College and University Years (1970s)

PCC and USC

 

 

Following my high school graduation in 1974, I decided to attend Pasadena City College for two years and then transfer to the University of Southern California with the goal of a Cinema BA.  PCC had an excellent reputation and my high expectations for college were fulfilled.  In comparison, my USC years turned out to be not at all what I expected, which in retrospect was a good preparation for some of the basic realities of society in general and the entertainment industry in particular.  I was told that it was my writing awards that were the reason I'd been selected for admission to USC, receiving a full State Scholarship as well as a Supplementary Scholarship from the school for fall 1976. 

English and writing classes were my primary area of interest at PCC.  During my freshman year, I was delighted to be one of four short story author winners in the annual Jane Murray Memorial Short Story Contest of the California Writers Guild.  The awards dinner took place at the Atheneum of nearby Cal Tech.  While attending PCC, I worked for Mann Theatres (as previously mentioned).   During my sophomore year, I was on the staff of three college publications with my contest winning story published in the annual Inscape magazine.  Considering my interest in cinema as an art form, the movies I reviewed for The Courier were "Taxi Driver" and "A Clockwork Orange" — each showing reflection about human nature in relation to violence (in a society where the mainstream media seems incapable of reporting about overlooked dispensations of the Divine Mind).  Prominent news of the past two weeks includes statistics about massively reduced bird populations in North America since 1970 and the announcement of a formal impeachment inquiry of President Trump initiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
 
It's startling for me to realize that 45 years have passed since I began attending college.  Like myself, my twin brother Mike also worked at a Pasadena movie theater while we both attended PCC.  When the time came to go to USC, we found an apartment to share that was a couple blocks away from the school.  Mike was an English/Public Relations major.  The first apartment we rented had a shared restroom and for the following year we found a better place nearby named La Sorbonne Apartments.  
 

The most demanding class of my first semester at USC was one where each student made a half dozen Super 8 short films.  There were two instructors for the class, an intense older man named Mel and the more affable Allan.  I was very proud of all my work for the class yet one miscalculation seems to have had an insurmountable impact on the way the teachers perceived me and my work.  I had filmed one of my movies using my twin brother and my friend Kate, who also worked at the Academy Theater in Pasadena.  When my movie was shown to the class, I was chastised for not following directions by not having been cinematographer in lieu of being an actor.  I bemusedly explained the situation about having a twin brother and everything seemed fine.  However, at the end of the semester when my report card arrived I was upset upon finding that my grade was only a C.  At one point Mel had mentioned he thought it would be best if I waited a semester before taking the 16mm class that was next in the production classes sequence; however, since my scholarship was only for two years I decided to see if there was a possible space in the class.  There was no lack of space in the class so I was glad to be able to enroll. 

The 16mm class was a more challenging class regarding all the technical aspects of making a short film.  Students were paired up with each one directing, writing and editing a movie and then serving as the cinematographer for your partner's.  I had selected for my partner a student named Richard, whose Super 8 films had impressed me.  My movie was a somber character study that ended up being entitled "Blind Date."  The storyline was about a young blind woman who became close to the man hired by her mother to read books to her.  The final shot is of the blind woman alone reading braille after happening to encounter the man with a girl friend.  At that time, the movies were made in black and white, which I thought was befitting for the subject.  I used my friend James A because of his intensity while my friend Diane also had the precise emotional temperament I thought appropriate.  There was some second guessing among the class about my choice for the actor; however, the realization that a man's looks were not as important as his personality from the blind woman's perspective was one of the themes that the film was meant to convey.  The necessities of the production were so demanding that this was the only time in my life that I had to miss another class (Spanish) due to deadlines.  I recall at least one all-night editing session.  It was exciting when I posted a campus notice and found a talented young composer to provide an original score (flute solo) for the movie.
 
It was during this semester in 1977 that I saw an early special screening of the movie "Star Wars" for USC cinema students without having any expectation of the tremendous success that would follow.  (article)  An innovative aspect of the film were the comments about the mysterious 'Force.'  If the Force was with you, there could be audible guidance from disembodied relatives like Luke Skywalker's uncle Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Parallels are obvious with the panoply of documented cases of transcendental communication (although I gave no contemplation to this at the time). 

At the end of the semester despite completing all the assignments and never being absent, I was shocked to receive a D for the 16mm filmmaking class.  At first, I thought a simple mistake had been made.  Upon contacting the department administration, I soon found myself being confronted by my previous class teacher Mel who reminded me that he had told me to wait a semester and didn't offer any further explanation.  I had several meeting with the department chairman Mort Zarcoff yet it was obvious that nothing could be done about what seemed to me a bizarre and blatantly unfair predicament.  Exasperated with the uncertain standards of the curriculum, I decided to change my planned Production emphasis for my B.A. degree to a History/Criticism Emphasis to complete the requirements, necessitating an additional semester of USC classes.

When I again had Allan for a film theories class, it was intimidating when I learned that the grade would be based on a single final exam essay.  My strategy was to prewrite two essays on topics that I thought might apply to the precise subject selected by the instructor.  The eventual question turned out to be almost exactly the same as one of those I'd prepared so all I had to do in the allotted time interval was write everything as neatly as possible in the blank lined USC Examination Blue Book.  My grade for the class turned out to be an A.  Ironically, one day Allan went up to my brother on campus because he thought Mike was me and said something extremely complimentary about the essay.  Mike explained, "I'm not Mark.  I'm his brother."  When Mike told me about what had happened, I began thinking again about how different my university experiences had been from what I'd expected.  At La Sorbonne Apartments, our next door neighbor was Michelle, a PhD cinema student from Back East.  I had no desire for any continued formal university education and what I learned from her only confirmed this attitude.    

Reflecting about my two and a half years at USC, I realize now that it was beneficial to have taken the additional history/criticism classes as this provided me with more experiences enhancing my writing skills.  Allan was the author of a book about Film Appreciation and two other of my instructors also were authors: Arthur Knight had written a prominent book about the history of the cinema entitled The Liveliest Art and John Russell Taylor published the biography of Alfred Hitchcock entitled Hitch in 1978.  Mr. Taylor led students to compare the careers and craft of British film directors David Lean and Carol Reed with a focus on their movies "Oliver Twist" and "Oliver!" in particular.  This brought enlightening insights into filmmaking techniques and more complicated realizations about aspects of the moviegoing experience dealing with creative elements and potential psychological viewer responses.

After writing many movie reviews for Arthur Knight's class, I realized that my embarking on the career of a film reviewer would be possible; however, my lack of enthusiasm for mainstream studio movies would've made this an obviously futile endeavor.  I was especially pleased when Arthur told me on different occasions that reading my analysis of Brian DePalma's "The Fury" and Lina Wertmuller's "The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain" had altered his own perceptions about the movies.  I found "The Fury" to be a satire on movie conventions while in the latter film the director's use of the two main characters' friends as a contemporary Greek chorus was an innovative element.  My conclusion was: "The end of a romance really could seem to be the end of the world, and through Wertmuller's gloomy perspective, Armageddon comes easy."
 
Two major term papers examined the careers of film director Ken Russell and movie reviewer Pauline Kael.  One essay of which I was particularly proud compared two Vincente Minnelli movies and was entitled "The Central Motif in Minnelli's 'The Bad and the Beautiful' and 'Lust for Life.'"  When it received only a C+, I shrugged and realized myself to be no longer expecting grades to reflect my individual efforts.  I met with the teacher to learn what he found lacking about my essays yet he didn't offer any suggestions in particular.  My essay included the statement: "The two films move from a reality of failure to a second reality of success in a way that the actual success of the protagonists is intangible in that it isn't concrete.  Van Gogh is going to become a great and famous painter while Shields is going to become a successful producer."

For a documentary class, once when I attempted to define a documentary film as being "any film where the preservation of reality on film overpowers fictional elements," the instructor responded with two pages of typed single line commentary about my attempt to articulate a definition. 

One of the papers from my university years that I've managed to save all these years is a list of films for my French Film genre class.  These titles now impress me as reflecting potentialities of the medium often overlooked when the commercial emphasis predominates, including two Godard films ("Masculin-Feminin" and "Une Femme Est une Femme").  Among the other titles found are "Le jour se lève" ("Daybreak"), "Le 400 Coups" ("The 400 Blows"), "Les Biches" ("The Does"), "Ma Nuit Chez Maud" ("My Night at Maud's"), "L'année dernière à Marienbad," ("Last Year at Marienbad") and "Les dimanches de Ville d'Avray" ("Sundays and Cybele").  For a another class about the political film genre, each student individually had to choose a movie to present for viewing to classmates and my selection was Godard's "Weekend."  When the night came, the teacher informed me the wrong movie had been received by mistake.  I was so bewildered that I ended up going home early when he said that students could do so if they didn't want to watch the 1962 Danish film instead.

Throughout my college and university years, I dedicated myself to writing the best possible essays and articles for my classes just as now I strive to accomplish clear and easy-to-understand blog articles.

At the end of my second year at USC while I still had a few classes to complete, my brother graduated in the usual way.  I helped him with writing his application letters to movie studio publicity departments.  He had already begun making industry connections by serving as an intern at the local Filmex international film exposition.  While some publicists pass their entire career without working at a movie studio, Mike was fortunate to be immediately hired as a junior publicist at Disney.  He moved into his own apartment down the street from the Burbank studio lot.

In May that year, I'd visited the USC Career Development Center to look for a job in the movie development or publishing fields and found a position in North Hollywood that looked promising.  An editor was needed for a new magazine called Modern Games from a company called American Art Enterprises.  I remember going to a job interview and learning that the actual main part of the job was writing captions and articles for what are usually known as 'hardcore porno magazines.'  The publisher gave me a few sample magazines to take home and study.  Everyone who I met at the company seemed so pleasant and normal that I soon decided to accept the job as a way of getting some publishing experience.  Having no intimate romantic experiences of my own, I studied the writing of authors such as Anais Nin (Delta  of Venus) and found further inspiration by inventing scenarios satirizing movies and TV shows I'd seen.  I also was able to place one of my literary short stories in the more mainstream adult magazine (softcore) Foxette.  The story had absolutely no sexual content, being a character study of a lonely young woman who found it difficult to begin a relationship.  In January 1979, the publisher decided that he wanted a more crude 'first person' approach for the story content of the magazines.  As I was finally graduating with my Cinema degree, I decided it was time to find a better job.  As I wasn't interested in participating in the formal USC graduation ceremony, I soon received my diploma in the mail.
    

There would be many more surprising twists in what would eventually become what now can only be described as a progression that from other people's perspective must seem to constitute a comparatively 'over-the-top' life (as longtime readers of this blog are well aware).