California Talent Search
In the typical California film school, where so much time is spent in the dark, it's good to have a dose of reality, he says. "But I think it's also good to give people the chance to take off and fall on their faces. It's a lot easier to fall on your face in school than in the real world, where there's usually more at stake." But Dallas film professional Ethan Besser gives his UT film school education a mixed review. "The information they give you is so out of date. Basically, they prepare you if you're going to come out and start directing. Unfortunately, it just doesn't happen like that. I must say being a PA (production assistant) can at times be pretty futile, but I've learned so much sitting and watching how it's done."
Many of the people he works with don't know about things such as film axis (an imaginary line between two people), Mr. Besser says. "That's because they just started doing it. They didn't go to film school. I feel that in the long run, going to school has been beneficial, but I must emphasize it's in the long run." Louis Black, founder of the alternative newspaper Austin Chronicle, has been both a film student and teacher at UT. He sees the university's program as "unusually successful."
"It's not one of these programs where 10 years later nobody's working in film," he says. "I have yet to visit the set of a film being shot anywhere in Texas where two or three people I taught at UT haven't come up to me." In Dallas, Mr. Peterson, who has a master's in film studies from New York University, calls film school just one way to get into the business. "There's no set formula. Things are always changing. If there were a lot of people who knew everything, there wouldn't be so many companies that go in and out of financial trouble and so many movies that fail."
Friday is the postmark deadline for dues and resumes for the 2007 Texas Association of Film/Tape Professionals Directory. That's the all-important "who's who" of the state film and video industry that goes out to producers. Former Dallas TV producer David King, who spent the last four years with DDB Needham developing Web sites for the likes of Pepsi and Mountain Dew, begins work Wednesday in London. He's been named managing director of Icon Medialab U.K., the London division of Stockholm-based Icon Medialab International. CEO Chris Christian called to say The Studios at Las Colinas has bought half of Thornhill Productions with an eye to offering "turn-key production" - from idea to final cut. In a statement explaining the stock purchase, he says the two "share many synergies in their mission statements and have agreed to come together to form a full-functioned, state-of-the-art production division for the Studios."
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