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17 Hollywood, UCLA 281 Ihad learned in my first year that USC’s Film School and UCLA’s Department of Theater Arts film school were as different as night and day. While equally outstanding in the education they offered students, their fundamental approach could not have been more opposite. USC cultivated close ties with Hollywood and the entertainment industry. UCLA eschewed any connection with it. For obscure reasons lost to history, UCLA wanted no part of “commercial” filmmaking. They were teaching art. Ironically, if UCLA film school graduates, such as Francis Ford Coppola, became Hollywood luminaries, the same teachers who disdained the entertainment industry now frequently boasted of their successful graduates. During the summer, Larry Thor and I talked during afternoon walks at his home on Escondido Beach, especially about revising UCLA’s screenwriting program. Thor agreed that students were getting short shrift when there were twenty or thirty of them in a seminar . But the university would not allow us to significantly reduce our admissions, and the demands for enrollment in our screenwriting program were steadily increasing. Thor, generous to a fault, said he hated the idea of turning away any kid who wanted to be a screenwriter. He would take as many as thirty students in one of his seminars. But I felt that working with six students in a seminar, each assigned to write a feature-length final draft screenplay every quarter, would create something closer to oneon -one tutorial instruction and demand more writing. University policy had set six as a minimum but had no official maximum figure . Though Thor and I agreed to disagree, he never tried to dissuade me from my position. What I believed was largely responsible for the increase in demand for our courses was the growing tendency of the studios to go into “development” deals with writers. With the studios always desperately searching for material, they had come up with the idea of putting many screenwriters in “development,” paying them Guild minimum for their scripts at the front end, with a much larger payment if their screenplay ever went into production. The growing new philosophy was to develop ten or twenty screenplays with hopes that one of them would land a big-name star or a big-name director and find its way into production. One young studio executive boasted to me that he had two hundred screenplays in development in hopes of bringing one to film. Many studio executives I met would ask me for a first look at our program’s best students’ work. I told them my first choice was to find our outstanding writers an agent, which was always the students’ primary goal. When our screenwriting awards were handed out at the end of the school year, we could expect as many as a half-dozen agents attending the ceremony introducing themselves to the winners. While we welcomed Hollywood professionals’ interest in our students’ work, we understood that in the majority of instances these brief introductions led nowhere except to disappointment for the students. While everyone in Hollywood professes eagerness to read the work of new screenwriters , the ugly truth is that very few of these eager-to-read people ever actually read the scripts submitted to them. They are actually read by readers on staff who submit a one-page synopsis and an evaluation of the script. 282 Hollywood, UCLA 283 Hollywood, UCLA Former screenwriting students with talent who had written at least one of what was called a “show script,” or “calling card script,” would happily settle for development deals. They could live for months on the up-front money (often twenty or thirty thousand dollars or more) while their reputation became established as a proven professional who had sold material. Having sold a script, they were eligible to join the Writers Guild of America, West. Many of these former students lived from year to year off the income generated by development deals, without ever having one of their scripts made into a movie. Ironically, students with great show scripts would often sell other scripts they’d written without ever selling the show script. Several students with a half-dozen screenplays written while at UCLA would later tell me, “I sold the worst one first.” A wise student never stopped writing, building up a small arsenal of screenplays. Getting into the marketplace was tough, but staying there was tougher still. As we all knew, the only way to develop as a writer is...

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