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Student film making approaches professional quality and quantity at the college level, where three big state universities clearly outstrip the rest: the University of Southern California, U.C.L.A., and New York University. All three have full-scale curriculums leading to bachelor's and master's degrees, professional-level studios, sophisticated faculty guidance. At U.S.C., for example, resident teachers of the school's 350 cinema majors include Hollywood Directors King Vidor and Norman Taurog, while Jerry Lewis is an "adjunct professor." U.C.L.A., which has an enrollment of over 300, is about to complete a $2,500,000 film-production center, including several tons of first-quality equipment purchased at an auction from the old Hal Roach Studios. Twenty-five hundred miles away, the N.Y.U. film school (enrollment: 250) lacks the advantages of California sunshine and nearby Hollywood expertise. But it does have a topflight staff of 27, headed by Robert Saudek, onetime producer of TV's Omnibus.
Plethora of Parodies. All three schools have been around long enough —U.S.C., the nation's oldest, was founded in 1929—to have developed more or less distinctive styles of their own. U.C.L.A. favors and encourages free-form experimentation. Moviemakers at rival U.S.C. try to put a high professional gloss on their products and are very Hollywood-conscious—so much so that one professor recently complained about the plethora of student parodies of Bonnie and Clyde. N.Y.U. students, by contrast, tend to turn out deliberately rough-hewn works with the grainy look of neorealistic, cinema-verite documentaries—a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that most of their films are shot on location in the streets of nearby Greenwich Village.
In some cities, children are learning to make movies at the same time that they are mastering the ABCs. In Lexington, Mass., for example, Yvonne Andersen, 36, runs an extracurricular workshop where children aged five to twelve are introduced to the rudiments of animated film. Their work shows a freedom, verve and humor that Disney might have admired. Their short subjects (four minutes maximum) range from settings of favorite nursery rhymes to imaginative moralistic fables like The Amazing Colossal Man, written and produced by a dozen workshoppers. In this no-nonsense parable, suspicious earthlings annihilate a peace envoy from outer space.
More typical—and more demanding —is the once-a-week film class at Northern Valley Regional High School in Demarest, N.J. Taught by English Teacher Rodney Sheratsky and Documentary Film Maker Eric Camiel, the course includes esthetic theory, film history, and exercises in cinematography, cutting and editing. Students, most of whom borrow their parents' 8-mm. equipment, are required to make one filmlet a week, which is subjected by Camiel to scathing professional criticism. He can be high in his praise for efforts that show both imagination and care—and many do. One of his students this year did a four-minute movie on the theme of pregnancy, using dense filtered colors, quick cuts and even a touch of Underground technique: he doctored the film stock with scratches to help create an abstract effect. The point is not that any of the students are embryonic Eisensteins, says Sheratsky, but that "these kids, all of them, are thinking film."