we give them the best. And if they are not going to be a Spielberg, they are still going to go out there and make a very fine product. They will probably be absorbed into the industry very successfully.

“Most of our students work outside of school as well. So we have a wonderful reputation for our kids who know everything is not going to be handed them on a silver platter. They don’t come to school in Mercedeses or BMWs.”

Instead, CSUN film students pay the standard $372 in fees every semester and then are faced with the often formidable task of raising thousands of dollars to finance their film productions. One senior project, a 13-minute, black and white student movie scheduled to be shot over four days in Pasadena recently had an expected budget of $10,000, a daunting figure for its three full-time student filmmakers.

Grant McDowell, the student writer and editor of the “Twilight Zone”-like short, recently sold some of his clothes in a yard sale to raise money for the movie. Other funds are raised through loans, car washes, financial grants from the student government and elsewhere. Local film equipment companies are also approached to donate rental time on state-of-the-art equipment unavailable at CSUN. Student writer-director Jeff Jenkins, 22, persuaded Panavision, with his 18-page script, to loan him one its cameras for a month to film his senior project, “I Dreamt I Was a Butterfly.”

“Those are the skills you’re really going to use when you get out there,” said Myron Murakami, a 1988 CSUN graduate who now works in the film department. “Raising money is a very important skill if you want to do your own films, if you don’t want to go begging. So in a way we teach real independent production, as opposed to a studio deal. You have to fight for every dime, and you know how much things cost.

“Here, because you’re pretty much left to your own devices, you have to do everything,” Murakami added, referring to film production students. “You have to be able to work sound, to work camera, you have to know how to put up lights and how lights work, and how to edit. Everyone ends up doing a lot of everything.”

The cost of “I Dreamt I Was a Butterfly,” a half-hour black and white drama, is expected to total about $20,000. Filmed in Morro Bay with a cast that includes professional actress-singer Kristen Vigard and noted local artist-actor James Mathers, the movie is scheduled to be finished in time for screening on campus and at the second annual CSUN student film festival Thursday at the Directors Guild of American theater in Hollywood.

“Hopefully, it will spark interest in someone supporting us to do a feature,” Jenkins said. “And if it’s not, we’ll do it ourselves. We’ve learned how to scrape up this support, and the next thing is a feature, definitely.”

But Jenkins said many senior projects never make it to that final stage, where edited sound and edited picture are processed into one self-contained reel. Financing is the always overriding concern.

Added MacDowell, “There’s a group in our class that has shot their whole thing, and the lab is holding their developed film hostage because they don’t have the money to get it out. We hope that doesn’t happen to us.”

After graduation, CSUN filmmaking and script-writing majors generally find their way into the industry, script-writing teacher Ken Portnoy said. He recently bumped into a former student at a gym who had already directed a feature. And he later spotted one of his former production students giving the stocks report on the Financial News Network.

A solid 30% of all film production students who take an unpaid internship, gaining some firsthand knowledge and experience in the industry while still in school, get immediate or near-future job offers, said Temma Kramer, head of the film production area and of the internship program.

Producer Jay Scharer, whose hourlong music video program “Pump It Up” is syndicated nationwide, said he uses interns from CSUN regularly. For two or three days a week, the students perform a variety of tasks, from answering phones to sitting in on editing sessions to going out on location to help set up shoots.

“They are very conscientious, very hard workers, very reliable,” Scharer said. “We have been delivered a lot of very reliable people. Sometimes with interns it’s potluck, they don’t take it seriously or whatever. And the people at that school have been exceptional. The small sample that we’ve had have been very nice to work with.”

At “Unsolved Mysteries,” the NBC nonfiction program, assistant researcher Greg Carlisle said interns help sort through the nearly 1,000 letters the show receives each week. They also assist producers during casting calls, with locating props and with pre-production paperwork. He added that he’s noticed no meaningful distinction between the students he hires from other local schools and CSUN.

“They are very important,” Carlisle said. “Everybody here loves the interns. They really do help out a lot. It can get really crazy here when we’re in full production and it’s really nice to have an intern give a helping hand.”

Kramer, a UCLA film graduate, also insisted that the CSUN degree is no less valuable on a filmmaker’s resume than that of other local schools. “When someone looks at your film, your portfolio piece, when someone reads your script, they do not ask to see your grades or your degree,” Kramer said. “The truth is in the pudding. It’s in what you produce.”

Among the department alumni are entertainment executives Dave Dubiel, production manager for Cable News Network; Rich Thorn, senior vice president for the editing and special effects company the Post Group; and Lance Taylor, vice president for creative affairs at actress Shelley Duvall’s Think Entertainment production company. And currently a student in the CSUN film department is actress Joan Chen, a lead player in the 1987 Academy Award-winning “The Last Emperor,” and, more recently, television’s “Twin Peaks.”

“We’ve had students go on to solid heights,” Kramer said proudly, “actually earning a living in the business.”

One common complaint among students, however, is in the quality and variety of production equipment available in the department. CSUN filmmakers say they can only look with envy at the fully equipped USC program, aided significantly by donations from such generous alumni as director-producer George Lucas.

McWorter said she saw cameras at school held together with duct tape. And while she said she was fortunate that as a writer all she needed was “paper and a pencil,” she plans to donate money early this year to establish an annual fellowship for screenwriters.

“I wish there were more people that would look back at their school and do that,” she said. “I got a lot of scholarships, and I needed them.”

McWorter said that before transferring to CSUN from Glendale Community College, she always had confidence in the quality of her work. But it wasn’t until after arriving at her first script-writing class with CSUN teacher Alan A. Armer that she had any expectations about how her scripts would be received.

McWorter said she learned important lessons about story structure at CSUN. But it was her very first session under Armer, head of the CSUN script-writing program and now on a sabbatical from the school until the spring semester, that had the greatest impact on her. She added that she continues to talk to her former teacher regularly, meeting for lunch about once a month.

“He told us the first day of class if you feel compelled to write, and you know you’re good, you will make it. And I believed that,” McWorter explained. “I wrote before I ever met him, and I’m the kind of person that wrote other projects outside of assignments. But he made me believe I could get an agent no problem, people would buy my work without me even blinking. And it’s turned out that way. He dispelled all my fears.”

McWorter’s own success is also having some impact on the fellow students she left behind.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Jenkins, who remembers McWorter as just another student as recently as last year. “Other than strange, I think it’s inspiring to know it can happen. It makes you totally believe in yourself and your talent, and not to get freaked out if nothing is happening right now. She got a lot of heat from mainstream professors, saying her stuff was too wacky.”

And with the sale of a handful of scripts behind her already, optioning two screenplays and a third sold to Paramount since graduating, McWorter said she is considering spending some time in the future teaching what she’s learned about writing and the movie industry to new students. Recently she returned to the Northridge campus to speak and answer questions in front of a large class of would-be script-writers.

“I think it would be fun to teach,” she said. “I might, I don’t know, if they want me.”

In the meantime, McWorter is busy working on new projects and enjoying her uncommon success. She happily recounted how she had just purchased a new car for her mother the night before, and was now making plans to send her father on his long-dreamed-of trip to Australia.

Her father, she said, is talking of writing a script of his own, and McWorter has been encouraging, as she is to just about anyone willing to try it. Finally, she asked, “Are you working on a script? You ought to start. You never know.”