Film Students: Don’t Make This Mistake

Everyone has a unique experience of film school, but here’s a critical pitfall I witnessed at mine.

One day, all of us film students were corralled into an auditorium. The instructor asked “how many of you want to direct?”

Predictably, almost every hand went up.

“How many of you want to write?”

Almost as many hands.

“How many of you want to be cinematographers?”

Half the room.

“How many of you want to edit?”

Way less, but still a decent showing.

“How many of you want to produce?”

Crickets.

Maybe things are different at your film school. Maybe things have changed at mine. But at the time, there was massive enthusiasm to play the creative auteur, contrasted against shockingly scant interest in the managerial or business side of film and television. And ironically, entertainment is first and foremost — a business.

To be fair, my school did offer one course on scheduling and budgeting, taught by a working line producer. It was wildly unpopular. There was also one class dedicated to the complex labyrinth of film sales and distribution: hands-down the most valuable class I attended in 4 years of college. And yet, I vividly recall a classmate sitting next to me, complaining that the instructor was teaching us how to form an LLC. “If I wanted to go into business, I would have gone to business school. This should be about making art.” That classmate never worked a day in the film industry.

Relative to the number of courses on film theory, cinematography, and mise-en-scene, the more pragmatic subjects were outliers. The demand just wasn’t there. In fact, there was a palpable disdain for the roles of producers and AD’s. These people were seen as useless annoyances, while camera/grip/electric dominated student productions. As an AD, I was frequently ignored or told to move out of the way by DP’s and their equipment-savvy cohorts. There was likewise a dismissive attitude toward actors on far too many student film sets.

Oh, the irony.

Once I got onto a major studio set in Hollywood, my mind was blown. I saw very clearly that it was the producers and AD’s who were running the production! Talent was treated like royalty! If a camera assistant ever spoke to an actor on a union set as they did back in film school, that AC would be filing for unemployment before sundown. My film school experience had it completely backwards! And that’s not to say that Hollywood camera and lighting people were sitting on the sidelines. They worked like beasts. But they were there to serve the production — not the other way around.

It is my belief that film schools should include a mandatory “assistant director” program, ideally in conjunction with the DGA. Film students should still understand lenses and lighting, but I would argue that learning how to properly schedule a day, or how to effectively manage a working set are equally (maybe even more important) skills for functioning in the entertainment industry.

The fundamentals of development, financing, sales, distribution, and marketing should also be requisite subjects for any film student. A movie without a paying audience is about as useful an airplane without wings.

Continue to outsmart with your classmates with hot takes on the works of Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut. So long as you can also tell me how many setups remain until we’re breaking for meal.