Film fest shows practice does make perfect

Film fest shows practice does make perfect

By Mike Horowitz

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

On Tuesday night, the future of Hollywood got a glance at the
pasts of the masters of the present.

If this sounds reminiscent of Dickens, or just chronologically
absurd, it’s because the film fest, for all of its good intentions
of funding a scholarship fund, was mired in a confusing sense of
purpose. The organizers, The Future of Hollywood and Back to Film
School, could have just come out and stated their compulsion to
screen student films of modern day filmmakers. But when they tied
in an inspirational award, given to schlock movie producer Roger
Corman, and spoke of the industry’s future, themes were mingled and
metaphors mangled. In any case, it was a chance to view some very
hard-to-find debuts.

The short films on the program that were screened were highly
impressive. When Oliver Stone’s short "Last Year in Viet Nam" was
added minutes before the curtain, expectations were raised even
higher.

Unfortunately, these were far from the pinnacles of cinema these
men have since produced. Gale Ann Hurd, the evening’s emcee,
praised the shorts for possessing the mastery and the raw talent
these filmmakers would later employ in features. She was stretching
it.

They were, for better and for worse (mainly worse), student
films. Sometimes difficult to grasp, mostly difficult to hear and
barely worth the viewing time. They revealed surprisingly little of
the genius they were supposed to. While the shorts shouldn’t be
criticized as if they were theatrical releases, or even arthouse
independants, they are hard to hail as brilliant.

Robert Zemeckis’ "The Lift" was one of the more intriguing of
the bunch. A seven minute short done while he was at USC in 1971,
the film is the tale of a stock market executive who battles an
elevator to and from work. When he tries one day to outpace it by
running up the stairs he succumbs to a heart attack and the
ambulance crew sends him down to ground level on the lift.

The funniest and most structurally sound short was Martin
Scorcese’s "What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like
This?" In this short, a writer becomes so obsessed with a mediocre
painting that he discontinues his normal life. As the fixation
takes hold he stops eating, writing and sleeping.

The latter is what all but the most caffienated audience members
felt like doing during Polanski’s 21-minute "When Angels Fall,"
Truffaut’s "Les Mistons," Milius and Lucas’ animated "Marcello, I’m
So Bored" and especially the aforementioned Oliver Stone film "Last
Year in Viet Nam." While it foreshadowed Stone’s penchant for
massive editing, his heavy-handed symbolism and his snake fetish,
it should be left out of his Vietnam trilogy for its relentless
boredom factor.

The films showed those in the audience that there’s no way in
hell any studio head could have selected these filmmakers for
excellence based sheerly on their student shorts. Perhaps that’s
the encouragement the films gave to the future of Hollywood. They
all were bad enough to be productions of … well, Roger
Corman.

Corman, producer of 250 films, director of over 50 and pioneer
in video and cinema distribution is one of the few filmmakers in
town who hires crews outside of unions. He pays little and cuts
corners with reckless abandon. Fortunately for his reputation, this
approach has allowed him to "discover" many of today’s top stars,
from Ron Howard and James Cameron to Jack Nicholson and Robert De
Niro. While some say he merely exploited them first, it was the
discovery angle for which he was honored on Tuesday.

It was a fitting award for a night of big names and scarce
quality.