collage1. USC
USC has been churning out great filmmakers since Douglas Fairbanks, Darryl Zanuck and Irving Thalberg were teaching classes there. From James Ivory (’57) to Robert Zemeckis (’73) to Doug Liman?(’92) and up to Ryan Coogler (’11) — they all learned how to point ?a camera on this Exposition Park campus. For Ride Along director Tim Story (’91), that history was one of the school’s big selling points. “It was my admiration for George Lucas,” he explains why he applied, referring to class of 1969’s most famous pupil (also most generous; Lucas donated another $10 million last year). “That it was 20 minutes away from?where I [grew up] didn’t hurt either.” This year, the school got ?a new animation director — Teresa Cheng, who’s worked at Warner Bros., DreamWorks and Lucasfilm — and teamed with the State Department to launch the Middle East Media Initiative to support collaborations with filmmakers in Saudi Arabia (which just lifted a 35-year ban on movie theaters). But of all the things USC has going for it — including its master classes (Lisa Kudrow taught one on comedy this year), its state-of-the-art VR Lab and its program for video game designers — the thing that keeps this school on the very top of this list, for the sixth year in a row, is its world-class faculty. Says Planet of the Apes scribe Amanda Silver (’89), “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t refer back to what I learned with those teachers.”
2. New York University
Since director Cathy Yan graduated just two years ago — with a dual degree in cinema and business, something no other ?film school offers — she’s gone on to make the 2018 Sundance darling Dead Pigs and just got hired to direct Marvel’s Harley Quinn movie with Margot Robbie. The Handmaid’s Tale director Reed Morano (’01) only got one degree but still became the first female director to win a drama Emmy in 22 years, while Mudbound director Dee Rees (’07) got nominated last year for screenwriting and Rachel Morrison (’00) became the first female cinematographer to ?be nominated for an Oscar. Says Alec Baldwin, who graduated from the East Coast’s premier film school back in 1993, “New York City is where you go to get serious ?about a career in the arts. Nowhere has as many possibilities as New York. Nowhere. And at the top of that New York list is NYU.”
3. American Film Institute
New dean Richard Gladstein has made some small improvements to this bucolic Los Angeles campus (there’s now a cafe!) and some big ones, too (hiring Juno producer Lianne Halfon as the head of the producing discipline). But perhaps the most striking transformation has been the school’s focus on female filmmakers. This year’s class, for the first time, has a 50-50 male-female ratio. There’s also a new intensive course for cinematographers that gives 20 female students a tuition-free ride. Female alumnae, meanwhile, continue to make cracks in the glass ceiling, like Rachel Morrison (class of ’06, after she got her undergraduate degree at NYU) and Patty Jenkins (’00), who last year became the highest-grossing female director with Wonder Woman. “They were more focused on clarifying what your vision was, and then on whether you were executing it well,” Jenkins tells THR of her time as a student. “That is a lesson that needs highlighting in a world of so many cool tools and superficial things.”
4. UCLA
Not everyone’s homework assignment gets watched ?by a nationwide audience. But MFA student Steven Canals (’15) sold the pilot he wrote for course 284B (Writing Television Drama Scripts) to Ryan Murphy. Today, that pilot is FX’s transgender drama Pose, which was renewed for a second season. And Canals isn’t the only one turning schoolwork into a career: Gaia Violo (’15) sold her writing assignment, a pilot for an FBI mystery called Absentia, to Sony’s global pay channel AXN (Amazon picked it up for the U.S.), while a group of seven other grad students recently collaborated on Waterschool, a documentary co-produced by jewelry company Swarovski about the world’s fresh-water supply, which ended up getting sold to Netflix. Cutting-edge facilities (including an Oculus NextGen VR lab), generous donors (who gave more than $3 million to students this year) and full-ride graduate scholarships (including programs for female students from India and the Arab world) all put UCLA high on this list. “Those three years were invaluable,” says Canals. “I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for UCLA.”
5. Columbia University
It was impossible to attend a film festival this year without bumping into a Columbia grad. Six films made by alumni played at Cannes in May, including HBO’s Fahrenheit 451, directed by faculty ?member Ramin Bahrani. No ?fewer than 42 alumni and faculty were represented at Sundance, with movies like Nancy, written ?and directed by Christina Choe (’12) and edited by David Gutnik (’12). Even the school’s growing digital storytelling lab, launched just two years ago, had ?a presence in Park City; the ?lab’s founder and director, Lance Weiler, premiered an AI version ?of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ?at Sundance. Meanwhile, back on ?its Upper West Side campus, students have been getting used to the university’s newly constructed Lenfest Center for the Arts, which includes a 150-seat state-of-the-art theater, as well as the school’s brand-new postproduction center.
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