Memorial to honor student-friendly film professor

Film professor emeritus Edgar Brokaw Jr. may have retired in
1988, but he could never truly separate himself from the
campus.

The famed professor who taught Alexander Payne, Francis Ford
Coppola and Jim Morrison passed away at age 85 on December 9, 2002.
A memorial service will be held in Melnitz Sound Stage 2 on Sunday
at 4 p.m.

Brokaw was a famous fixture at the film school for years.

“Ed was so devoted to the department that he kind of lived
here in his office,” said screenwriting professor Richard
Walter, who was a colleague of Brokaw’s for a decade.
“He had a residence off campus, but he used to spend nights
in the office and washed up in the public restroom. Film students
work around the clock, and he was always available to
them.”

A tall man with a big smile and animated personality, Brokaw had
an enthusiasm which rubbed off on those he knew. Brokaw believed in
student projects, even when the students didn’t.

“I think he lived his own career vicariously through other
people’s work, because he was able to encourage people to do
things that they didn’t think they could do,” said Bob
Dickson, a documentary filmmaker who studied with Brokaw starting
in 1961.

Before 1961, Brokaw spent the preceding five years running his
own production company, New York Studios, Inc., where he produced
commercials, short musical films and shot cinematography for films.
He returned to UCLA in 1961, bringing his independent sense of
loving filmmaking grunt work. He advocated and enforced the current
mode of UCLA’s “project system” film school
curriculum, where students learn by doing.

“Brokaw just wanted to see us making films and he
didn’t want to hear any excuses,” said Maria Elena
Rodriguez, a former student and currently a writer on the NBC show
“Kingpin.”

Rodriguez remembers Brokaw’s editing classes, where
students pieced together their own versions of
“Gunsmoke” and “Hawaii Five-O” episodes
from the raw dailies. Yet this was Brokaw’s station closer to
the end of his UCLA career, as the department became more and more
specialized.

When Brokaw was a student here in 1947 and immediately became a
teacher after graduation in 1952, the theater arts department had
just started and Brokaw was a member of its first class. Then, the
film school was not yet in fashion, and it took until the 1960s for
UCLA’s film school to develop its identity as an experimental
school for auteur filmmakers. Throughout all of this, he continued
to advocate for the students, often against what he perceived as
ineffective bureaucracy.

“For a while, Ed was so suspicious of all the red tape
that he kept a check-out room for equipment, which students he
approved of would be able to use,” said Colin Young, a former
Brokaw student who also asked Brokaw to head the film school when
Young was chairman of the theater arts department. “He was
completely out of line and out of order, but I didn’t mind,
because some good things were coming out of it.”

The selfless professor walked from campus to his favorite
hangout spots. In his later years, he didn’t use a car
““ a choice made for his students’ benefit.

“If you’re in a car or stuck at home, then you
won’t see people,” said Prudence Macgowan Faxon, former
Brokaw student and granddaughter of former UCLA dean Kenneth
Macgowan, a friend of Brokaw. “If you’re on campus, you
bump into people and you sit down and talk. That’s what the
whole academic environment is meant for, an exchange of ideas where
people take time to sit down and talk and learn new things. He
personified that and you don’t find that much
anymore.”

By Brokaw’s retirement in 1988, digital editing was
replacing Brokaw’s manual flatbeds and moviolas ““ old
equipment according to today’s standards. In addition, the
theater arts department had transformed into the current
specialized School of Theater, Film, and Television. Yet even after
retirement, Brokaw could never completely leave the school where he
saw his students mature.

“It was more that people saw Ed in the later years as he
was working in the library or eating something at North
Campus,” said Faxon, who is organizing a film production
scholarship in Brokaw’s name.

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