Don't Go To Film School

Seriously. Don't bother. I'm so far in debt from student loans that it's ridiculous to even think about. I was 27, and literally doing nothing with my life. I'd spent my 20's in a drug-fueled personal odyssey of utter bullshit, thinking that by emulating my literary heroes (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Kesey, etc.), I'd have something to write about.

What I didn't understand is this: you cannot and should not try to live someone else's life. I tried that for too long and woke up one morning stinking of gasoline with the cops at my door. I was living in my grandmother's house, wasting my time with losers who I thought were my friends, got stinking drunk on Wild Turkey and set someone's car on fire. After two months in jail and then a year of doing odd jobs without any notion of what to do with myself, I signed a student loan deal and moved to LA.

I was from a small town and Los Angeles overwhelmed me. The school I chose was not UCLA or USC or even Loyola Marymount - it was a jack-of-all-trades school which offered no Master's degrees and has probably lost its accreditation.

I was desperate to get the fuck out of my town and I wanted to make movies somehow, so I jumped on the first wagon I could find. That was a mistake, and even if James Joyce did say "A man of genius makes no mistakes," it was still a fucking mistake because I'm no genius. If I was, I'd probably have stayed in my hometown and learned to make movies on my own and then moved to LA on my own terms.

I learned a lot in film school - the nuts and bolts of filmmaking, the basics on navigating the oceanic mass of Los Angeles - but my advice for anyone planning on taking out a massive debt for the rest of your lives based on a hope and dream: stop and think it through. Like I didn't.

There are a whole mess of books about filmmaking I wish I'd read before taking that leap. The best are IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE by Walter Murch, REBEL WITHOUT A CREW by Robert Rodriguez, and SHOT BY SHOT, by Steven D. Katz. Read these, my hypothetical neophyte filmmaker. Get your hands on any kind of camera and shoot something. Anything. Find something to edit on - most Macs come with iMovie and there are ways to get Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere that aren't strictly legal, but they work. Work on scoring your little film. Screen it somewhere, even if it's just your parents' living room. Get it seen. Get some feedback. Then do it again... and again and again... when you're ready, find some kind of on-set or in-office film job, learn the hands on mechanics of how it works. Keep making movies. Write a few scripts. THEN go to Los Angeles.

Learn from my bonehead mistakes. I moved back to Northern California with my tail between my legs, and now I regret it. I should've stayed. I'm going back, though. I'm 32 now and I'll have to start from scratch, but I've learned that wasting away in a cubicle is no way to live, not when what you really want to do is make movies.