Peer Groups At Your Work Level
Think about what you pay for tuition to go to college or a graduate program. You could probably go to (equipment supplier) at top film schools, rent the stuff yourself and figure it out. Tools are one thing, but they're not "the" thing. Neither are teachers, he says. "We are blessed with some great teachers like Don Pasquella at SMU and Ben Levin at North Texas. People like that is a reason to go. Unfortunately, the way those universities are with tenure and all that, there are a lot of bad teachers, too."
Since 1982, Mr. Weiss has had ample opportunity to examine cinematic academe and its inhabitants. Once the only film teacher in West Virginia, he has since taught film and/or video at the University of Texas at Arlington, Northlake Community College in Irving, the University of Texas at Dallas, SMU and the Art Institute of Dallas. "The best reason to go to film school," he says, "is a peer group that's at your work level, that's interested in the same issues you are, and that you can talk with about your ideas -- one that you can make mistakes in front of and still feel comfortable. You go through this growing process with a bunch of people and then -- when you get done -- you have friends you can call." A place to experiment
If you're a movie-of-the-week wannabe or wish to photograph your friends sitting in the bathroom talking Kierkegaard, others say, film school is the place to experiment. "If you make a film at film school, you can afford to be a bit pretentious," USA Film Festival artistic director Richard Peterson says. "That can be a good thing. You're not necessarily making something to sell. So you can make a poem on film or make a video for music that's not commercial." In 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 "The information they give you is so out of date.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.
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