From Wright State To Sundance Film Festival
Two-time Academy Award nominees Jim Klein and Julia Reichert came of age before film editing schools became the place to learn your craft. "If you went to film school, you wouldn't admit it when you went out looking for a job because there would immediately be this prejudice that you didn't know what you were talking about," Klein said. "That has changed dramatically over the last 15 years, to the point where the vast majority of people in the film world went to film school."
Those students have followed in the footsteps of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese - the new breed of film-school-trained directors who rose to prominence in the late '60s and early '70s. Coppola, Lucas and Scorsese studied at the country's three most prestigious film schools - the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Southern California and New York University.
Wright State University, where Klein and Reichert teach film production, is quietly gaining a comparable reputation. "We're certainly one of the top five undergraduate film schools in the country, and we are competitive with the top graduate schools in terms of the quality of film that our students are making," Klein said. What it lacks are the resources of those more prestigious schools. Klein isn't aware of another film school that's had shorts in the prestigious Sundance Film Festival two years in a row. WSU students Josh Wintringham and Nicol Simmons had back-to-back entries at Sundance in 2005 and '06. Simmons' film, Dry Mount , won a Special Jury Prize.
Film Threat , a popular alternative-film magazine, listed Wright State as a Recommended Film School of National Reputation. The Independent, the leading periodical for independent filmmakers, named it as one of only nine national film schools to offer superior training in an independent film environment. Seven new shorts by WSU students will premiere tonight at the seventh annual Big Lens Film Festival, with repeat showings on Saturday. "It's the high point of the year, no question about it,"Reichert said. After Big Lens, the aspiring filmmakers cross their fingers and hope for a call from Sundance or any of another 20 to 25 international festivals. "There's no point in making films if you can't show them," said senior Paul Hill, who produced one of this year's Big Lens premieres, Dead Cats Dance on Fire. "We all want to try to break into the industry somehow, outside a student level. Getting into these important festivals is really our main outlet for that. " Wright State's Motion Pictures Program, part of the university's Department of Theatre Arts, was founded in 1976 . Two nationally recognized film-theory professors - Charles Derry and Bill Lafferty , who both earned doctorates from another top film school, Northwestern University - joined the faculty in 1978 and 1980. Production courses were taught by part-time adjunct professors before Reichert and Klein came on board in 1984.
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