Film schools critique gets lost in geographic cliches

In writing about cinema, it’s always easiest to think of New York as “art,” Los Angeles as “commerce.” Angsty Woody Allen stares through smudged spectacles into the clear blue eyes of buff Michael Bay.

Worse, these cities’ fine film schools, such as NYU and USC, are often conscripted -- as if horses in some ghostly Palio -- to represent these warring attributes. In this model, NYU is where the auteurs run free, and poor USC is a subcontractor for the larger machineries of the Studio.

One has only to articulate these sentiments to see how sweeping, and sweepingly useless, they can be. Alas, the Jan. 31 column by Geraldine Baum about the Tisch film school at NYU [“More Freshmen in Film Shooting for NYU”] seems reflexively to promote these cliches.

The piece celebrates NYU’s very fine film school, from whose doors emerged Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and my own mother (among talented and independent others). It chronicles the journey of a Culver City native who enrolled as an undergraduate at USC, spent a semester in USC’s School of Cinema-Television in the critical studies division, then transferred to NYU where, as the article reports, the world opened up for her, a world of lights, cameras and action.

If I’m correct -- and forgive me if I’m misreading -- Baum’s piece has two larger theses: first, that filmmaking at NYU is more immediately hands-on than at USC, and second, that NYU is the far better fit for indies, auteurs and people of vision.

Freshmen in our critical studies program, or indeed in any of our divisions, aren’t routinely handed cameras. Instead they are required to take courses to expand the reach and breadth of their education. We believe strongly that the quest for knowledge, practical and impractical, useful and otherwise, shouldn’t be shortchanged or circumvented. We’re mindful that we’re an institute of undergraduate and graduate learning, not a trade school.

Students in USC’s production program are indeed launched on a program of hands-on filmmaking -- but not until the second semester of their sophomore year. Our premise is that the program should first hone the ability to craft a story, not the facility to wield a piece of equipment. Whether told as fiction, as poetry or as cinema, story is the miserable, wonderful path that leads to everything.

True cinema, vital cinema, living cinema knows no location or boundary. Many of the seminal works of the American avant-garde, from “Meshes of the Afternoon” to “Killing of a Chinese Bookie” to “Killer of Sheep,” were filmed in our city. The interiors of “Mean Streets” were shot at the Ambassador Hotel.

And on USC’s Cinema-Television faculty you will find teachers who’ve written for Scorsese, Soderbergh, David Lynch, who’ve edited for Cassavetes and Hal Ashby, who’ve shot for Rob Nilsson and Lizzie Borden. Most certainly USC celebrates the Lucases, the Zemeckises, the Rydstroms, the Mechanics, the Ziskins -- those alumni (and alumnae) who have left, and continue daily to leave, large and extraordinary marks on our industry. But USC Cinema-Television is equally proud of Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (“Ed Wood,” “Larry Flynt”); of David Veloz (“Natural Born Killers,” “Permanent Midnight”); of David Goyer (“Blade,” “Batman Begins”); of Michael Lehmann (“Heathers”). USC alums made the documentaries “Burden of Dreams” and “Spellbound,” even as they wrote/directed or produced such indy triumphs as “Donnie Darko” and “Napoleon Dynamite.”

In the long run, it matters little if one is given a camera in the first semester or the third, if one garners inspiration from urban alleys or the sun-struck arroyos. All of the first-tier film schools can teach the craft. But what’s more important is what can’t be taught.

Writer-director Frank Pierson maintains that the prerequisites for screenwriting should be “two bad marriages and some time in jail.” His point is that a school can’t create character, only guide and equip it.

Ultimately, at NYU or USC or anywhere else, what is truly most important is what can only be encouraged. The talent of quickening hearts. The courage to speak truth to power. The art and craft to honestly depict the world as far more beautiful, or far more terrifying, than is typically sold to us.

And most importantly: the ability to tell the story, residing quietly now within, that only you can tell.