Trying to Get Their Footage in the Door

It’s crunch time in the School of Film and Television at Chapman University in Orange.

The school’s editing suites, which are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, have been booked around the clock as student filmmakers scramble to finish their semester film projects.

Some harried students bring pillows and blankets to sleep on the hallway floor in hopes that an editing machine will be freed up early or that someone will forget to wake up for their scheduled 4 a.m. edit session.

Even the equipment room--where student filmmakers can check out everything from a $100,000 Arriflex SR (a 16-millimeter movie camera) to a 50-cent C-47 (a clothespin used to hold a colored gel to a light)--still bustles as the semester comes to a close: Half an hour before the door opens at 8:30 on a recent morning, there already was a line of students vying for the equipment needed for “pickup shots” on their films.

“It’s insane. It’s suicidal. But, yes, there are people who are desperately trying to finish their films and go out and shoot and try to stick that footage in,” said Edmund Bravo, a graduating senior, who was about to pull a 1-to-7-a.m. editing shift with his two student production partners.

The budding Chapman filmmakers, many of whom are scheduled to graduate this weekend, aren’t alone.

The same frenzied scenario is being played out at the 50 or so other film schools and the hundreds of college and university filmmaking programs that have cropped up around the United States since the late 1960s.

It was a time when a bearded young USC graduate student named George Lucas received a scholarship to Warner Bros. Studios to “observe” another bearded filmmaker--and USC alum--Francis Ford Coppola on the set of “Finian’s Rainbow.”

At Chapman University--Orange County’s only college or university with a school offering both undergraduate and graduate degrees in filmmaking--most of the 627 students in the School of Film and Television hope to make movies.

For the film school’s 74 graduating seniors and 12 graduate students, the month of May marks a “fade-out” on their student filmmaking days as they prepare to leave the sheltered life of academia and join the ranks of Hollywood hopefuls.

With student films and screenplays as calling cards, they will be entering the highly competitive, potentially lucrative and undeniably glamorous world of motion pictures.

Bob Bassett, dean of the School of Film and Television, is candid about the difficulty of crashing the studio gates.

“Students come and learn all these difficult issues of telling stories with film, but to quote every [professional] filmmaker who comes to campus, ‘The hardest part about the business is getting a job,’ ” Bassett said.

Director Arthur Hiller (“Love Story,” “Silver Streak”), Chapman’s inaugural filmmaker-in-residence, came to film via directing radio and TV programs in the 1950s. He offers his own cautionary tales.

“When I talk to the kids, I always say to them, ‘You have to be lucky.’ They say, ‘You’re being modest,’ and I tell them some of my luck stories and I say, ‘You just have to hang in, to keep knocking on doors.’ But you need luck--you do.”

Working on the Script

for a Chapman Studios

There were only a few film history and film appreciation courses offered at Chapman when Bassett was hired to start the film program in 1981. By 1992, after expanding to include an impressive array of production courses, it became a separate department within the university’s School of Communication Arts.

The growth in the film and television department continued to be so dramatic that it became its own school in 1996, moving out of the theater arts building and into its own home in the old student union.

The 20,000-square-foot, single-story maze of offices is home to editing suites that boast 40 digital nonlinear editing machines and a television laboratory-studio in which students learn multiple-camera technique. The building was christened Cecil B. DeMille Hall two years ago in honor of the pioneer film director. (Cecilia Presley of Newport Beach, DeMille’s granddaughter, is one of the film school’s benefactors.)

Bassett and the 16 full-time and 24 adjunct faculty members have even more ambitious plans.

On the drawing board is Chapman Studios, a nine-acre complex to be built on a site that the university recently bought two blocks from campus.

Modeled after an actual movie studio, the proposed complex would have classrooms, eight post-production editing suites, a theater and an 18,000-square-foot sound stage to be rented out to professional production companies. Another building would house five smaller sound stages for student use.

There would even be a “back lot” with New York and Parisian street sets for both student and professional use.

Bassett said the estimated $42-million complex will be funded by donations from “individuals and foundations . . . interested in the storytellers of tomorrow.”

A fund-raising campaign for the first-of-its-kind university “studio” has just begun, and $3.5 million has been committed for the complex. Construction is expected to begin in three years, he said.

Renting the large sound stage to either an ongoing television series or to feature film companies “would provide opportunities for students to intern and work side by side with professionals and experience the latest production practices,” Bassett said.

Chapman film students already have no difficulty finding opportunities to work alongside professional filmmakers.

The school’s proximity to Hollywood has allowed Chapman students to serve as interns at all the major movie studios and television networks. (Television producer John Copeland, of “Babylon 5” fame, who made short films at Chapman and earned a communications degree there in 1973, regularly provides internships.)

Such professional connections can pay unexpected dividends.

One 1998 graduate, John David Currey, who participated in NBC’s national internship program the previous summer, so impressed NBC that he was later hired to edit the network’s promotional spots. Another student, Jenny Terusa (Class of 1997), interned on “Friends” and landed a job in “trafficking,” a first step for a television editor.

Closer and Closer

to Hollywood

Tuition for Chapman’s School of Film and Television is about $19,000 a year for undergraduates and about $9,000 a year for graduate students. Most undergraduates receive some financial aid, Bassett said.

(At USC’s School of Cinema-Television--which at 70 is the nation’s oldest film school and has 1,200 students, nearly double that of Chapman--undergraduates pay about $22,000 a year and graduate students pay about $16,000. At UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, which has 348 film students, the fee for undergraduates who are California residents is $3,864 a year and $6,558 for graduate students.)

At the Chapman school, faculty members are all working professionals. Academy Award-winning sound editor Harry Cheney, who teaches editing, even arrives on campus early to edit the TV series “Party of Five” in Cecil B. DeMille Hall, where students can drop in and watch him at work. (A courier delivers the finished product to Sony Films.)

The latest Hollywood connection, the Marion Knott Filmmaker-in-Residence program, was launched this semester with a $1-million endowment from Knott, a Chapman trustee.

Director Hiller has been on campus every Monday to meet individually with the so-called Knott Scholars, 11 of the school’s top filmmaking students.

During his hourlong meetings with students, Hiller views daily film footage and rough cuts and discusses their screenplays and film ideas.

His advice has been invaluable, said graduate student Tracy Taylor of Mission Viejo.

At 43, Taylor, a high school English teacher, is one of the film school’s oldest students.

She majored in radio and television broadcasting and received a master’s degree in film studies “years ago” before becoming sidetracked with work and marriage. After 10 years of teaching, she said, “I decided I wanted to go for what I wanted . . . originally.”

Although she dreams of directing--and hopes to break in as a screenwriter--she acknowledges that “I’m a little bit older than most of the other students, and I don’t see myself going and working up the Hollywood structure.”

Taylor added: “I’m realistic enough to think I might have to teach at a university and scrape together my money to make maybe an offbeat film and be more like John Waters out of Baltimore, not Hollywood.”

Then there’s 22-year-old Andrew Molina, who picks up his degree at Chapman this month after completing classes last December. He has wasted no time pursuing his dream of being a Hollywood producer and director.

He and two other Chapman filmmaking students, Byron Werner and David Huseonica, last year formed Open Aperture Entertainment. With funding from private investors, they already have produced two as-yet-unreleased feature-length comedies, one of which, “Zig’s,” stars Jason Priestly of “Beverly Hills 90210.”

Molina also has directed three local television commercials and produced a music video for Sammy Hagar that is airing on VH1.

While at Chapman, Molina landed a paying job as script supervisor on a feature film that used other film students as crew members.

The key to succeeding in the movie business, he believes, “is to jump on as many professional films as you can. That’s the first step between school and the real world.”

It helps to learn how others have done it.

Among the highlights of the filmmaker-in-residence program are Monday-night dinners that Hiller hosts with a dozen filmmaking students and a guest filmmaker, most recently director Paul Mazursky.

A former actor, stand-up comic and writer for the Danny Kaye television variety show who co-wrote the 1968 Peter Sellers comedy “I Love You, Alice B. Toklas,” Mazursky made his directorial debut in 1969 with his own screenplay, “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.”

At the dinner, Mazursky regaled students with Hollywood tales and advice on breaking in as a director.

“I’m asked this a lot and I never like to be negative or pessimistic,” he told them. “But you’ve got to be prepared for tough sledding, and you might get discouraged because that’s the way it is. It’s tough for me; it’s tough for Arthur, and we’ve done a lot of movies.”

Added Hiller:

“That’s why I always ask students, ‘Is this what you want to do most in the world?’ And if your answer is yes, I say, ‘That’s not enough. It better be the only thing you want to do. You have to have passion.’ ”