Film School (11 page)

As we roll into the second month of school, I'm getting to know my 507 classmates a little better. I'm at a real disadvantage going home on weekends to Camarillo. Most of the shooting, and almost all socializing, takes place on weekends. I hear my classmates talk about events on Monday that happened over the previous weekend and I know they are getting closer. I don't share in those events, which makes me feel even more like the odd man out.

Even though I'm missing out on class-bonding time, I am getting to know my two camera partners better.

I'm fascinated at the differences among the three of us. Fee Fee is pretty, but she tends to disappear in our class. She slumps into her chair, seemingly hiding, and often wears baggy, oversized clothes that drag on the ground. Fee Fee doesn't talk much in class, and she sits in the corner, like a shy spider.

My other camera partner is Shorav, the Indian exchange student. He's a PhD student with a thin wisp of a moustache. When he holds court in class, which he does often, he moves his arms and hands as if he's trying to shape his words out of the air. His voice is very high and lilting. I nickname him Showbiz, a name that quickly catches on with the whole class. Showbiz likes his nickname and embraces it. The name is intentionally ironic because he's the furthest thing from a Hollywood player. Showbiz is an academic and he's a free-spirited freethinker. He's so free-thinking none of us knows what he's thinking, and it's compounded by the fact he seems stoned much of the time. Showbiz is always late for class, and he always arrives wearing a satisfied grin. His films—collages of often badly exposed, out-of-focus, seemingly random images—are as far from the mainstream as one can imagine. In class, he gives oddly looping monologues in heavily accented English.

Showbiz admits to me when we exchange the camera one afternoon that he's taking the production class because he's on a scholarship from the Indian government, and if he stretches out his schooling by taking some production classes, he can delay his graduation. He really likes a chance to make experimental film, he says, and he doesn't need to prove himself. For him, it's an adventure, and a free one, thanks to taxpayers in India. He's going to get his PhD eventually in critical studies and, I suppose, teach in India, where he'll confuse and mystify his students just as he confuses and mystifies us.

Showbiz's second film is called L.A. It's a film about people getting on and off a bus, set to music. Some of the shots are out of focus. The scenes are shot on a real Los Angeles city bus, and the characters are just regular riders. It's interesting though, in the same way that sitting on a bench on a busy street and watching people is interesting. There is no story, however, no plot and no actors. Is it a documentary? An art film? A collection of images taken on a bus ride? Yes to all of them, apparently.

In contrast, Fee Fee spent her undergraduate years making films. She has a very good sense of how to use a camera, how to edit. The physical parts of filmmaking don't intimidate her, and her work is glossy and focused.

But her second film is pretty dull. A woman gets a call from her boyfriend and it's apparently a breakup call because she cries a lot and we see flashbacks of the couple. It looks like a music video. It's a standard Film School Drama.

Fee Fee looks out at the world with large eyes that remind me of the oversized eyes on animated Disney characters. She sometimes wears a My Little Pony T-shirt. Her first film was about a cute little stuffed animal that chased people. Her second was the crying woman dumped by the boyfriend.

Then she shows her third film. It hits us like a cast-iron skillet to the skull.

In Fee Fee's third creation, a gorgeous young woman masturbates in bed. The camera puts us viewers
right there
into the action. The woman wakes her hunky young boyfriend. He looks like Adonis, and he is inexplicably uninterested in having sex with her, despite her intense efforts to arouse him. The scene causes several of us males in the class to elbow each other during the screening and whisper how that sure wouldn't happen to us, no-way, no-how.

Then Fee Fee's lead character leaves her hunky boyfriend and goes to a sex-toy shop, where she peruses various latex wear and adult toys. Then she has sex with another hot young woman.

The film is graphic, and looks like arty soft porn. Her film leaves the class as speechless as Showbiz's but for entirely different reasons. We're not prudes, but we're just stunned at the film because it comes from quiet Fee Fee.

And the credits and titles in the film are super-dazzle spectacular. The credits cite Fee Fee's company (there is no company, all of our films are owned by USC) as Rock Star Productions!

All of us look at Fee Fee in wonderment. I thought she was a quiet kid who went home to do needlepoint.

It was December 2000. Julie
and I walked along the beach in Ventura County, California. The Pacific
was
pacific and the air was warm, amazingly warm to us, coming from the freezing Midwest. Families strolled on the picturesque Ventura Pier. The sun was going down. It was a gorgeous evening. All was mellow.

Julie and I were about to move to California. We had left our two daughters in snowy Minnesota and had flown out to look at real estate. We were elated. Life looked so good. For years we had scrimped and saved and both worked around the clock. She had done her medical residency, and I had freelanced all sorts of crud—technical writing, business writing, speech writing. I ghostwrote a book about home repair for
Popular Mechanics
. And even though I had no idea what I was doing, I had produced a few safety videos for Cargill, the same agribusiness I wrote speeches for. All of it was to earn enough money to pay a mortgage, raise two kids, and support her dream of being a doctor.

Now Julie was going to be working her first real job. It was at a clinic for migrant workers in Oxnard, about fifty miles northwest of Los Angeles. Julie spoke Spanish and loved the location.

And me? I would be launching a magazine that my
Daily
Southtown
pal Sean Callahan and I had dreamed up. It was called
GeezerJock
. It would be a snappy, beautifully illustrated monthly magazine dedicated to master athletes—those forty and older.
GeezerJock
had attracted the attention of a deep-pocketed New York publishing investor. He was going to pay us to develop the magazine in exchange for a minority share of the company.

Julie's nickname, given by one of my favorite
Southtown
reporters, was Superbabe. In the fading sunlight on the California coast, Superbabe looked especially superbabealicious. Her long brown hair caught the sun. Her big brown eyes were liquid.

One year later, I sat and watched the ocean from the same place. Huge waves smashed into the Ventura Pier, spraying water high into the air. A storm in the Pacific was calving these monsters, the biggest to hit the coast in years. How different the scene was from a year earlier, when the ocean was so tranquil. How different our lives were.

GeezerJock
was dead—the deep-pocketed New York investor had bailed out. The World Trade Center towers were piles of rubble. We had sold our house at a loss when our money ran low. We moved into a rental house. I was making zilch. And Superbabe was now recovering from cancer surgeries. What a year it had been.

Our first clue was the nausea. Julie had gotten pregnant when we arrived in California. She never had much morning sickness during her other pregnancies, but this time she had a
lot
of morning sickness. And most of it came in the evening. Every single night, as predictable as the tide, she'd head for the bathroom and kneel by the toilet and barf. And barf and barf and barf. The pregnancy was very hard. She wondered if it was because it was child number three or because she was now past thirty-five or because she was exhausted from her long residency.

But it was from something different. Late in her pregnancy, Julie felt a lump in her neck. Doctors had to wait until she delivered to operate; it was too risky to do so while she was pregnant. On a sunny warm January day, beautiful little Sophia Rae Boman entered the world. Four days later, Julie went under the knife and surgeons removed half her thyroid.

The lump on her thyroid was cancerous so, less than a week later, Julie had the rest of her thyroid removed. During her second thyroid surgery, an inexperienced surgeon at the Ventura County Medical Center damaged the main nerve to Julie's left vocal cord, leaving her rasping and choking on her own spit. She couldn't talk. She couldn't swallow. She had big bandages around her neck. She no longer had a thyroid gland, and one of her vocal cords was paralyzed. Sophia was two weeks old, Maria was twenty-six months old, and Lara was five years old. I wasn't making any money. Julie was at home, recovering. She received no pay from the clinic while she was home. Within two months, she returned to work. She had to wear a portable loudspeaker on her hip and a microphone around her neck so her patients could hear her thin and damaged voice. She gasped for breath while walking up stairs. I stayed home, taking care of the kids, meeting Julie at doctors' appointments, changing diapers, doing laundry. We'd been in California for less than a year. We had no family within two thousand miles. Few close friends lived nearby. It was a lonely, frightening time.

We watched our money drain from our savings. An earlier last-ditch effort to rescue
GeezerJock
fell short when a story Callahan and I had been asked to write by
The New York Times Sunday Magazine
was killed in the post-9/11 chaos, ending our hopes that the
Times
publicity would be enough to bring
GeezerJock
back to life. Our story was about a fifty-six-year-old grandmother who was banned from international sporting competitions for doping. It was a good story, and we were reduced to dumping it on Salon.com for a few hundred bucks. Google it if you like.

Julie still had to go through radiation treatment. She kept losing weight.

These were supposed to be the good years.

C
asper's film history class continues where it left off. I had hoped that Casper would have forgotten my name after the first week, but such was not the case. At the beginning of each class, he calls me out for special attention and often calls on me during lectures.

And then I decide to wear glasses to class, a first for me in grad school. Normally I wear contacts—but the lenses irritate my eyes when I'm spending long hours in front of a computer, which I'm doing every day. My glasses are horn-rimmed jobs, very studious looking. When I enter the auditorium and take a seat, Casper spots me in the crowd. He puts his hands to his mouth in mock shock. Students are still filing into the large hall, and it's several minutes before class begins.

Casper loves being the center of attention. He approaches me. “Look at this. Look at
this
!” he says. “Steve, you look
lovely
.” He's playing to the crowd, of course, and nearby students are laughing. I'm his straight man, and he's the comic. He's wearing a wireless microphone, so his voice is projected through the auditorium's loudspeakers.

He takes my glasses off my face and puts them on his. He strikes a pose like a Milan runway model. I don't think he can see a thing—my eyes are really terrible and the glasses have lenses powerful enough for the Hubble telescope—but he doesn't seem to care.

“What do you think? I think they're lovely. Wonderful. You should wear them more,” he says.

He takes them off and hands them back to me. Then he turns to the one hundred-plus other students in the class. “Did you know Steve wore glasses?”

It's a rhetorical question, of course. Most of the students in the class have no idea who I am, other than I'm that older guy Casper likes to pick on. Casper turns to me. He appraises me with mock seriousness. “No, I take it back. You have blue eyes. You definitely should
not
wear glasses.”

I notice that in this whole exchange I've never had a chance to say a single word. It's all Casper, and it's extremely entertaining. I've never experienced anything like this in an academic setting or in
any
setting. Casper is the most interesting lecturer I've ever heard. He is intense, for sure, but he puts himself into his lectures in a way that is fascinating, and it's often more one-man performance art than academic lecture. If ever there is a Church of the Blessed Angel Doris Day, Casper will be the lead acolyte. It doesn't take much of a spark for him to praise her honors and all-around wonderfulness. And if there is a figure that represents for him the inner circle of hell, it's Barbra Streisand. If Doris Day is heaven-sent, Barbra Streisand shares a smoke with Lucifer. Casper will stand onstage and belt out a few bars of Streisand's signature tunes, singing loud and woefully off-key and waving his arms like a drowning swimmer. Then he'll spend a few moments discussing her awfulness before returning to the lecture at hand. He's funny, opinionated, and erudite—so erudite that many of his comments go flying over the heads of his younger students.

His comic interludes are little breaks to cleanse one's palate before he launches again into his lectures. His talks are so intense that if anyone tries to slip out to go to the bathroom, he'll demand to know why they're leaving. During one lecture, Casper called out a student who tried to sneak up the aisle and chided him for not being able to “hold his water.” Some lectures go on for two hours, without a break. I quickly learn not to drink too much water or coffee before a Casper lecture. I later discover a website called Rate My Professors that has more than one hundred comments about Casper. One student posted: “If you like eccentric entertainment while learning at the same time, Casper is for you! But
don't
raise your hand unless you're ready to be
grilled
.”