Tales of a Failed Filmmaker – Beginning Film School at NYU

Having grown up in Nebraska, switching to New York City for college was an obvious culture shock.  However, it never felt as strange as many people thought it would be for me.  I was ready for a change, and I was ready to learn a bit about filmmaking.  The most education I had had was a class run by someone who believed nothing good had been made since Casablanca.

Ironically, a film had come out the summer before I went off to NYU called The Freshman.  This was not only a wild coincidence because it was about a young man starting college, but also because he was beginning school at NYU studying film.  I wondered how true it was going to be for me, especially in regard to the teacher who was so obsessed with The Godfather that he couldn’t talk about anything else.

I had some teachers like that, but more on that later.

The screening of The Freshman I went to was empty, as though it was a private screening for me; a warning.  I didn’t know how to take that, and I still don’t, but it was something that stood out.

The other movie that ultimately had a lot of meaning for me about that time was Pump up the Volume.  I saw it while on the way to New York.  My dad and I stopped off for the night in Pennsylvania.  He wanted to see something I wasn’t at all interested in, and he wasn’t interested in my Christian Slater movie, so we agreed to meet afterward.

At the time I thought Pump up the Volume was just an okay flick.  But on retrospect, it was very foretelling.  The story is about a young man who runs an underground radio station, broadcasting his views on life that really connect to other teenagers.  The FCC comes down hard on him for illegally broadcasting, and he sends a message to everyone to make their voices heard.

This movie could not be remade now because the concept of getting your voice heard is taken for granted.  With Youtube, podcasting, blogging, and all sorts of other ways to get your voice heard, the idea that you once had to go through a filter is gone.  But that really characterizes the difference between the world I was trying to break into as a storyteller at the time, and the world today.  In the 20^th century you had to ask permission to get your story told; permission from a movie studio or a book publisher or a magazine or a film festival.  That changed throughout the 2000s.  IFilm started to change that on the internet, but failed when they decided to become like the film festivals.  Little did they know that people were tired of that mentality, and they went by the wayside in favor of Youtube and blogs.

Now Pump up the Volume seems almost quaint the way it seems to state the obvious.  But one has to understand that those dark days of entertainment are only a very few years behind us; and the movie should serve as a warning of what it could become again if we ever regulate these free markets again.