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On that warm autumn evening, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hosted a celebration of the school’s 70th anniversary. From the famous to the freshman, Trojan filmmakers trekked to the Academy’s glitzy Beverly Hills digs. They thronged up the majestic winding stairway, filling the venue’s 1,000-plus seat auditorium to capacity. They gazed – some in awe, some with familiarity – at the massive golden Oscar statues flanking each side of the proscenium. As a uniformed guard cordoned off one section of seats, many speculated whether this was a sign that the school’s most venerated grad, George Lucas ’66, would be in attendance. The evening’s entertainment featured a mix of student films culled from roughly 4,000projects in the school’s archives: scratchy post-war how-to’s ran shoulder-to-shoulder with ’60s sci-fi flicks. Reels that hadn’t been out of the vaults since a shirtless Clark Gable caused a scandal illuminated the screen alongside films so pristine they looked like they’d just come from the lab.
USC film program founder Boris Morkovin shows camera crane and sound dolly to students, circa 1937.
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Interspersed between the screenings, USC entertainment veterans took to the stage. Lucas, who had indeed slipped into the auditorium as the lights dimmed, joined visual-effects specialist Richard Edlund ’60 and director Randal Kleiser ’68, MA ’74 to regale the crowd with tales of life in the old days – when classes were held in surplus barracks and projects were cobbled together with whatever student filmmakers could beg, steal or borrow. (Some in the house smiled nostalgically, others eagerly took notes.)
And so the evening went. To the vets, it was a time to look back and reconnect. For the unfledged, it was a glimpse of the struggles and triumphs that lay ahead.
But perhaps the most telling moment of the night came when the school’s dean, Elizabeth Daley, stood at the podium. To make a dramatic point, she asked USC graduates to rise for recognition decade by decade. A handful of stalwarts rose from the early days, but as she ticked off the years, the ranks thickened appreciably. Through the ’50s, onto the ’60s, into the ’70s, over the ’80s and up through the ’90s, they took to their feet. The writers, the producers, the animators, the executives, the academics. One by one, they rose. In the end, very few people remained seated.
It took some time for the rounds of applause to subside. When they did, the screeching sound of Hollywood slamming to a halt was almost audible.
 he early history of Hollywood is replete with tales of deals carved out over martini-drenched power lunches. But USC’s alliance with the nascent film industry came not at the tip of diminutive plastic sabers skewering green olives, but over real swordplay with one of the epoch’s greatest swashbucklers, Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
According to lore, the “King of Hollywood” – star of such silent-era epics as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and The Black Pirate (1926) – frequently practiced fencing at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. So did USC president Rufus B. von KleinSmid.
At the time, the movie industry was suffering from a dearth of qualified technicians and other behind-the-camera personnel. Von KleinSmid saw his opening and lunged. During friendly duels with Fairbanks, he choreographed a way for USC to play a valuable role in Hollywood’s development: in 1929, the univer
Coach Dean Cromwell and Greta Garbo, 1934.
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sity and the film academy began a collaboration to present lectures on motion pictures; three years later, USC became the first American university to offer a bachelor of arts degree in film.
Though popular, the program got off to a slow start. “It was fairly primitive compared to what we’d been led to believe,” says long-time faculty member Herb Farmer ’42, MA ’55, who came from New York to attend USC after reading about the film program in an amateur movie-maker magazine. The classes, held in the basement of the Old College building, weremainly public lectures; and what little equipment the program had was outdated.
But the pace picked up quickly. In 1940, it officially became the Department of Cinema, and within five years there were courses in screenwriting, camera operation, sound, editing, film business and advanced production. In the post-war years, USC produced dozens of educational movies – often on unused film stock recycled from combat aircraft gun-cameras. By 1958, the program had matured to the point of splitting into separate tracks for critical studies and production.
The rise of television in the 1950s and ’60s, coupled with the breakdown of the Hollywood studio system, ushered in a period of radical change. Film themes shifted from family-oriented extravaganzas like The Sound of Music (1965) to youth-oriented low-budget flicks like Easy Rider (1969) – reflecting the boomer generation’s taste for films that totally broke away from traditional box office offerings.
“The industry was looking for new directions,” says film historian Richard Jewell Ph.D. ’78.
In this climate, a new breed of filmmakers emerged. Lucas, then a junior, won the National Student Film Festival award in 1965 for his futuristic Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 EB. Two years later, John Milius ’67 won an honor at the same festival for his animated short, Marcello, I’m So Bored.
Hollywood executives took notice.
“The thinking started to be, ‘We’ve got to find young people to come in and make these kinds of movies for us,’” says Jewell, now the school’s associate dean for academic affairs. “And where is it that they looked for these young people? They looked to film schools – in particular, USC.”
The 1970s saw this new generation of filmmakers hit their stride. American Graffiti (1973) became a commercial hit for Lucas. He followed up the nostalgic classic with his now-legendary space opera Star Wars (1977). Thanks to other trailblazing directors, such as John Carpenter ’71 (Halloween, 1978) and Robert Zemeckis ’73 (Back to the Future, 1985; Forrest Gump, 1994), USC earned a strong reputation for turning out grads who were redefining the movie business, pressing the envelope on everything from special effects to storylines.
Academically, the school continued to forge ahead. The Peter Stark Producing Program was launched in 1979. An undergraduate writing program began in 1982, and its graduate-level counterpart debuted seven years later. But insiders point to 1983 and 1984 as the watershed years, with two back-to-back milestone events. First, the department’s reorganization as the School of Cinema-Television. And then the move from the rickety old barracks that had housed the program for roughly 40 years into modern facilities underwritten by some of the biggest names in entertainment: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Johnny Carson, as well as Marcia Lucas and the Harold Lloyd Foundation.
his was the world producer Elizabeth Monk Daley entered in 1989, when she arrived at USC to chair the school’s film and TV production division. Daley had studied theater at Tulane and earned a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Wisconsin. She got her start in Washington, D.C., setting up an experimental theater program for the Wolftrap Foundation in the early ’70s, then later forming a production company to make documentaries.
By 1978, she was producing live satellite broadcasts for PBS. Two years later, she co-authored None of the Above, a public television documentary about voter apathy. Around the same time, she joined the communications faculty of American University, where she met her husband, James Hindman – now co-director and CEO of the American Film Institute.
In 1982, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where Daley thrust herself back into production, becoming director of Taper Media Enterprises and subsequently a producer for MGM/UA Television.
Elizabeth M. Daley |
When acquaintances began sounding her out about filling the chairman’s slot in USC’s production program, Daley was initially reluctant. She grew more interested when a friend challenged her to act upon her oft-voiced complaint that too few women and minorities were employed in the industry. Here was a chance to effect change. Daley’s own favorable impression of the USC interns with whom she had come in contact sealed her decision to go for the chairmanship in 1989. Two years later, she was tapped for the film school deanship – becoming the first woman in America to occupy that post.
Daley’s role has been clear from day-one: “To provide an environment where everyone – faculty, staff and students – can do their best work,” she explains. “Concurrent with that is the goal of getting the resources for them to do it.”
Getting resources proved the first order of business, and Daley discovered she had her work cut out. Glowing stories about star graduates and major building projects dominated headlines in the trade papers, leaving the entertainment world with the false impression that USC’s film school was flush. In fact, it was in financial straits.
Daley decided to appeal to alumni. But instead of merely going for their wallets, she went for their wisdom.
“When you have the kind of alumni we have, not to listen to them, not to involve them in everything you do, strikes me as rash foolishness,” she says.
And listen she did, coming away with a strong appreciation for two themes that the alumni sounded time and again. The first was an endorsement of USC’s tradition of providing broad training in all aspects of cinema and television, not just one particular niche.
“We pride ourselves,” Daley says, “on educating someone who truly understands the larger global picture of film and television, the entire entertainment industry and the tensions between its parts. Someone who understands the fact that it’s both an art form and business, that it’s both technologically based and story-driven, and that it has enormous impact on society.”
Under her leadership, the program has remained free of cubby-holing. Students learning the art of screenwriting find out what it’s like to speak lines or frame a shot when they take courses in acting and directing. Production majors looking to master future technologies are firmly rooted to the past with film history classes. Even doctoral candidates in the critical studies program are required to venture from theory to practice by making student films.
The second theme alumni trumpeted to the new dean was the urgent need to usher students into the industry once they had wrapped up their studies.
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