SDSU Filmmakers Take Center Stage at L.A. Screening

San Diego State University film alumnus Jack Garrett was amazed when he read about a recent screening of films produced by SDSU film students. The film department organizers charged admission, and the money went to support film projects.

“That never happened when I was there,” said Garrett, who attended SDSU from 1986 to 1989.

Things are changing at the SDSU film department, which has always struggled to establish itself as a center for film study.

The department is taking its battle for respect to the front lines Sunday night, hosting a screening of films produced by past and present SDSU students at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. It will be the first Los Angeles screening to feature SDSU filmmakers, and it represents the school’s latest effort to establish itself in the big leagues of film scholarship.

For graduates of SDSU who have witnessed the department’s struggle for legitimacy, the Los Angeles event is viewed as long overdue, one more sign that the much-maligned film department is getting its act together.

“It’s certainly a step in the right direction,” said alumnus Jenna Ward-Steinman, whose “Still Life With Beer” will be part of the AFI event.

The audience for the AFI screening will be composed primarily of invited industry professionals. Besides spotlighting 11 short films produced by SDSU students, the evening’s guest of honor will be SDSU alumnus Kathleen Kennedy, producer and president of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.

The film department administrators believe the screening is a vivid example of the progress made by the department, and they hope it will show the industry professionals in attendance that SDSU graduates can do more than surf. Many of the films have won awards, some on a national level.

Garrett’s “The Night Waiter” has aired nationally on the Showtime and Movie Channel cable networks, as well as on “Night Flight,” the late-night cable show. Mark Lawrence’s adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story, “The Inspired Chicken Motel,” won a prestigious FOCUS award in 1989, the first time an SDSU student has won the national prize.

“There is new blood everywhere in the (film) department,” said Lawrence. “There’s a new spirit, a new attitude. A lot of people are really excited about it.”

Still, SDSU is not well known in Hollywood. In the halls of industry studios, the college has never engendered the respect of USC, UCLA, Columbia and the other well-established film factories.

When preparing students for jobs in Hollywood is the goal, lack of recognition within the industry is a serious problem, and it represents the next major challenge facing the SDSU film department.

“It’s been frustrating for our grads to go up there and know just as much as graduates of other schools” and yet be treated differently, said Professor Mike Real, chairman of the Telecommunications and Film Department. “Without any mystique behind them, they can get lost in the shuffle.”

Although SDSU alumni are scattered throughout the TV and film industries, Kennedy is the biggest name to emerge from the 30-year-old department.

Though the department is limited to 250 students, the number of applicants has swelled to four times that. The program offers a master’s degree and two bachelor degrees, a bachelor of arts and a more specialized bachelor of science.

According to Real, the department began to pick up speed in 1980 when the school hired the late Dennis Sanders, a veteran Hollywood director with two Academy Awards on his resume, one for a documentary and the other for a short subject.

Besides bringing prestige to the department, Sanders, who died in 1987, helped link the department to Hollywood.

It was the presence of Sanders that helped persuade Garrett, who did his postgraduate work at Southern Illinois University, to continue his film education at SDSU.

“I knew Dennis had a couple of Academy Awards and he had done some features,” Garrett said. “I got a feeling for the potential” of the department.

But all involved admit there has been a big gap between that potential and reality, especially when it comes to integrating the school with the Hollywood community. Recent graduates have seen for themselves the lack of power offered by a film degree from SDSU.

“I don’t think mention of State carries a lot of weight as far as getting jobs,” said Garrett, who works in San Diego as a video editor and free-lance photographer.

Even at SDSU, the film department has often been thought of as a poor stepchild to the larger, more active and better equipped television and video departments. Although 30% of the current 250 telecommunications and film students are focusing on film, five years ago the number was closer to 10% to 15%, Real said.

“Video is definitely emphasized” at SDSU, said Lawrence, a 1989 graduate who is pursuing his postgraduate studies at UCLA’s film school.

“The support (in film) is much less (available), the equipment is much less, the attention is a lot less,” he said.

When it comes down to it, “all a film department has is morale,” a sense of camaraderie, Lawrence said. Until recently, students say, both were often lacking, primarily because there were few screenings or organized events.

“Film students really didn’t tend to group together,” said Garrett, who arrived at the university in 1986 to teach part time and work on his master’s degree in film studies.

Ironically, most of the films that will be screened Sunday night were produced outside the department by students willing to take the initiative to bypass its bureaucracy. The lack of equipment has always been a major problem. And the equipment that was available was notoriously difficult to check out.

“I came from Southern Illinois University, which is no USC,” Garrett said. “Southern Illinois doesn’t have a lot of money, either, but they had four or five 16-millimeter cameras, full lighting packages. . . . I came to San Diego State and they barely had one functioning 16-millimeter camera.”

Until recently, funds were rarely available for students interested in doing anything more than the most simplistic of films.

“They do a good job of training the guerrilla filmmaker,” Ward-Steinman said. “The problems with money and equipment certainly train you to get out there and see what you can do.”

Much of the department’s money problems stem from the financial woes of the California State University system and the extraordinary expenses of film production. For the school, it’s much easier to budget for television and video, where the main expense is equipment. In film, costs are impossible to predict, where expenses, such as for film and film processing, can add up very quickly.

“You can’t cover the film budget with the university budget the same way you can with TV,” Real said. “It takes a lot more ingenuity to make it work.”

Luck and a heightened ability to scrounge have helped the department’s quest for more equipment. When actor Burt Lancaster sold his home in Los Angeles a few years ago, teacher Carroll Blue, who organized Sunday’s screening, arranged for the projectors from Lancaster’s screening room to end up at SDSU. Another friend of the department helped arrange for a hefty discount on an editing system.

Beyond the equipment, there have always been complaints about the film department’s curriculum, which some feel was too narrowly focused toward the Hollywood end of the industry, at times sacrificing the more artistic elements of film. The program is often contrasted to the film department at UC San Diego, which is often lauded for its artistic and scholarly approaches to film.

When Ward-Steinman arrived at SDSU after earning a bachelor’s degree in film from New York University, she was shocked at the “dearth of critical teaching.”

“I was astonished the first time I taught and students didn’t know some of the major European filmmakers,” she said.

Yet, most detractors agree that things have improved tremendously within the department in the past few years. Ward-Steinman, who teaches summer classes at the university, believes an “increasingly more vigorous” faculty has played a big part in the improvements.

There are new faculty members, such as Jack Ofield, an independent filmmaker and a veteran of the industry with stints as a director for ABC and the National Film Board of Canada; Blue, an award-winning filmmaker, and Greg Durbin, who came to SDSU from the University of Oklahoma faculty.

“If the editing room needs a new bench, Greg is the type of guy who will come in on weekends to build a bench,” Real said.

The film department, most agree, is also doing a better job of taking care of itself financially, working outside the restraints of the university budget.

Wally Schlotter, an alumnus who now heads the local Motion Picture and Television Bureau, has been particularly active, serving as a liaison between the film department and the community. He helped organize a 1984 fund-raiser at the Hotel del Coronado, a party commemorating the 25th anniversary of the filming of “Some Like It Hot” at the hotel, helped fund construction of the Billy Wilder Suite, which includes two editing rooms, sound transfer equipment and a screening room. The suite was finally completed this month.

Three years ago, a Student Advisory Council was formed to promote screenings and facilitate financial aid for film projects. For example, last year the council sponsored a screening of student films at the Ken Cinema, with admission fees going to help film projects. Two new scholarships established in the past three years and funded through community support--one in honor of filmmaker Sanders and the other named after the late Clayton Brace, one-time general manager of KGTV-TV (Channel 10)--are also available to film students (usually a few hundred dollars each, although the amount varies).

“We’ve been really fortunate to have students here in recent years who have taken on a lot of initiative, and people in the community have been supportive,” Real said.

However, like the rest of the university, the film department is faced with a 10% to 12% cut in its budget for the next school year. There will be eight fewer classes offered in the fall, and most of the part-time teachers will probably lose their jobs.

“The budget cuts are going to hurt, but I don’t think they will reverse” the progress, Real said. “Now there is a lot of momentum. The students finishing now are role models for the new students.”