A little less than a year ago, seven UCLA graduate film students were given the opportunity of a lifetime. Showtime Network, which has 35.9 million subscribers, offered to air and partially fund a film from each student in a joint project with UCLA titled “Images of War in the 21st Century,” which will air in prime time the night before the presidential election, on Nov. 1.
“I just couldn’t believe it,” graduate film student Jenn Kao said. “It wasn’t really something I ever thought would happen while I was in school.”
Although the film project on war was originally scheduled to air on Veteran’s Day, film school faculty pushed for an earlier airing date, one before the election. They felt this would add to the relevance of the film project’s theme of war, a huge issue of debate in the upcoming election. Showtime eventually agreed to air the film shorts the night before the election.
Together, the films are unquestionably political and lean toward the left. Conservatives will almost certainly have a field day about the liberal nature of the majority of these films. With shows like “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” and the “Images of War in the 21st Century” project, has Showtime become too liberal with its programming? Many are likely to think so.
But as Kao said, this is nothing new.
“Hollywood, to begin with, is kind of a liberal place,” she said.
And likewise, these student films lean toward the left.
“We’re all young students,” Kao said. “So it’s not surprising to me that we skew that way.”
Showtime was well aware of the politically leftist nature of these films.
“I think that that’s probably true,” said Pancho Mansfield, Showtime Senior Vice President of Original Programming. “But for people usually writing about war, it’s rare that you have things that are pro-war. It’s harder to spin it positively.”
For Barbara Boyle, chair of the UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, whether the program is balanced or not was not a concern.
“I actually don’t understand political balance,” Boyle said. “(The movies) each have their own point of view. And I think one after another is an examination of a question that’s gigantic, probably the largest single question that we ever have to face: Why do we have to go to war to solve our problems?”
Perhaps the most politically explicit film in the project is Roberto S. Oregel’s film “Dominance and Terror: A Discussion with Noam Chomsky,” in which the famous political dissident and MIT educator states his belief that the U.S. war on terror is an act of terrorism in itself. Chomsky also calls the United States the leading terrorist state.
“We had no restraints whatsoever,” Boyle said. “They made the final choices. Nobody said, ‘Oh I wish this were toned down more.’”
Even Kao was pleasantly surprised by the freedom Showtime gave the student filmmakers.
“They really did let us go our own way,” she said.
And although Kristina Malsberger’s film short “Elegy,” in which aliens discover a space capsule with home video of the now extinct human species, is not explicit in the way that the Chomsky piece is, Malsberger is not shy about stating her own political views.
“I think (‘Elegy’ is) an anti-war film,” Malsberger said. “And I hope that people watch it and think more deeply about what it means to choose war and the repercussions of that. Maybe we should send it to the White House.”
The most politically balanced film in the group is Jennifer Glos’ documentary, “War on their Minds: Voices of American Kids,” made up of interviews about war with children from ages 4-18.
Children both from anti-war families and children who attend military school were interviewed. The responses vary greatly from “sometimes to do the right thing, we have to go to war” to “it’s cowardice, the way we go to war.”
Brad Sample’s “Attention” is more of a push for Americans to simply vote. In the film short, the intensity of two historians speaking simultaneously amongst images of war and the Twin Towers being hit emphasize the immense significance of the upcoming election. In one frame, the film shows the message: “Your vote will determine the future of this country.”
The only question that remains is why Showtime decided on UCLA specifically rather than USC or NYU, the other two top film schools in the nation.
But of course, in Hollywood, connections are everything. Over lunch one day at the Hotel Bel-Air early last year, Boyle first presented the idea of the project to the then current President of Programming for Showtime, Jerry Offsay, a personal friend and close business collaborator of Boyle’s. Boyle wanted a duplicate for UCLA of the NYU film project “Reflections on 9/11.”
Showtime eventually agreed to do the project and in May 2003, faculty members from the UCLA Department of Film, Television and Digital Media formed a committee. Film graduate students were asked to submit one-page treatments, including their film ideas and budgets by September 2003.
Thirty-four applications were narrowed down by UCLA faculty members and those applications were then sent to Showtime in Oct. 2003. UCLA faculty and Showtime chose the final 7 films and announced the results in Nov. 2003. From then on, the filmmakers had until July 2004 to complete their films.
Showtime liked what they saw this past summer.
“Having gone to film school myself,” Mansfield said, “I looked at this and went ‘My god! These are really well done.’”
Students were given two-thirds of their budgets plus an additional $1,000. But as Kao said, Showtime’s support pretty much covered her entire budget by adding to her credibility as a filmmaker in the eyes of others and thus allowing her to receive other funding more easily. A couple of the filmmakers have also already been contacted by agents and managers in the business who are interested in their upcoming work.
Throughout the process, the filmmakers learned a great amount outside of the classroom on topics ranging from TV broadcasting standards, closed captioning and color correction film to the realities of business contracts. But above all, the filmmakers learned how supportive and loving their peers, many of whom helped them create the films, were.
Malsberger’s film relied heavily on real home videos of other students in the school.
“I had people entrusting me with their family footage and also their family memories,” Malsberger said. “So I felt like it was something precious and was very touched by that.”
The seven filmmakers also ended up working on each other’s films.
“That’s how this all gets done,” Kao said. “Our school is not very competitive in the way that other film schools are. There are other film schools where people get kicked out from the program at a certain point, and ours doesn’t do that. In our program, you really have to love your other students, because they’re the ones helping you in deep ways. We wanted to help each other, because all our films were going to stand next to each other by the end, and you wanted the whole program to be good.”
Kao helped in the post-production stage of Eli Kaufman’s film “Winning the Peace,” while Kaufman acted as Kao’s first artistic director on her film “Outside.” And Malsberger was a director of photography for Glos’ documentary.
In the end, the project brought the schoolmates closer together.
“It generated a lot of pride in the school,” Malsberger said. “And I know Showtime has done this before with other schools, like NYU, and I felt like there was an underlying sense that we wanted our films to be better than the NYU films, and that UCLA could do better.”
Although the films will air on Nov. 1, it won’t be the highlight for the filmmakers. Simply accomplishing what they set out to do was worth the journey.
“The day we saw all the other films, for me, was this incredibly happy day,” Kao said. “We had all been so exhausted together, trying to get this done. So it felt like a huge victory.”