I was having a hard time with the college scene. While everyone was getting into the swing of dorm parties and late night studying, making friends and rushing fraternities, I was spending my time in the Cinema School library watching old movies on VHS, and reading screenplays. I will never forget watching the David Lean classic Brief Encounter on a little TV in a brown melamine cubicle, sitting in a metal chair a few feet from the screen, while wearing a plastic set of crappy headphones, and being utterly moved by the beauty and brilliance of the film, with its deep black and white photographic tones and its dramatic Rachmaninoff score. It was a rhapsodic experience for me, and I was a crying mess right there in the library, taking off the headset and rewinding the tape. I did this nearly every day. 

And they had a fantastic library of screenplays -some with multiple drafts! They wouldn’t let me leave the library with them, as I wasn’t officially in the film school, so I’d just sit in there all day and try and decipher, say, the original draft of Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, for example. I wanted to know how the story had evolved from the original conception, and why the producers had made the changes that they did. This was in the days before DVD extras and Director Commentaries, so I was stuck coming to my own conclusions. At nights I’d stand outside some of the 400 level classes that I knew had famous filmmakers and celebrities speaking, and I’d try to get in. I just wanted to learn, fulfill my obsession, and obligate my passion. Sometimes I got in, sometimes I snuck in, and sometimes they closed the door in my face. I was not one of their elite.

At one point, shyness be damned, I went to the Cinema School Dean’s office to accost the dean. There were a number of screenplays in the library that they wouldn’t let me read, see, or even touch because I hadn’t yet been accepted into the film school. They asked for my film school I.D. (yes, they had their own I.D.) and when I began to complain, the kid behind the counter said go see the Dean, if it upsets you so much.

So I marched right up there. I was fuming. I wanted to know why I was paying $40,000 a year, as a legitimate USC student and I couldn’t use the damn library! I wanted to know why they wanted to keep me from learning! I wanted to know what the big point of these constricting school policies was! But most of all, I wanted to meet this Dean and see what kind of person he was. 

He was out. The Big Shot was out. His secretary asked me what it was regarding, and I mumbled something about how I wanted to use the library. She told me I didn’t have full access to the library because I wasn’t a film student. And that hurt. Because if I wasn’t a film student, then what was I?

Back then, everything at the USC School of Cinema revolved around the 480, which was a 20 minute 16mm sound film, made entirely by students. The school produced about five 480 narrative fiction films a year, and considering the hundreds of students

enrolled in the school, it was obviously extremely competitive. Only the best of the best were selected to direct one of these films, and all the rest of you scrubs had to build sets and wipe lenses if you wanted your degree. It never made sense to me: all these films students, at the finest film school in all the land -the oldest in the nation- and none of them making films. What were we doing here? I was feeling more and more disillusioned every day.

Mid way through my third semester I found myself on Academic Probation. This had no effect on me, but it disturbed the Financial Aid office, and they recommended that I see a College Advisor, to protect their investment. Fine, I thought. No, really, I thought that was fine! I could use a little advising. So I made an appointment, went in and sat down. She was nice. Friendly. She pulled up my transcript and looked it over for a minute, and then made a something’s-burning-in-the-kitchen face.

“Sean,” she said, “you seem to have an interest in an eclectic range of subjects.” It was true. I had refused to sign up for any mundane 100 person general ed basics. For example, instead of “History” I took “History of Ancient and Medieval Science”. Instead of “Anthropology” I had taken “Exploring Cultural Ethnography Through Film” and for a science I took “Earthquake Geology”. I was all over the map, and I was pulling down C’s, D’s, and I’s and W’s (“incomplete” and “withdrawal”.) They were mostly 300 and 400 level courses.

On the other hand, I was taking all the film classes they would let me into without me being an official student. Evidently, it takes some students a few years to get accepted into the program -and by then they wouldn’t be able to fulfill all the requirements- so a lot of classes were open to average Joes like me. I took “Editing 101”, “On-Screen Direction of Actors”, “Film Business and Law”, and several others. And, aside from Introduction to Cinema, I got A’s in all of them. One class, I forget the exact name of it, took a current film in release and studied it from pre-production to release, inviting once a week someone who worked on that particular movie. I loved the class so much, that when the teacher thought my paper on Steven Spielberg “was good, but read too much like a magazine article” (which I took as a compliment) I wrote a completely new paper on the Sony takeover of Universal. I got an A. A high-on-himself senior film student in the class was infuriated by this, and the prof defended me: “But he wrote two papers!”

The class was held on a Wednesday night, right after my editing class. I would go to both classes, and then head to the student editing bay around 10:00, and stay there all night working on my pieces. And I mean I was there all night. Strangely, in the bureaucratic mess of rules that was the USC School of Cinema, I was given access to the 16mm and video editing equipment, since I was in the editing class (I was given a “special” I.D., of all things.) I would grab snacks out of the vending machines and chat with some of the 480 crews about their films, and then hang in the editing bays and work on my class projects: old raw 16mm footage of Gunsmoke episodes and video of bad documentaries. We were allowed to choose which footage we wanted to edit, and I chose them all. And the Gunsmoke episode I editing a few different ways. And then, when I ran out of projects, I got my old 8mm movies from high school, had them

transferred to video in the developing department and re-edited them with a soundtrack, just for posterity.

But the semester was coming to an end, and, my advisor warned, if I didn’t fulfill my general education requirements and polish all my grades, USC Film School, as an option, was seriously dead in the water. (And the D in Introduction to Cinema did not help. I would have to take it again.) She said I was clearly a bright student, and asked why I couldn’t apply myself in the other classes for the greater goal. I didn’t say much, because I knew I just didn’t want to.

And then she told me exactly the thing I needed to hear, exactly the thing I wanted to hear, exactly the right advice -advice I would heed, and run with.

She told me to take a year off school, and perhaps go get a job in Hollywood.

Of course! I thought. And I was stunned, because here was my college advisor, advising me not to go to college at all! She said a lot of people do it -take a year off to work- and then they come back refreshed and renewed, and with a greater interest in their education, and it all sounded swell to me.

And I went and got a hold of the one guy who I knew who worked in the film business, told him about my plight, asked him to where to apply, and went for it. A month later, after a few friendly calls on my behalf, Steve and I were lunching at the Disney Studios commissary, and I was the youngest employee of Walt Disney Feature Animation.