A little less than a year ago, seven UCLA graduate film students
were given the opportunity of a lifetime. Showtime Network, which
has 35.9 million subscribers, offered to air and partially fund a
film from each student in a joint project with UCLA titled
“Images of War in the 21st Century,” which will air in
prime time the night before the presidential election, on Nov.
1.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” graduate film
student Jenn Kao said. “It wasn’t really something I
ever thought would happen while I was in school.”
Although the film project on war was originally scheduled to air
on Veteran’s Day, film school faculty pushed for an earlier
airing date, one before the election. They felt this would add to
the relevance of the film project’s theme of war, a huge
issue of debate in the upcoming election. Showtime eventually
agreed to air the film shorts the night before the election.
Together, the films are unquestionably political and lean toward
the left. Conservatives will almost certainly have a field day
about the liberal nature of the majority of these films. With shows
like “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” and
the “Images of War in the 21st Century” project, has
Showtime become too liberal with its programming? Many are likely
to think so.
But as Kao said, this is nothing new.
“Hollywood, to begin with, is kind of a liberal
place,” she said.
And likewise, these student films lean toward the left.
“We’re all young students,” Kao said.
“So it’s not surprising to me that we skew that
way.”
Showtime was well aware of the politically leftist nature of
these films.
“I think that that’s probably true,” said
Pancho Mansfield, Showtime Senior Vice President of Original
Programming. “But for people usually writing about war,
it’s rare that you have things that are pro-war. It’s
harder to spin it positively.”
For Barbara Boyle, chair of the UCLA Department of Film,
Television and Digital Media, whether the program is balanced or
not was not a concern.
“I actually don’t understand political
balance,” Boyle said. “(The movies) each have their own
point of view. And I think one after another is an examination of a
question that’s gigantic, probably the largest single
question that we ever have to face: Why do we have to go to war to
solve our problems?”
Perhaps the most politically explicit film in the project is
Roberto S. Oregel’s film “Dominance and Terror: A
Discussion with Noam Chomsky,” in which the famous political
dissident and MIT educator states his belief that the U.S. war on
terror is an act of terrorism in itself. Chomsky also calls the
United States the leading terrorist state.
“We had no restraints whatsoever,” Boyle said.
“They made the final choices. Nobody said, “˜Oh I wish
this were toned down more.'”
Even Kao was pleasantly surprised by the freedom Showtime gave
the student filmmakers.
“They really did let us go our own way,” she
said.
And although Kristina Malsberger’s film short
“Elegy,” in which aliens discover a space capsule with
home video of the now extinct human species, is not explicit in the
way that the Chomsky piece is, Malsberger is not shy about stating
her own political views.
“I think (“˜Elegy’ is) an anti-war film,”
Malsberger said. “And I hope that people watch it and think
more deeply about what it means to choose war and the repercussions
of that. Maybe we should send it to the White House.”
The most politically balanced film in the group is Jennifer
Glos’ documentary, “War on their Minds: Voices of
American Kids,” made up of interviews about war with children
from ages 4-18.
Children both from anti-war families and children who attend
military school were interviewed. The responses vary greatly from
“sometimes to do the right thing, we have to go to war”
to “it’s cowardice, the way we go to war.”
Brad Sample’s “Attention” is more of a push
for Americans to simply vote. In the film short, the intensity of
two historians speaking simultaneously amongst images of war and
the Twin Towers being hit emphasize the immense significance of the
upcoming election. In one frame, the film shows the message:
“Your vote will determine the future of this
country.”
The only question that remains is why Showtime decided on UCLA
specifically rather than USC or NYU, the other two top film schools
in the nation.
But of course, in Hollywood, connections are everything. Over
lunch one day at the Hotel Bel-Air early last year, Boyle first
presented the idea of the project to the then current President of
Programming for Showtime, Jerry Offsay, a personal friend and close
business collaborator of Boyle’s. Boyle wanted a duplicate
for UCLA of the NYU film project “Reflections on
9/11.”
Showtime eventually agreed to do the project and in May 2003,
faculty members from the UCLA Department of Film, Television and
Digital Media formed a committee. Film graduate students were asked
to submit one-page treatments, including their film ideas and
budgets by September 2003.
Thirty-four applications were narrowed down by UCLA faculty
members and those applications were then sent to Showtime in Oct.
2003. UCLA faculty and Showtime chose the final 7 films and
announced the results in Nov. 2003. From then on, the filmmakers
had until July 2004 to complete their films.
Showtime liked what they saw this past summer.
“Having gone to film school myself,” Mansfield said,
“I looked at this and went “˜My god! These are really
well done.'”
Students were given two-thirds of their budgets plus an
additional $1,000. But as Kao said, Showtime’s support pretty
much covered her entire budget by adding to her credibility as a
filmmaker in the eyes of others and thus allowing her to receive
other funding more easily. A couple of the filmmakers have also
already been contacted by agents and managers in the business who
are interested in their upcoming work.
Throughout the process, the filmmakers learned a great amount
outside of the classroom on topics ranging from TV broadcasting
standards, closed captioning and color correction film to the
realities of business contracts. But above all, the filmmakers
learned how supportive and loving their peers, many of whom helped
them create the films, were.
Malsberger’s film relied heavily on real home videos of
other students in the school.
“I had people entrusting me with their family footage and
also their family memories,” Malsberger said. “So I
felt like it was something precious and was very touched by
that.”
The seven filmmakers also ended up working on each other’s
films.
“That’s how this all gets done,” Kao said.
“Our school is not very competitive in the way that other
film schools are. There are other film schools where people get
kicked out from the program at a certain point, and ours
doesn’t do that. In our program, you really have to love your
other students, because they’re the ones helping you in deep
ways. We wanted to help each other, because all our films were
going to stand next to each other by the end, and you wanted the
whole program to be good.”
Kao helped in the post-production stage of Eli Kaufman’s
film “Winning the Peace,” while Kaufman acted as
Kao’s first artistic director on her film
“Outside.” And Malsberger was a director of photography
for Glos’ documentary.
In the end, the project brought the schoolmates closer
together.
“It generated a lot of pride in the school,”
Malsberger said. “And I know Showtime has done this before
with other schools, like NYU, and I felt like there was an
underlying sense that we wanted our films to be better than the NYU
films, and that UCLA could do better.”
Although the films will air on Nov. 1, it won’t be the
highlight for the filmmakers. Simply accomplishing what they set
out to do was worth the journey.
“The day we saw all the other films, for me, was this
incredibly happy day,” Kao said. “We had all been so
exhausted together, trying to get this done. So it felt like a huge
victory.”