More trouble than the average

290 is a required class at USC for a number of Cinema school related majors, from interactive media kids, screenwriting folks, critical studies folks, and production dickheads such as myself. In the course of a semester, you create 5 movies, which ends up being approximately a movie every three weeks. This pace is frantic, but for once, it’s work you want to do because it’s something you’re interested in. Put it this way: I’ve never put off any work for this class, and I’ve been putting off shit since the moment I was conceived.

As with everything in this cold world, there are problems with this class. The biggest problem, I think, is this:

INT. Bedroom — MORNING

An alarm clock rings. HERO wakes up and shuts it off. HERO gets up.

What the hell is it with student movies and having to wake up? You have no idea how many people think this is both an interesting and thought-provoking way to segue into the magical realm of cinema. Also, another problem:

EXT. College campus

Male twenty-something has issues/problems with female twenty-something. They stare at each other meaningfully for a while. Locations include but are not limited to outdoor restaurant, library, walking between classes, and generic student apartment.

The other thing more annoying than starting a movie with the main character waking up are relationship movies. On one trip to the Avid editing labs, a quick scan around revealed that approximately 95% of the computers were occupied with movies about college males and their relationships with college females. Although I didn’t watch any of these movies, titles like “Together” or “Just Friends” leads me to believe that if I did watch any of those turds, I’d probably give myself consecutive swirlies to wash the awful taste out of my mouth. I think some of those movies even had one of those characters waking up at some point.

You might wonder about that 5% that wasn’t occupied with boring ass relationship/waking up movies. That 5% was busy finding a suitable alarm clock sound effect for the clock at the beginning of their movie.

You’re probably thinking “Oh Mr. High and Mighty here has no right to talk,” which is probably all fine and good, except the thing is you’re just sitting there thinking it and I’m all here typing this up all predicting what you’re thinking, before you’re thinking it, which basically amounts to you being a loser and me pretty much being psychic. So before you fire off an angry email in my direction, you’d better think again – because I already know what you’re going to type, sucka.

A huge problem is that people simply don’t go far enough with their movies or characters, so instead of being kick ass awesome, they’re just mediocre and boring. In my writing class, we wrote scenes that introduced a character. One girl wrote about a high school girl who was pretty much a badass and all the adults were respecting her and she pretty much owned the school and all. Problem is, it didn’t come across. Instead of being all that and a bag of potato chips, her character was mad stale Cheetos. All she had to do was add any or all of these sentences to the script at any point, and the character would’ve flown off the page:

- Karen opens the door to the classroom and pinches a fat loaf onto her Home Room teacher’s desk.

- Karen lets all the air out of PRINCIPAL JONES’ Ford Focus, and then blames it on a drunk special ed student, TIM.

Now, with those gems of character nuance, the script becomes ten-fold better, and an infinitely more watchable movie. All she needs now is a good old relationship and maybe a scene where she wakes up, and you’ve got gold.

If anyone’s interested in my assignments for this class, email me.

-f.w.