USC Trojan Family Magazine - Autumn 2001: Giving Back to the Future

No one knows better than director Robert Zemeckis that yesterday’s cinematic tools are becoming as obsolete as an engineer’s slide rule. His remedy: create the country’s first and only fully digital filmmaking training facility, affectionately called "the Z."

IT'S SPRING BREAK, 2001. The University Park campus is a ghost town except for the hundreds of students who have crammed into Norris Theatre to see director Robert Zemeckis ’73, who has returned to his alma mater for a screening of his latest flick – the Oscar-nominated Cast Away – and to tape comments for the film’s DVD release. As the closing credits roll and the house lights come up, a muttering voice comes over the P.A. system. Titters roll through the theater as listeners realize they’re overhearing Zemeckis kidding around backstage. As the laughter swells, the amplified voice stops.
A moment later, Zemeckis strides confidently into the auditorium. He doesn’t skip a beat: “I learned that trick from the president,” he quips. The audience cracks up at the reference to President Bush’s open-microphone gaffes on the campaign trail.
With deft, self-deprecating humor, Zemeckis transforms a potentially embarrassing moment into a smooth entrance. For the next two hours, as students ply him with questions ranging from his use of religious symbolism to his marketing strategies, one key to Zemeckis’ success comes to the fore: Despite his status as one of the industry’s big guns whose films have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, he is just a regular guy who loves his job.
A few weeks earlier, this regular guy had taken center stage at the star-studded opening of USC’s Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, the nation’s first and only fully digital training facility for student filmmakers. As he ascended the podium, he was holding a Super 8 movie camera and film cartridge – underscoring the quantum jump filmmaking has made since his student days in the early 1970s.
“Digital technology is the most important leap forward in motion pictures since the introduction of sound,” he told the crowd of friends, colleagues and USC associates. “My hope is that the Center for Digital Arts becomes a place where future filmmakers can learn to – as a character in one of my films said – ‘harness the power’ of this phenomenal storytelling.”

Zemeckis’ commingling of cartoon characters and live-action ones – as in this scene (top) where Bob Hoskins is handcuffed to the title ’toon from the 1988 hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – was a cinematic first. In the Back to the Future series (middle), he pushed the time-travel genre both from the visual and narrative perspective. The subtle morphing effects he used to twist Meryl Streep’s neck like rubber (bottom) in the 1992 film Death Becomes Her was a breakthrough.

BORN ON MAY 14, 1951, ROBERT ZEMECKIS REVEALS his Chicago roots in every word he utters. Thirty years in Southern California haven’t loosened the nasal tones of the Windy City. Though he was a film lover from an early age, it was seeing Bonnie and Clyde (1967) that changed him from avid movie-goer to aspiring movie-maker.

“I always loved the action, the special effects part of movies,” he says in an interview. “When I also started to realize that movies worked by manipulating the audience’s emotions, then I really got hooked. That’s when I understood what a director does.”

He had begun making 8mm movies in high school, but didn’t consider studying cinema in Hollywood until he happened to catch comedian Jerry Lewis on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” talking about teaching at USC’s film school. Zemeckis promptly transferred out of Northern Illinois University and headed west.

Coming to USC “was probably the most important experience, as far as becoming a filmmaker, that I had,” he says. Zemeckis made two student films at USC: The Lift (1972) and A Field of Honor (1973) – the former about a homicidal elevator; the latter an irreverent comedy about a man hijacking a bus to Cuba.

USC also was one of the few places in the pre-VCR era where Zemeckis could view hundreds of old movies courtesy of the school’s weekend retrospectives. And the school provided one other critical ingredient: it surrounded him with people like himself, people who ate, breathed and dreamed celluloid. One of those people was fellow Midwesterner Bob Gale ’73. The two teamed up in their junior year.

“Bob and I had middle-class upbringings,” says Gale. “We gravitated toward each other because our tastes in movies were very similar.” The two shared a hearty enthusiasm for Hollywood movies without pretensions of wanting to make political or artistic statements. “He wanted to be a director from day one, and I wanted to be a screenwriter from day one.”

So began a collaboration that has continued for decades. Over the years, Gale estimates the duo has generated about a dozen screenplays together, including Back to the Future (1985, with sequels in 1989, 1990).

Early on their path was smoothed by John Milius ’67 and Steven Spielberg, who took an interest in a Zemeckis/Gale script that eventually became the movie 1941 (1979).

With Spielberg’s support, Zemeckis made his directorial debut in 1978 with I Wanna Hold Your Hand, followed by Used Cars (1980), and his first big commercial success, Romancing the Stone (1984).

“Steven stuck by him, but it took a few films and a lot of faith on Steven’s part,” George Lucas ’66 recalled at the opening night gala for the Zemeckis Center. “He kept plugging away with this guy because Steven knew there was talent there. He knew that Bob was well trained, he was very sophisticated in the use of the medium, and he could walk right out of USC and direct a movie,” the Star Wars creator said.

Though some of Zemeckis’ films have generated lackluster reviews, his record is replete with titles that have bowled over fans and critics alike. Back to the Future, which grossed more than $210 million by some estimates, handed Zemeckis an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Forrest Gump did nearly $330 million and secured him the Academy Award for best director.

A large part of the Zemeckis success story lies in the director’s talent for visual effects. He has been a pioneer in their use, be it the seamless blending of animated figures with live actors in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the impossible contortion of actors’ faces and bodies in Death Becomes Her, or the melding of historical figures with fictional ones in Forrest Gump.

This understanding and expansion of the cinematic language has won Zemeckis much critical acclaim. (And on occasion a mild rebuke, as when he used out-of-context footage of Bill Clinton in Contact. The scene drew complaints from the White House concerning fair use of the president’s image.)

Zemeckis traces the specific impetus for a digital arts center back to the scene in Forrest Gump where, thanks to computer-generated effects, Tom Hanks was made to look like he was shaking hands with JFK.

“That’s the first time a shot appeared in one of my films and I didn’t know how it was done,” he says. “It kind of scared me a little bit. I realized that I had to learn about the future of the technology that was playing a major part in my films.”

It didn’t take long for him to realize that if he needed to pay closer attention to technology, then so did everyone else in the industry – including newcomers. “What we need is to train film students of the future in this digital technology,” he says.