I arrived at USC as starry-eyed as the rest of the film kids, but the more time I spent there, the more I realized that I was forfeiting my undergraduate education in favor of a glib professional program. I thought about how I’d have to justify myself to everyone who asked: If filmmaking is my passion, my calling, my raison d’être, the thing I do well, the thing that drives me mad, the thing that keeps me sane, the thing I’d wrestle the devil for, then why in the hell would I want to abandon it? Because I wasn’t ready for it. I thought about how it would entail facing all the told-you-so’ers who’d haughtily bitten their thumbs at my decision to go to film school in the first place. I thought about how transferring meant abandoning my film career-or at least putting it on pause. It was still a precarious thought at the time-never for sure, always reversible-but it was something I’d been thinking about. One of my professors said he felt the same way when he relocated to Los Angeles from the Northeast, like nothing was real.īy January I was asking the same professor for a recommendation letter to transfer. How do Didion and Ellroy get by? I recalled something else Hornby once wrote: “I can exclusively reveal that if you sit by a swimming pool in L.A., wearing swimming shorts and reading, then Hollywood starlets leave you alone.” The observation was supposed to be a joke, of course, but now it terrified me moving to L.A. But would I be able to in a place so apparently unliterary as L.A.? I wondered. Hornby said he could do so because he read so voraciously, which to me meant that if I was ever going to be as good a filmmaker as Dickens was a fictionist, I was going to need at least to double, maybe triple, my narrative intake. That’s one a day, every day for his entire working life, or a small town. I insisted upon the extra weight, having recently read an essay by Nick Hornby that said that Charles Dickens invented 13,000 characters in his lifetime.
USC TRANSFER ACCEPTANCE RATE FULL
What did he mean they don’t read? How’s a city full of filmmakers supposed to make movies without books? I had brought a duffel bag full of novels with me to orientation, mostly hardcovers, stuffed between two pairs of jeans and an old Frisbee. I scribbled the fact on the corner of my book, committing it to print and memory. I sat by a screenwriter with a wine stain on his collar, who told me the horrible secret about Los Angeles.
Transferring-not necessarily transferring to Harvard, just transferring in general-hadn’t occurred to me until a red-eye flight, heading home to Virginia after USC’s midsummer freshman pre-orientation. I could finally commit to a college-for one year, anyway. With their paralyzed blessing and a “no” from Harvard behind me, I could finally notify USC. Having kept my ambitions of directing and screenwriting from most people, this was a common response after all, the valedictorian doesn’t usually go to film school, does he? Given my teachers’ worried expressions, I reassured them that I’d do it properly, that I’d go to school for it, that I was, in fact, talented, that I’d already been accepted to the very best film schools in the world, including the best of the best at the University of Southern California, so there was no need to worry. “Film, huh?” my teachers would ask, muzzling their groans through pursed lips. Ah well, at least the rejection gave me the peace of mind to do what I had been planning all along: go to film school. And yet, as tends to happen post-rejection, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was somehow inadequate, that the neighbor’s snotty-nosed harp prodigy who had gotten into Yale was somehow better than I was. “I’m just applying to Harvard for kicks and gigs,” I would tell my friends and family. Not getting into Harvard as a senior in high school was more disheartening than devastating, more mocking than moribund, for I’d never actually planned on going to an Ivy. “Oh they’re just rubbing it in,” my brother told me. With careful fingers, I held the envelope up to the sun and squinted through to the boldface text: I am very sorry to inform you…. Thinking, for the moment, that the stewards in admissions had changed their mind, or that perhaps they wanted to say they were “very, very sorry” again, I thought it better that I double-check this newly arrived hard copy. I hadn’t anticipated a letter, having already received an e-mail with the very same, exciting news of my non-achievement one week earlier.
It came in a parchment-yellow envelope-business size-bundled in the crease of a tractor catalog addressed to Our favorite neighbor. My younger brother and I were raking grass off the driveway when the mailman arrived with my rejection letter from Harvard.
0 kommentar(er)
