Editor’s note: This is an article from the Summer 1998 issue of UCLA Magazine.
The first university film course in the United States was conducted in 1915, the year D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was released nationwide. The class was offered through university extension at Columbia in New York and focused on the “photoplay” as a literary genre. It was taught by university faculty and local theater and film professionals, and designed as a hybrid, at once an academic course (like literary studies) and a trade school skills class (like auto repair). At the time, Columbia administrators and faculty were hedging their bet on cinema studies; the course was not associated with any degree program nor part of the regular curriculum.
There were, to be sure, plenty of people — enrolled students and adults taking classes via university extension alike — interested in classes on the new art form–mechanical, wonder-popular obsession. But key questions needed answering: Was cinema an appropriate subject for the academy? Were the movies worthy of scholarly debate? Columbia’s experiment with cinema studies didn’t catch on anywhere else; the answer, at that time, was no.
As the film industry moved west, popular magazines carried ads for correspondence schools offering classes on how to write a screenplay, how to direct a film. But these were the offerings of schools of dubious distinction teaching the tricks of a new trade. Roughly coinciding with the arrival of sound on film and the first-ever Academy Awards came a second significant academic experiment with cinema studies. Organized and administered at Harvard by Joseph Kennedy in 1927, the mistitled “Introduction to the Photoplay” class was in reality a business course offered in the graduate business program and taught by an impressive group of Hollywood industry players: Adolph Zukor, Cecil B. DeMille, Marcus Loew, William Fox, Jack Warner, Sam Katz, Robert Cochrane and Louis B. Mayer. By all accounts, the class was a hit, but it proved too expensive and too difficult to repeat. Cross-country travel was time-consuming in the 1920s, and the studio executives were far too busy to make the Harvard course an annual event.
By the late ’20s, the film business was ensconced in Los Angeles, and soon enough the task of film education was taken up by the region’s two big schools: UCLA and USC. During the 1929-’30 school year, the Harvard course was reprised at USC and then packaged as a series of mimeographed lecture transcripts by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The course was marketed to universities across the nation, but purchased by just three: Iowa State, Stanford and UCLA.
USC founded the nation’s first film school in 1932, and UCLA followed suit in 1947. In retrospect, the interval proved fateful. Throughout the war years, a new understanding of film as a persuasive medium for communication had emerged. Feature films, cartoons and documentaries were produced to support and document the war effort. Servicemen affiliated with the signal corps received training in film production. And numerous technological advances (faster film for night and low-resolution shooting, new lenses with better depth of field) revealed film’s intrinsic relationship to the coming electronic age. Film was no longer just “the movies.” As a UCLA College of Applied Arts report of the day concluded, “motion pictures have the power to change world habits and culture.”
From the moment of its founding, UCLA’s Theater Arts Department included a Motion Pictures division. Kenneth Macgowan was appointed as the department’s first chair, a choice which proved significant. Macgowan was an accomplished theater critic (with a Harvard pedigree) as well as a successful Hollywood film producer. He was a man as much at home in an academic department meeting as a studio story conference. Macgowan understood early on that the UCLA program would have to establish its own identity; it could not prosper and grow as a trade school living off the industry. His vision was for a viable and independent scholarly enterprise.
The first task for the UCLA film school was to make the case for cinema studies as a standalone academic discipline within the larger humanities curriculum. In 1947, theater and film students took the same introductory classes in their freshman and sophomore years: The Social Aspects of Mass Media, Fundamentals of Acting, History of the Theater Arts. There were also courses in set construction, costumes, lighting. Only upper classmen were allowed to specialize in film or theater, and regardless of their choice, they were required to study both production and history.
The film school faculty back then was an interesting group comprised of industry professionals, academics and former servicemen, who had learned how to shoot film during the war. A canny use was also made of local talent, including director Billy Wilder and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, as guest-star lecturers.
In a 1950 L.A. Times article descriptively headlined “Courses at UCLA Boost Movies to Lofty Realm of Cap and Gown,” Macgowan explained his approach: “We try to give our students the whole picture of theater arts — at the very least with the hope of broadening their intelligence, their interest in and enjoyment of those arts, at best, so that they may eventually find jobs in the educational and entertainment fields.” He stressed the program’s seriousness of intent: “Our students are not kidding themselves about getting into the studios. They know — because it is the first thing we tell them — they will not find the quickest route to a swimming pool in Beverly Hills here!”
Solid public affirmation of the value of a UCLA film education came 25 years later, marking both the consistency of the program and changes in the industry. In 1972, UCLA film school alum Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released to astonishing critical and box-office success. Coppola was the first of a wave of film school grads to make it in Hollywood. This coterie of young directors — Coppola, USC’s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and NYU’s Martin Scorsese among them — were dubbed “the movie brats” and, in the course of a decade, changed Hollywood for the better.
The ’70s were a Golden Age of American filmmaking. And dominating the decade, for the first time in the history of the movies, were directors trained in university film schools. The studios had previously been cautious about film school grads. But a dismal box-office slide throughout the 1960s and the emergence of a young, well-educated film audience signaled to the industry that it was time for a change. In particular, Coppola’s success with a highly stylized, idiosyncratic rendering of a classic Hollywood genre piece like The Godfather seemed to suggest that film schools, after all, had the answer.
The so-called auteur renaissance came as no surprise to the filmmakers themselves. Ray Manczarek, founding member of the legendary rock group The Doors, and a one-time UCLA film school student, put it bluntly: “Hollywood’s gotta change. They’re going to get rid of those old fogies and we’re gonna take over. They can’t stop us. There are too many of us.” In a 1968 interview, Coppola was only a bit more circumspect in observing, “I don’t think there’ll be a Hollywood as we know it when this generation of film students gets out of college.”
Coppola’s prediction, on the eve of his enormous critical and commercial success, reflects a bravado that seems, in retrospect, very much a sign of the times: The brat pack of which he was a member were all college students in the turbulent late ’60s. But a quick survey of even a short list of UCLA film school alumni suggests that throughout its 50-year history of educating filmmakers, the program has nurtured a remarkable spirit of independence.
Following in Coppola’s footsteps came classes of critically acclaimed filmmakers and screenwriters unparalleled in the annals of university film education. From the neo-noir formalism of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Mishima) to the post-punk hipster entertainments of Penelope Spheeris (The Decline of Western Civilization, Wayne’s World), UCLA filmmakers have influenced the medium in original and lasting ways.
Faculty in the film school are quick to point out that the success of its graduates should not be measured in terms of box-office grosses or tabloid celebrity. UCLA has trained more women directors as well as men and women of color — groups routinely shut out of the industry — than any other university program. Spheeris, Allison Anders, Charles Burnett, Victor Nunez and Gregory Nava made student films at UCLA and then got to make features because of the films they made at UCLA.
The university-trained auteur directors of the ’70s set a new course for the industry as a whole and presided over the transition from bad studio films to personal genre pictures and then, alas, to the event film that so dominates the box office today. On a parallel track, however, UCLA-trained directors virtually created the independent film industry. In the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, independent films more often than not were “B” pictures made and released by small studios like Monogram or AIP. But for nearly three decades now, UCLA film school grads have found success by insisting that their work is an alternative to mainstream commercial filmmaking. Spheeris, Anders, Nava, Nunez, Burnett, Alex Cox and Paul Bartel, all UCLA-trained, together comprise a who’s who in contemporary independent American filmmaking. And quite fittingly, UCLA film school alum Geoff Gilmour now runs the Sundance Film Festival, the annual indie-pix showcase.
Today, the independent spirit pervades the curriculum; any single orthodoxy is discouraged. The department remains committed to student-made, student-owned films. Film production at UCLA is whatever a student can make of the opportunity and experience. Should something terrific come out of it (and often enough it does), the student, not the university, holds the copyright. As the industry has changed, more and more film school–educated producers, directors, screenwriters, creative technicians and performers have found work. The studios’ current infiltration by film school graduates, along with growing student interest in studying and participating in the business of making movies, has brought film education full circle. UCLA’s film department now has an acclaimed Independent Producer’s Program — harkening back to “The Introduction to the Photoplay” courses offered in the ’20s — taught by film school faculty that’s an all-star cast of industry players: Peter Bart, Variety editor and former studio exec; Peter Guber, Mandalay Entertainment CEO and legendary Hollywood player; super-agent Arnold Rifkin; Joe Roth, chairman of Disney Studios; and Fox VP Thomas Sherak.
The screenwriting program, long one of the department’s strongest, can now boast of an astonishing list of big-time screenwriter alums. Last summer’s top four films were all written by UCLA-educated screenwriters: Con Air (Scott Rosenberg), Jurassic Park: The Lost World (David Koepp), Face/Off (Michael Colleary) and Men in Black (Ed Solomon). Add to the summer ’97 hit list the box-office success George of the Jungle (Audrey Wells) and the critically acclaimed independent picture, Ulee’s Gold (Nunez). UCLA’s critical studies program in cinema came into full flower at the end of the ’70s and is today flourishing. More and more universities nationwide now offer classes in film history, theory and criticism, and of the new generation of film educators, many studied at UCLA. Film preservationists and archivists trained at UCLA now do important work at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Sundance Institute, the American Film Institute and other major repositories for motion pictures. With the digital revolution already bringing about dramatic changes in how movies are made and distributed, the UCLA film program is moving into its second half-century of educating not only America’s future filmmakers, but its future filmgoers as well.
