When senior lecturer Hal Ackerman was first asked to teach at UCLA, he was terrified. He said he had no confidence that he could offer students any advice that merited real value.
Now, 30 years later, Ackerman sits in his office where movie posters cover the walls. On these posters are personal insignias from the screenwriters, all of whom are Ackerman’s former students.
Ackerman started teaching at UCLA in 1985 and is currently the co-chair of the screenwriting program. After 30 years of teaching at UCLA, Ackerman is retiring at the end of the spring quarter of 2015 and moving back to his original home, New York, where he will focus on writing novels and plays.
Ackerman writes movie scripts, plays and novels. He has been awarded numerous accolades over the years, including the 2011 United Solo Award for best script for his play “Prick,” the 2011 Lovey Award for best first novel for “Stein, Stoned.”
He initially began to write because he had a desire to make people laugh, Ackerman said. The first full-length play he wrote in college was a musical version of a book based on Robin Hood. Ackerman said he was stunned when he heard an entire theater erupt into laughter at something he created.
“The thought that went through my mind was ‘All right, I’ll probably never have any real love in my life, but this will be a great substitute,'” Ackerman said.
Before he became a screenwriter, Ackerman was an off-off-Broadway playwright in New York. However, as movie scripts offered a bigger paycheck, Ackerman said he created a plan to move to Los Angeles.
“I would come (to Los Angeles), I’d write (a movie) just as bad as anyone else could do, I’d be paid an obscene amount of money for it and return to New York and write plays,” Ackerman said.
Once in Los Angeles, however, Ackerman said he quickly learned that there was more to movie scripts than he had realized.
Ackerman began to go to the movies every day with a flashlight, notepad and stopwatch, taking notes and studying the structure, he said.
Ackerman’s scripts were soon optioned, and in 1985, his friend, Richard Walter, who is the associate dean of student affairs and co-chair of the screenwriting program, offered him a teaching post at UCLA.
Walter said he believed that the combination of Ackerman’s nurturing, engaging personality and his success in the writing industry made him the perfect candidate for the position.
Although initially terrified at the prospect of teaching, Ackerman said he accepted the offer, and once he began teaching, he was hooked.
“I saw the progress the students made and saw that I did actually have the ability to be able to see what it was a student was trying to do and how I could guide (their work),” Ackerman said. “That’s a very exciting type of communication.”
In his class C430: “Screenwriting Fundamentals”, Ackerman said a dozen of the scripts written have become movies.
One of these successful scripts is displayed twice on his wall of posters. Produced under the name “A Walk on the Moon,” alumna Pamela Gray said she wrote the first draft of the screenplay in Ackerman’s C430 class in fall of 1991 and titled it “The Blouse Man.”
“When Hal saw the beginning of my work on the screenplay ‘The Blouse Man,’ he said to me, ‘You can go all the way with this one,'” Gray said. “For someone that I respected and was the teacher, to have so much confidence in me and to say it, not every teacher would do that.”
Alumnus Barak Goldman, a former student of Ackerman’s, was a paid TV comedy writer before attending UCLA for graduate school in 2003.
He said Ackerman taught him more about humor in five minutes than he had ever learned before.
“He taught me about comedy in screenwriting, that you don’t write a joke for a joke’s sake, that a joke has to come out of character and situation organically,” Goldman said.
Ackerman said his students and their stories are a source of inspiration to him. He said the interactions and close relationships with his students at UCLA have impacted positively on his life and writing career.
“I believe that our life is made up of all the little interactions we ever have,” Ackerman said. “There has been a lot of those (at UCLA), just those connections, those moments together. They all add up.”