BRUINS TAKE A MEETING
USC’s film school was once the hot connection between ambitious collegians and the Hollywood studio system. Now, boasts Richard Walter, chairman of UCLA’s screenwriting faculty, Bruins are making most of the deals. Among his claims:
Of the 60 or so screenwriting students in UCLA’s MFA program, two-thirds have agents (a dozen have signed with William Morris alone).
His students had six films at Cannes last year.
The recent $20-million “Highlander” was written in class (it flopped critically and commercially).
His students wrote the TV season’s kickoff episodes of “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” and “Miami Vice,” the “Twilight Zone” and “Amazing Stories” pilots and the recent highly rated CBS movie “The Other Lover.”
A particularly good relationship with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment (Todd Holland, a former Bruin, has just been set to direct “Gremlins II”).
Walter found himself pitching a story idea recently to a former student who’s now a story executive with “Twilight Zone” (Walter got the assignment).
Students from USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program “line up” at UCLA looking for scripts to produce “because they say they can’t find any good ones over there.”
“USC used to be much more commercially oriented, UCLA was more avant- garde,” said Walter, who was a student member of the so-called “USC Mafia” during the George Lucas era in the 1960s. “We’re now much more actively integrated into the commercial community.”
Only 15 screenwriting majors are accepted each year into UCLA’s MFA program from some 150 applicants. All the teachers are pro writers.
After trumpeting UCLA’s show-biz payoffs, Walter alleged, “Our secret is that we tell our kids to forget about the trends and what’s hip and write the freshest, most original, most personal, most naive romantic story they can. If I catch a student with a trade paper, I take it away. Our most successful kids are those that absolutely forget about the movie business.”
What does USC say?
“All that may be true, but it’s no longer going to be true,” said Margaret Mehring, director of USC’s (undergraduate) Filmic Writing Program, begun four years ago.
Mehring said the screenwriting major is strictly undergrad (average age: 20-22). That may change: Columbia University’s Frank Daniel arrives at USC May 15 as the new dean of the USC Film School with “a very strong interest in film writing.” Mehring promised an MFA screenwriting major within two or three years (currently, the major’s in film production, with a few advanced writing classes).
Mehring added that “some of our undergraduate students have agents and are making deals,” and stressed that they are deeply grounded not just in scriptwriting, but in the needs of the actor and the director. The first “filmic” grads--19 of ‘em--get diplomas May 9, “and May 10, they’ll be in the marketplace.”
Doesn’t a 22-year-old need a bit more, uh, life experience before writing films?
“That’s a myth,” she said.