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LACC: Low-Budget Film U. : Budding <i> Auteurs</i> Are Too Busy to Be Envious of USC, UCLA

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Vaughn Obern was walking through the hospital-quiet hallway of the communications building at Los Angeles City College when he was stopped in his tracks by a student--or rather, a hopeful student.

She said she had heard someone was dropping his film editing class. She followed him down the hall and then down the stairs, all but begging to get in.

“There are a lot of people ahead of you on the waiting list,” he said, promising to get her into his Cinema 11 class next semester. After she walked off, he explained her desperation. There are 35 people in his class. There are 43 on the waiting list.

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Welcome to L.A.’s other film school.

USC and UCLA cast tall shadows in this town--ones that cover LACC’s commuter campus in Hollywood and reach into most of the studios and talent agencies.

“I know USC and UCLA have the big names just because (George) Lucas . . . and everybody has come out of there,” LACC student Beth Rivera explained, taking a break from her editing project late in the afternoon. “But just because it’s a more expensive school where you’ve had one or two students who have done exceptionally well, that doesn’t mean there’s no creative kids coming out of other schools.

“A lot of people feel prejudiced toward USC and UCLA, so they hire (their graduates), and so those people are in the industry, and they keep hiring. . . . I think sometimes it’s hard to break into that,” said Rivera, 30.

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She had been working as a free-lance assistant film editor when she enrolled last year. Her immediate goal is to learn more about videotape editing, but eventually, she said, “I guess I would like to be a director, like everybody else.”

Like all students in the cinema division of LACC’s radio-TV-film department, Rivera will get a chance to direct a 16-millimeter film, if she’s got the determination and the money. Advanced projects--which are usually color films with dialogue--cost about $1,000 a minute to produce.

But the financial damage isn’t as bad as it sounds. Fees at LACC are $10 a unit, and most classes are three or four units. At UCLA, where students also bankroll their own films, undergrads pay $967.50 a quarter and grads pay $1,082 a quarter. USC finances final film projects, but undergraduate tuition is $529 a unit and graduate tuition is $555 a unit.

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Do you get what you pay for? While some USC students may walk away with invaluable contacts, USC technically owns the advanced films produced there. At UCLA and LACC, wanna-be filmmakers may have to pay for their own materials, but they own their final project.

There’s also the question of control. Dorian Gibbs, 29, did his undergraduate work at USC, but when he decided to study film, he went to LACC.

“I went to USC for drama, for acting, and it cost a lot of money. So when I decided to pursue directing, I couldn’t see spending all of that money for a film that they basically had control of and I was limited in what I could do,” he said.

In a sense, LACC’s film program has more in common with graduate programs than undergraduate ones. It’s a two-year track, heavy on the technical instruction and hands-on experience. But while most film schools are turning away nearly 95% of applicants, LACC takes anyone with a high school diploma or its equivalent.

“I’m very much aware of the competing film schools,” Prof. J. P. Geuens said. “But (LACC) is a different animal completely. It has a little weird personality, but it’s interesting to share in what’s going on there.”

Geuens teaches a variety of classes at LACC, including Cinema 15 and 16, the advanced film production classes. The 15 or so students who make it to each of his classes are the survivors drawn from a pool of up to 300 enrolled cinema students. “It’s a different group of students. They come to LACC because they don’t have the skill to enroll or be accepted at UCLA or USC. In a way that makes them more like real people than professional students,” he said. “When it works, it produces a film that is difficult to get at USC or UCLA.”

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Still, he recommends his students go to screenings at other film schools to size up their competition. He also suggests they buy used camcorders and shoot every day to learn how to create shots with what is available to them. Few listen to his advice.

“A lot of people think they can survive by simply doing academic work. It creates a grade but doesn’t create a filmmaker,” he said.

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Finishing a film at LACC takes more perseverance than at USC or UCLA. There is no structured academic program that pushes students through. Class waiting lists are growing. The stockroom is losing cameras to attrition; there is little money for repairs.

Said alumnus Dan Bootzin, 32: “It’s a little more of a sink-or-swim situation. It’s a little more democratic. You can do as much as you want, or do as little as you want. You decide that you’re going to make your film this year.”

Bootzin’s eight-minute production “Six Point Nine” won a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1991. Now he’s working as a free-lance commercial editor and writing a feature-length script.

Though LACC has been offering film classes for 24 years, Bootzin thinks the school is just now “on the brink,” as demonstrated by the bulletin board where clippings about alumni are posted.

“When I first started there, that board was pretty bare actually. Now it seems to be overflowing,” he said. Tamra Davis, who directed the independent feature “Gun-Crazy” and the rap music parody “CB4,” and Albert Hughes (who co-directed the upcoming “Menace II Society” for New Line Cinema with his twin brother Allen) both attended LACC.

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Tom Stempel has been teaching at LACC full time since 1972. Unlike university faculty who feel the publish-or-perish pressures, he was hired to teach. He can--and does--write and publish on his own time. He usually instructs four classes each semester, which can have up to 90 students each.

“One of the things I tell people I like about teaching here is you never know who or what is going to walk in the door,” he said. “I’ve had students as young as 17--someone who had a special waiver from their high school; I’ve had students in their 70s and 80s.”

And Stempel thinks LACC is preparing those students for the industry as well as the cross-town giants. A degree is nice, he explained, but the difference between film student and a filmmaker is a finished film.

“That’s really the crucial thing, and that’s why we put more of an emphasis on making sure that (when) they go away from here, they’ve got a film that they can show people,” he said.

Though the LACC film program is designed to take two years, Stempel said, he “can’t recall in my lifetime anybody actually finishing that in four consecutive semesters, two consecutive years.” When students do drop out, it doesn’t mean they aren’t coming back. Students often take time off to earn money to finance their final project.

“They save up. They hit up their relatives, their friends. You know, wait around for the rich aunt to die,” he said, grinning. “We don’t really inquire too closely where the money comes from.”

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“I have a lot of yard sales. My parents are very helpful. Very supportive,” explained Relah Eckstein, 33, who was shooting “Oat-Meal” one night on the Communications Center sound stage.

Fellow students doubled as production assistants, set decorators and lighting technicians. The room was cluttered with multiple cameras, lighting stands, costumes and remnants of dinner. They planned to work until the building closed at 10 p.m.

Though “Oat-Meal” is her fifth 16mm film, Eckstein was flustered. An actress hadn’t shown up, and a production assistant had to fill in. A complicated mirror shot didn’t work out, so the crew set up for an unplanned double exposure.

Her surreal, non-narrative films--she describes them as a cross between Luis Bunuel, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini and John Waters--are not typical of advanced projects. In addition to attending school, she works full time as an assistant editor for animation projects.

After an hour, not an inch of film had been shot. The three actresses laughed like mock prima donnas and joked about urgent appointments with their hairdressers. After nearly two hours, the shot was ready. The lights were ready. The camera was rolling. Two women danced in their cardboard dresses and one emptied a watering can onto the floor. Cut. The production team mopped up the water.

“OK,” Eckstein said, “let’s do it again.”

The future of LACC’s film school looks something like a teeter-totter stalled in midair: On one side is the weight of the state’s financial crisis, and on the other is the recent success of some of their alumni. A shrinking budget means no new equipment for students, but one big-name success could bring industry attention and more donations.

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Many former LACC students have established successful careers in television, cinematography and film editing, but recent students have found a new door into the industry--music videos.

Tamra Davis started making music videos when she finished at LACC in 1985. She’d shot a video for a band on Super-8 film and a record company got ahold of it.

“They were so amazed. It was like a new style at this time--this was eight years ago,” Davis said. She went on to make more than 70 music videos for performers as diverse as Bette Midler and N.W.A. and used the money she earned to continue making short films until she found a producer who would let her direct “GunCrazy.”

“One big thing I learned at LACC--when I screened a film for a class, it wasn’t filled with a bunch of intellectuals. . . . It was full of real people,” she said. “The teachers were good, but it really has to do with the students.”

Another feature-via-video director is 20-year-old Albert Hughes. After directing 30 rap videos, the duo landed a $2.5-million budget with New Line to make “Menace II Society,” a movie about black youths growing up fatherless in Watts.

Stempel said that although the number of music videos being produced increases students’ chances of breaking into directing, none of the five full-time faculty encourages making them as student projects.

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“Music videos are a specialized market, and the professional ones are very expensive,” he said. “It also doesn’t show, for the most part, if you can direct. Can you handle actors? Can you put together shots that will connect in a kind of coherent way? That’s not really a requirement in music videos.”

Robert Stahley, the director of the radio-TV-film department, insists that he is optimistic about the school’s future. But he has to try hard to maintain his optimism, despite the alumni success. It’s a hard time for all state and city college systems, he said, not to mention the whole national economy.

But he acknowledges that LACC is up to its enrollment in chaos. Within that last five years, classes went from being free, to costing $6 a unit with a $60 ceiling, to now costing $10 a unit with no ceiling. Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed yet another increase, up to $30 a unit.

But, Stahley said, the money isn’t coming back though the system to the school. The department hasn’t been given any money for new equipment in three years. He has to cut the supply budget and hourly instruction budget in half for next fall.

“Now where did my optimism go?” he asked, and then answered his own question. “You can only chop things down to a certain extent before they start to grow again.”

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