The Force Was with Them
September 1965. Eighty eager young faces are assembled for the first day of orientation at USC School of Cinema. Gene Peterson, head of the camera department, walks onstage in Projection Room 108. His cornflower blue eyes scan the crowd for an unendurable 30 seconds of silence.
“Here’s my advice,” he says to us. “Get out now. You can still get your money back.”
1965 was a low tidemark year in Hollywood—never before (and since) had so few films been produced. The 20-year slide had begun in 1946 with the postwar surges of TV, cars, and suburbs. It was one of the reasons Peterson and other faculty at USC Cinema had become teachers, seeking cover in the leafy groves of academe.
The next day, a third of the class had opted for greener pastures. Those of us who remained did so because, well, that is the question. We were double the previous year’s admission of 40. Why the surge of interest in film at a time when the business was shrinking?
A year later, the faculty identified eight of us as troublemakers, including George Lucas, John Milius, Caleb Deschanel, Matthew Robbins, Randall Kleiser, and me. We were called to sit around a picnic table in the central corral of the cinema department, where we were harangued by our professors for our unwillingness to follow the school rules: No movie should be made more than a quarter mile from the school; only black and white film should be used; no more than 55 minutes of 16mm film should be shot. We were accused of breaking into the mixing theater at 2 a.m. to re-record our films, of not returning equipment on time, of sneaking into the equipment stock room with forged keys to get our hands on precious cameras and sound recorders. All of this was true.
These inventions and revolutions unraveled space and time.
This dressing-down was duplicated across town at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television, where Francis Ford Coppola and Carroll Ballard had been students a few years earlier; or NYU Film School in New York where Martin Scorsese was a student contemporaneous with us; or Long Beach State where Steven Spielberg would soon be enrolling. None of us had any prior connection to Hollywood.
Once we left school, all of us encountered different forms of The Wall—the barricade that says, “Go away.” The studios were surrounded by literal cement walls, usually about 15 feet high, which broadcast that message clearly. But there were other, invisible walls that we encountered, like the impenetrable Don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you forcetrilogy, and many others. Along with Oscars and, for a few of us—present company excepted—great wealth and fame.
