Free Film School by Steve Boman

understanding acting theory, especially the theories put forward by the well-known instructor Uta Hagen, author of Respect for Acting . It’s a dandy idea, but I’m one of the few students in my 507 class who has done any acting. In high school, I wrote and acted in a few silly comic skits and got the lead in a one-act comedy. I spent a year at Exeter University in England, and I got a role in a student production of The Merchant of Venice . I played the foul-mouthed and hot-tempered Gratiano. I even got talked into playing, ahem, a horse in Equus . I’ve also got good friends who are actors, and I’ve been behind the scenes on stages and at readings. I feel I can communicate pretty effectively with actors.
    Luckily, my Casper film history class hardly eats up any time outside of class, at least for now. I’m supposed to do prelecture readings, but I don’t do them. My knowledge of postwar history is good. I hope it will be good enough because Casper knows my name. Every other bit of time goes into my next 507 film.
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n college, I underwent a transformation. I studied. I worked hard, really hard. It paid off. I even got a National Endowment for the Humanities scholarship to Tufts University to study the rise of Hitler.
    When I graduated, I wanted to tell stories. I got a job at Minnesota Public Radio. On my first day, I was handed a tape recorder and a microphone and told to cover a presidential candidate who was making the rounds in northern Iowa. For nearly three years, I used the same tape recorder and the same microphone and covered hundreds of stories. I wrote fifty-second news stories; I wrote eight-minute feature stories. I voiced my own stories and produced them and was eventually made news director and anchor.
    I learned many things, among them the cardinal rule of journalism: don’t expect to get paid much. I started at $12,000 a year and lived in a $180-a-month apartment. I shared my bathroom with a mentally ill man who lived next door.
    But money didn’t really matter. I was single. My girlfriend lived in Germany. I didn’t care if I shared a reeking bathroom. I liked journalism. And journalism was starting to like me. More of my stories went national on NPR, and I won a few moderately prestigious awards.
    Then an odd thing happened. One dreary winter day, I drove with my German girlfriend to Chicago. She had pals there. The husband of one of her friends was a transplant coordinator for the University of Chicago. What kind of a job is that? I asked him.
    He explained he retrieved organs from brain-dead people all over the country and brought them back to the surgeons in Chicago, where they were transplanted into sick and desperate patients. That’s an odd job, I said.
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n class, FTC is explaining that we can focus on specific aspects of filmmaking on each of our films. If we want to emphasize lighting, that’s great. Or if we really want to work on our cinematography, ditto. He says we don’t need to be constrained by traditional ideas of filmmaking. Feel free to experiment, he adds. But, he tells our class, we have to follow these rules:
In our second film, we can use only one spoken word on-screen.
In our third film, we can feature one sentence on-screen.
In our fourth film, we can feature one short bit of dialogue—no more than a paragraph.
In our fifth film, we can have more dialogue but no more than a page. (A script page equals roughly a minute of screen time.)
    There’s also a wildcard: We can do one documentary if we wish as a substitute for any of the fiction films. The documentary has no dialogue limitations. It can be up to eight minutes long, just like our fiction films.
    FTC explains that the smaller the box we work within, the easier it is to focus on the art of filmmaking. Hearing the limitations causes me to experience a wave of anxiety. One word in an eight-minute film? I’m a wordsmith, for cripes sake! Words are the only thing I know!