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He studied at Ohio's famously liberal Antioch College, majoring in film and getting some experience working for free on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's "Jack." After graduating in 1998, Santiago went to San Francisco for a job on an animation project. It fell through. For the next few months, he scrambled to find movie work. Finally he heard about an entry-level position as a database builder of sound and images for "The Phantom Menace" at Lucasfilm.

With his similar experience for "Jack," Santiago figured he was a shoo-in for the $6-per-hour job. Lucasfilm figured differently.

By mid-winter, Santiago was hanging drapes for a living. Finally, the 24-year-old returned to Antioch to work in his alma mater's admissions office. As for films, he made a habit of steering clear of them: "I couldn't watch movies because it reminded me of the creative side that I still feel I've rejected as a matter of survival," Santiago said.

According to film professors at Ithaca College in New York, Santiago's experience in -- or rather, outside of -- the film industry is the consummation of an all-too-common film student ignorance. Undergrads, they say, think a film major automatically translates into a glamorous Hollywood job. When students graduate and find they aren't making the next "Pulp Fiction," they're shocked.

Disillusionment, unemployment, a degree collecting dust -- these things hardly constitute news for the recent college graduate. Nevertheless, these Ithaca professors have taken it upon themselves to offset what little hopelessness they can. Every fall, the film department has its new film majors take "Film Aesthetics and World Cinema." Emphasizing the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buņuel and Alfred Hitchcock, the course sets to unsettle students' notion of film, a notion largely derived from mass-market movies.

"The Hollywood style is just one of many," says Patricia Zimmermann, who's been an Ithaca film professor for 20 years. "To understand and to make good film, you need to know history, aesthetics and theory. Students come to school saying, 'Why did I come here? No one is teaching me to be Steven Spielberg.' It's naive of them and irresponsible for us to give them illusions that they'll be the next big things. There's more to movies than becoming millionaires."

Ithaca professors call the program's anti-Hollywood offensive "napalming their brains," and the assault has proven popular.

At first, the students "get really disturbed, but in the end they can really see film in a more complex way," says Zimmermann. "Our teaching is not indoctrination, but an introduction to how their analytical minds can work."

Tamika Means, an Ithaca film freshman and budding casting director, speaks fondly of her "napalming." "Ithaca has helped me deglamorize the industry a lot and that's important," she says. "I can't look at movies the same way again."

"The films we watch are socially and politically charged so you end up learning about the world," said Jonathan Evans, an Ithaca student who has gone through the Blockbuster detoxing. "You ask: What is the significance of the story I am being told? It's not just about being entertained."

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