What award doesn’t Clint Eastwood deserve? He’s been
an Oscar-winning director, one of the most recognizable actors in
films, a producer, a military man, a lumberjack and the mayor of
Carmel, a small California town.

Mike Figgis sits in a canopied square in the Farmers’
Market on 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue wearing sunglasses,
suggesting that perhaps he prefers watching people without them
knowing it.

When Elizabeth Upton started her job as musicology professor at
UCLA, she was not prepared for the initiation process: creating a
new general enrollment course. A medievalist, Upton created
“Getting Medieval,” a course about modern incarnations
of medieval things from Wagner’s operas to Disneyland castles
and “The Lord of the Rings.”
“I didn’t know anything about getting a new course
approved.

UCLA may be a new producer of foreign language filmmakers. Of
the seven films honored in this year’s Spotlight Awards for
directing, two are in foreign languages and were shot in foreign
countries.

UCLA may be a new producer of foreign language filmmakers. Of
the seven films honored in this year’s Spotlight Awards for
directing, two are in foreign languages and were shot in foreign
countries.

Director Chen Kaige is known for making films from the safe
vantage point of history, but he’s ready for a change.
“I used to believe there was no culture in China because
the old traditional cultural values were being destroyed by the
last 15 years under communism,” Chen said.

The newest crop of student filmmakers are not necessarily
students of film. As the tools of movie making are becoming more
available, film is increasingly just another thing to do to express
yourself.

Before directing “Wonder Boys” and “8
Mile,” Curtis Hanson won an Oscar for his screenplay
“L.A. Confidential,” a film he also directed. In 1999,
he became the chairman of the UCLA Film and Television Archive,
where he created the “Movie That Inspired Me” series in
which celebrities present and talk about movies special to
them.

UCLA’s film school allows its filmmakers to tell whatever
stories they like, and more often than not, this leads to personal
filmmaking.
In the case of UCLA alumna Vivian Umino, her short film
“Ill Repair” is actually about two older men, but
maintains that it’s still about her.

Classic films often get dated from their conservative
definitions of morality and prejudices. But this doesn’t
necessarily apply to all things old.
“We’re talking about 1933, and there’s a
nymphomaniac from Brentwood who’s also a kleptomaniac and a
sexual deviant,” said UCLA Film and Television Archive
programmer Mimi Brody regarding the film “Bloody
Money.”
That film will screen as part of the UCLA Archive’s
retrospective of early 1930s films that contrast the conservatism
that came later.