By the age of seven, Jennifer Middleton already had an agent.
But with appearances on the television shows “Full
House” and “NYPD Blue,” commercials for Mattel
and Subway and dozens of stage plays under her belt before she
entered high school, she decided to take a break from an early
career in acting to pursue the life of a “normal”
teenager instead.
And then she came to UCLA.
Drawn by promises of infinite opportunities and world-renowned
academia, Middleton enrolled as an English student with hopes of
also continuing her lifelong study of theater. However, she soon
discovered that the opportunities to pursue theater studies at UCLA
for non-theater students were nearly nonexistent.
“At the end of my first year, I was especially frustrated
because I had seen that it was nearly impossible to get involved
with the shows or even take many classes because they were all
restricted to majors,” she said. “I applied to UCLA
with the intention of minoring in theater. I was so upset to learn
that it was not a possibility. I did not apply to the major because
I have been studying theater my entire life, and I really wanted to
use my time at UCLA to explore a different field.”
Though it boasts historically top-ranked programs, a long list
of successful alumni and a prime location, the UCLA School of
Theater, Film and Television has yet to offer a minor in either
film or theater. Now, after years of successful major programs,
undergraduate film and theater minors are in the works.
“The lack of a theater minor is one item on my very short
list of things I wish I had known about UCLA that might have made
me decide not to come here,” Middleton said. “I think
that (the minor) is a necessary feature of our School of Theater,
Film and Television, and of the university at large. It is long
overdue.”
The possibility of minor programs in theater and film have been
suggested throughout the school’s history, but always
rejected largely due to financial constraints. More students
require more courses, more professors and more facilities.
However, after careful deliberation and trial non-theater
student courses, the theater minor is finally in a penultimate
stage of approval, said Edit Virreal, associate dean of academic
affairs for the School of Theater, Film and Television, and the
chair of the MFA Playwriting Program.
Supported by Robert Rosen, dean of the School of Theater, Film
and Television, and backed by the university-wide initiative to
further open the doors to all academic areas of study, the proposal
has been in discussion for the past several months. If the
Undergraduate Council approves the program in June, the theater
minor will be offered beginning fall 2006.
However, the possibility of unforeseeable bumps in the road
still exists.
“We feel it is unwise to start promoting the theater minor
before the Undergraduate Council makes their own independent
decision. We look forward to offering it as soon as it is approved
by the University,” said Virreal in an e-mail statement.
Though the process has not yet reached the Undergraduate
Council, a film minor has also recently been under
consideration.
Tom DeNove, vice chair and head of production for the Department
of Film, Television and Digital Media, said the expanding list of
film courses open to non-film students, including four
production-oriented courses, is a testing ground for a possible
minor program.
“We’re definitely getting the enrollment, and the
feedback from those taking the classes has been positive. We seem
to be able to structure the courses to make it work,” said
DeNove, who is also currently teaching a digital cinematography
course open to non-film students. “So far, it’s been
positive on all sides.”
Next year, the department hopes to offer more production courses
for non-film students, such as a special effects or directing
course, in addition to a growing number of criticism, writing and
business-oriented classes. The ideal projected date for the film
minor is fall 2007.
In addition to the demands of the theater minor, a film minor
would require equipment, sound-stage space and other technological
resources as well. However, with the coming of the so-called
“digital revolution,” filmmaking has become more
accessible and affordable to the upcoming generation of
filmmakers.
“The one thing the minor program won’t be is
production intensive. It just can’t,” DeNove said.
“But the great part about the digital revolution is that you
don’t need film school to be in production. A lot of our
non-major students come to class with better equipment than we
have.”
Before the advent of affordable digital technologies, film study
relied solely on hard-to-use, expensive film cameras. Thus, a
small, support-based film school was the only viable option.
“We used to have no way of accommodating more people. Film
wasn’t something you could do on your own,” he said.
“But truly today, anyone can be an auteur ““ you can do
everything. We are still teaching storytelling, but it is a little
easier to get the images filmed and edited.”
As a professor and administrator, DeNove is enthusiastic about
the possibilities of a minor program. However, some students and
faculty in the school are dead set against the minor.
“I like the idea of accepting non-major students for film
classes ““ it is always good to know that a lot of people have
a vision ““ but I don’t like the idea of a film
minor,” said Mio Hachimori, a fourth-year film student.
“I would then fail to understand why film students write
essays and interview to get into film school.”
Both UCLA’s film and theater programs are highly
competitive. The UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital
Media, for example, accepts exactly 30 new students every year to
enter the program at the junior level ““ 15 from inside and 15
from outside the university.
“If we could take 100 people, we would. But we can’t
because of our resources,” DeNove said.
Though the creation of non-film student courses has opened up a
wider variety of intriguing courses to film students and broadened
the diversity of minds within the department, priority enrollment
is not given to undergraduate film students.
However, many film students believe that the creative effort
resulting in acceptance into the film program should grant them
priority over non-film students in every aspect, Hachimori
said.
“There is a sense of entitlement among TFT students,
because we had to audition, interview, or apply to the program, as
well as the university,” said fourth-year theater student
Emika Abe. “We are reminded year after year that based on the
percentage of students who get into TFT, it is harder to get into
than Harvard.”
Some film and theater students believe the creation of the minor
would sacrifice one-on-one time with professors, and that certain
classes should remain open only to students who were admitted based
on creative merit.
But DeNove, who also graduated from UCLA as an undergraduate
film student, said the creation of the film minor will not
necessarily affect the small class sizes for film students.
“If a minor or any non-major classes would pull away
resources from our film majors, it wouldn’t be done,”
he said. “That’s why it hadn’t been done in the
past. We just couldn’t yet figure out a way of making that
happen.”
A deal with Apple and Panasonic is in the works for equipment,
and there is currently discussion of the possibility of spreading
film courses across campus into other media-ready classrooms.
And while change may be frightening, many current film and
theater students, along with much of the faculty, also recognize
the necessity of fulfilling a more universal need for film and
theater education. Students in other disciplines, whether they plan
to enter the entertainment industry as a career, can benefit from
more intensive programs.
“We are not here to prove that we are better than others;
we are here to learn and to grow as students and as people,”
Abe said. “If more students are able to learn and grow as
much as I have these past four years as a result of a minor
program, then why not condone it?”
Though the logistics of UCLA’s potential theater and film
minors are still in discussion, other universities, such as UC
Riverside and UC Berkeley, have successfully instituted minor
programs in theater and film, respectively.
The USC School of Cinema-Television, for example, offers three
different undergraduate minors. UCLA is similarly entertaining
possibilities of multiple emphases within the minors.
Though the School of Theater, Film and Television has
traditionally been seen as separate from the university at large,
DeNove hopes that the new programs will not only attract students
to the school, but break down the perception that the school is
“off-limits.”
“What it takes to actually create a minor and makes it
completely official, we entirely don’t yet know,”
DeNove said. “I don’t know what type of hoops there
will be out there to jump through. But the great thing is that we
want to do the jumping.”