Film Schools

PEOPLE in Hollywood often are accused of acting like spoiled children. That may sting for some (eh, Lindsay?) but would only elicit an ennui-laden "duh" or, perhaps, "whatever" from Movies by Kids' participants who are, in fact, actual kids. "Wouldn't it have been great," says Greg Kindseth, a professional film editor, "if they had a film school for kids when we were younger?" That was the proverbial klieg light going off over his head.

When "Star Wars" creator George Lucas talks about the way academia regards his craft, he sounds more like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield than a bold Jedi knight. The filmmaker is convinced that colleges and universities don't give the world of cinema serious respect, despite the spread of programs, departments and schools focused on the field.

"Star Wars" creator George Lucas is giving USC a blockbuster donation of $175 million -- the university's biggest single gift ever -- that largely will be used to build a new home for its prestigious film school, campus officials confirmed Tuesday. The gift from his Lucasfilm Foundation builds on Hollywood's historic support for the cinema school, where Lucas earned a bachelor's degree. Much of the donation is to pay for a 137,000-square-foot complex.

Perhaps the only people who brag more about their illustrious alumni than Ivy Leaguers are the deans of film schools. At USC, the names dropped are Robert Zemeckis, Jay Roach, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. UCLA proudly lists Francis Ford Coppola, Gore Verbinski and Alexander Payne. California Institute of the Arts boasts a who's who of animation, including Tim Burton, Pixar guru John Lasseter and "SpongeBob SquarePants" creator Steven Hillenburg. Southern California is the film capital of the world and the film school capital of the world, boasting a dozen or so programs to hone the skills of potential filmmakers, usually to the tune of $10,000 to $34,000 a year.

Set a few blocks from the antique stores and historic storefronts of downtown Orange, Chapman University seems the antithesis of Hollywood glitz. The small university southeast of Los Angeles lies just outside the entertainment industry's 30-mile zone -- radiating from Beverly and La Cienega boulevards -- where most production takes place for economic reasons.

"The Quiet" is something of a film with a split-personality disorder. It never quite settles on whether it's a "Mean Girls" burlesque of teen life, an "American Beauty"-style bad-things-in-the-suburbs drama, or a wayward horror film. And it certainly never reconciles itself to successfully pulling off a hybrid of the three.

THERE was a time, and not so long ago, that any talk about television at film school was considered crass -- the low road to a higher calling. Film school was for budding auteurs, not TV hacks. "Television has always been the redheaded stepchild of virtually any university's film program," said UCLA professor Tom Nunan, who produced the film "Crash" but spent most of his career as a television executive. "It's a hard medium to come out and just embrace right out of the gate.

A Chapman University trustee and his wife have given the school $2 million to endow a chair at its Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. Venture capitalist Chuck Martin and Twyla Reed Martin of Laguna Beach donated the money for the Twyla Reed Martin Dean's Chair in Film and Media Arts, whose first occupant will be Dean Bob Basset. Chuck Martin is the founder of Enterprise Partners and co-founded the buyout firm Westar Capital.

Alexander MACKENDRICK in "On Film-making" defines the movie director as "the Invisible Imaginary Ubiquitous Winged Witness" of a film's creation. By this he means, putting the point less colorfully, that the director is already "a member of the audience for his as yet unmade film ... feeling what the future spectators of his work might feel and reacting as they might react."