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"The old Hollywood moguls of the '40s made film look sexy," said Zimmermann. "But this was never much more than a manufacturing system, and now it has left the hands of those moguls and has become a huge transnational industry."

Still, some students see themselves as auteurs -- they recite Eisenstein, Buņuel and Hitchcock in their sleep and wouldn't dream of landing a Hollywood gig. For this crowd, it seems, the frustration often comes when the major studio job doesn't fall through. Faced with the expensive task of creating an independent film from scratch, anti-Hollywooders sometimes take production assistant work on major projects in order to pay bills and gain experience.

But Zimmerman insists these students represent a minority of the young film majors.

"It is rare to see a beginning film student who is familiar with cinema outside Hollywood," she says. "Obsessive film junkies are a leftover of '70s film subculture, and at best a tiny portion of today's film-going audience."

Of course, location might affect the demographics of a school's film department; at the extremely competitive and well-connected universities, film majors might be of a different breed. David Irving, for instance, chairman of the undergraduate film and TV program at NYU, insists it's not that bad for graduating film students. "Roughly 60 percent find work in their departmental majors," he says.

"We're training creative people for a wide range of artistic fields," says Teri Bond Michael, spokeswoman for UCLA's Graduate School of Theater, Film and TV. "Their success rate is not easily quantifiable."

Success has required a different set of skills and experience over time, most notably a shift in the type of education that was necessary. In the 1920s through the 1940s, it was mainly L.A. screenwriters and their Manhattan financiers who had college degrees. Film schools changed that in the '60s. At the same time, the industry shifted from nationally based studios to international ventures, changing the skills necessary for a film job.

If film degrees don't consistently translate into film careers -- though for the likes of George Lucas, Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Coppola, they proved indispensible -- what do they offer? According to Zimmerman, they offer the same thing as any liberal arts degree: an education.

"I think film programs provide a kind of liberated autonomous zone, a place to think about politics, images, ideas and works of art," concludes Zimmermann. "Those zones of exploration are dwindling each day, so I feel the pressure to create a classroom where debates on contemporary culture can flourish."

Perhaps the real question addressed by Ithaca is how one prepares for a liberal arts degree that doesn't prepare one for anything. Actors, writers and artists, after all, have been graduating into food service jobs for years. And the myths of the Tony-winning performance, the great American novel, the museum show carry the same weight as that of a prestigious directing career. In this light, Ithaca's brain-napalming plan fits into a larger complex of how liberal arts programs ought to deliver their students into the real world.

Now, for better or for worse, Miguel Santiago wants to get a graduate degree in film. The draw -- practical or not -- proved irresistible.

"We are attracted to this field because we define ourselves as imaginative. We want to be recognized for what we create. Antioch taught me to think critically, to write and make movies. But it angers me that the creative life is a privilege. You end up needing a personal philosophy that can save you from this very real disappointment."
salon.com | July 28, 1999

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