Who Needs Film School?
Reader Sarah asks: I recently graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature, but am very interested in becoming involved with film production. Problem is: I live in Wisconsin. But am very close to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Not exactly the hub of film production. Anyway. The question is: where to start? Obviously, moving to L.A. seems […]
Ah, My Younger Days…
Writing yesterday about my film school pilot, I thought about our terrible professors for the first time in years. They were all pretty old, and set in their ways. They wouldn’t let us do anything unusual, like, oh, say, move the camera in the shot. They drained every ounce of originality from the production. Like […]
Learning Experiences
In film school, I worked on a sitcom pilot for the campus TV station. It was for a class, so if you wanted to be either the director, the writer, or the producer, you had to interview with the professors. They made three highly questionable choices. There were a lot of funny people on our […]
Wanna Know How Sausage is Made?
My freshman year at film school, I knew at least a half dozen people who dropped out of the program, if not college altogether. Even more changed majors in the years following. After picking films apart for class after class, they found that they just couldn’t enjoy going to the movies anymore, which was probably […]
Making Movies for Fun and No Profit
First of all, Ken Levine somehow stole a blog post idea directly from my head. (This fits with my theory that Rupert Murdoch has a chip my brain, and he’s stealing all my good scripts before I even write them.) Ah, well, it’s probably for the best– he’s a better writer than I am, anyway, […]