Getting reel

USC's film program grew from a single-course elective to be one of the nation's top cinema-television schools

By JENNIFER KELLEHER
Assistant City Editor

Long before it was known for famous alumni such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the 70-year-oldUSC School of Cinema-Television was making strides in a field where not many academians dared to venture.

What started as a one-course, one-classroom area of study in 1929 has grown to be one of the world's leading cinema-television institutions. That lone elective -the first film class ever offered at a university in the United States - was Introduction to Photoplay, taught by William Ray MacDonald.

Six years after photoplay became a cinematography department in 1932, current Professor Emeritus of Cinema Archives Herb Farmer was a freshman taking film classes in "one room in the basement of Old College," where Taper Hall is today. Back then, sound in movies was fairly primitive and color was only four years old, he said.

Farmer, who was born in 1920, left the East Coast to come to USC after reading about the film department in a movie magazine. He has been teaching at the university since graduation, except for three years of naval duty during World War II. The war caused a shortage of teachers, and while still a student, Farmer took over for a professor who left for active duty.

Aside from tuition costing only $2 per unit, studying film was very different in the 1930s and '40s, Farmer said, remembering going to silent films as a child with his father.

"In the beginning, classes had to do with the physics and mathematics of what it has to do with movies," he said. "Today it's going digital. What used to be a tedious task of editing is (now) being done very easily and effectively on computers."

Despite USC's proximity to Hollywood, students were encouraged to concentrate on documentary and educational films, said Jack Nealon, who was a graduate film student in the 1950s. Movie theaters were closing down and there were many layoffs in the industry.

"There were tales of ŚHollywood is finished,'" he said.

Nealon now volunteers at the cinema-television school, researching its history. When he was a student classrooms were in Quonset huts made of "very primitive materials left over from the '30s and '40s," he said.

After World War II, enrollment at USC increased because of servicemen using the GI Bill, which changed the makeup of the university where mostly upper-class students attended. As a result, "you had an influx of men and women...from all social classes," Nealon said.

Admission requirements were simpler, Nealon remembers: "When I attended, you were able to sign up as a cinema major and that was it."

In those days, film studies weren't taken too seriously, Nealon said.

"After the war, cinema studies weren't a priority for USC," he said.

To some extent that was still the case in the 1960s, when movie producer John Longenecker was a student here.

"It was very exciting and unique in the '60s," he said of the time when USC was only one of a small handful of film schools in the country.

Longenecker made his mark here by winning an Academy Award while still a student.

When George Lucas was still relatively unknown, he inspired Longenecker. Lucas had been visiting campus one day in 1968 and Longenecker struck up a conversation. Lucas gave him this piece of advice: "He said that all the struggles with the cinema department will be worth it if I can walk out of school with my film under my arm."

Longenecker took those words to heart and focused his efforts at making a short film while in school.

"I started off with a blank piece of paper with the intention of writing a story and making a short film that would win an Oscar, and I did," he said.

His senior year project, "The Resurrection of Broncho Billy," won the Academy Award for live-action short film in 1970, when he was only 23 years old. "Broncho Billy" holds the record as Universal Studios' most financially successful live-action short film, according to the book Writing Short Scripts by William H. Phillips.

Longenecker remembers having no stage fright that night as he delivered his acceptance speech with then-department chair Bernie Kantor at his side. "Right now, it really doesn't matter much that I got a ŚB' for this picture. But no hard feelings, Dr. Kantor," Longenecker joked that night. That comment got a big laugh from the audience, he said.

Longenecker thinks that today's cinema-television school is too institutionally entrenched. "Back then we were more free spirited and less cutthroat competitive," he said.

Older men dominated the movie industry, Longenecker said.

"It was a locked-up industry of adults," he said. "That all changed with Spielberg and Lucas."

In moving toward the future, the school depends on the notoriety of famous alumni, said Associate Dean Rick Jewell.

"Just like sports depends on the Marcus Allens and Charles Whites," he said.

But Jewell maintains that while students are studying here, they are not treated like potential Hollywood shakers.

"I couldn't tell you which ones would turn out to hit the jackpot," he said. "All we can do is give them the best education we can - and keep our fingers crossed."

Copyright 1999 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 138, No. 60 (Tuesday, November 30, 1999), beginning on page 1 and ending on page 10.