collage2. USC
This year, the USC School of Cinematic Arts may have lost its almost perennial No. 1 spot on our top-film-school lists to the upstart David of AFI — but Hollywood’s Goliath is still very much standing. Its 1,700 students don’t just enter a school, they get entrée to what constitutes a miniature version of the film industry it impacts on a scale no smaller school can match. With the priciest of state-of-the-art facilities, soundstages, edit bays, scoring stage and IMAX theater, students have access to more technology than many cinema professionals, and they can access training in every aspect of the film, TV, and interactive media businesses, from pitch and script development to distribution.
So what happens when it’s all shut down, as COVID controversially forced the school to do? Faculty spent their spring and summer breaks figuring out how to teach production classes online. Programs like writing, video-game design and producing, which are accustomed to online formats, adapted quickly, with students in different time zones and even different countries. And USC called in the big guns. Heavy-hitter alumni like Ryan Coogler, Stacey Sher, Kevin Feige, Tina Mabry and Judd Apatow, who were themselves pivoting during the pandemic, Zoomed in to classes and for special Q&A conversations with students. Events like graduation, film festivals and a video game expo that usually brings hundreds of participants to campus drew thousands of participants online.
3. NYU
NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television is reconvening in person for the fall semester, announcing rigorous measures to prevent, track and respond to COVID infections. NYU is offering classes in a mixed mode to enable students to participate in person or remotely, and is prioritizing flexibility should conditions change. All film classes will have a remote option, with opportunities for small group or one-on-one meetings on campus, and the school has introduced strict production rules to promote student safety.
Faculty, staff and students make more than 5,000 films a year, and outside of L.A., nobody can match NYU’s parade of film geniuses: Spike Lee, Chris Columbus, Joel Coen, Morgan Spurlock, Ryan Fleck (“Captain Marvel”), cinematographer Rachel Morrison (“Black Panther”), Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”), Damon Lindelof (“Watchmen”), “Pulp Fiction” editor Sally Menke and Nia DaCosta, the first Black woman to direct a Marvel film (“Captain Marvel 2”). Alum Nicole Kassell’s “Watchmen” hit the bullseye of the zeitgeist and set the year’s Emmy nomination record with 26; Jon Watts’ “Spider-Man” films have grossed over $1 billion; and Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” and its star Frances McDormand are front-runners at this year’s Oscars. NYU’s $2.25 million Black Family Film Foundation awards $150,000 in production grants, and the incoming freshman class in the undergraduate program is 55% female for the second year in a row.
4. Chapman University
Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts recently hired the second dean in its 25-year history, ex-Hollywood Reporter executive editor and Emmy-winning producer Stephen Galloway. New initiatives include the Master Classes, open to students and alumni, with the likes of Judd Apatow (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin”), William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”), CAA chairman Richard Lovett, producer Nina Jacobson (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter (“Black Panther”).
5. UNCSA
Blessed with a low 9-to-1 student/faculty ratio, UNCSA’s School of Filmmaking looks like a little Hollywood studio lot, and it really is like one — maybe with less ruthless cruelty, though students can probably hear stories about that from A-list Hollywood survivors like Ava DuVernay. Students collaborate with UNCSA’s top-ranked School of Drama and have access to several soundstages and animation facilities. They benefit from partnerships with RiverRun International Film Festival, Sundance and others.
The school covers the cost of senior thesis films and says its tuition (as low as $6,497) is about half the cost of other premiere film schools. During COVID, classes will be delivered in a hybrid of online and face-to-face components, using technologies that enable remote workflows (Frame.io and Set.a.Light 3D Studio). Interim Dean Henry Grillo helped increase enrollment 42% in 10 years, and UNCSA has expanded resources in motion-, hand-, and face-capture, effects technologies and game engine integration into filmmaking. Liked Doug Trumbull’s visual-effects work on “2001,” “Close Encounters,” “Star Trek,” “Blade Runner” and “The Tree of Life?” He’s collaborating with UNCSA to explore immersive storytelling techniques.
6. Columbia University
Columbia University School of the Arts, whose 72 MFA students focus on directing, writing or producing in either traditional film or the Digital Storytelling Lab, are all out to follow in the footsteps of alumni Kathryn Bigelow, Jennifer Lee, Phil Johnson, James Mangold and “Making a Murderer” writer/directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi. There’s also a BA and MA in film studies.
This year, seven students had films at Toronto, six in the Cannes lineup, 23 at Sundance, 10 that would have gone to SXSW and two at the Venice International Film Festival, where four alumni won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film for “Darling.” Melina León’s debut, “Canción Sin Nombre (Song Without a Name)” screened at more than 80 international film festivals and won more than 30 awards, including the New Voices/New Visions Award in Palm Springs. Prof. Trey Ellis’ historical doc “King in the Wilderness” won the Emmy and his “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality” won a Peabody, as did “The Edge of Democracy,” on which current student Moara Passoni served as an executive producer. Grads populate sets and writers’ rooms at Amazon, Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO, ABC, CBS, NBC and abroad. This year, School of the Arts filmmakers received five Oscar nominations (winning two), 10 Emmy nominations and three Golden Globe nominations.
7. UCLA
UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television has spawned alumni both venerable (Francis Ford Coppola, Eric Roth) and au courant (Gina Prince-Bythewood, Steven Canals, Marielle Heller, Justin Lin) — and if they were there now, they’d start the year attending classes remotely. When students come back to campus (pandemic conditions permitting), they’ll plunge into the new Media Arts Lab, equipped for the production and viewing of virtual reality, augmented reality, 360-degree video, projection mapping and interactive installations.
8. LMU
LMU’s School of Film and Television is undeniably growing under Dean Peggy Rajski. More students, including 89 incoming graduate students, the most ever. Ten new teachers, including four faculty of color. More courses: augmented reality/virtual reality, monetizing digital content, punk and queer cinema, animators paired with English majors to improve story quality.
LMU opened its expansive Playa Vista grad-school campus in 2018, and in 2021 it’s opening the 24,000-square-foot Howard B. Fitzpatrick Pavilion, with labs, an AR/VR teaching area, and an 86-seat theater. It’s grown its partnerships with Film Independent and Village Roadshow Entertainment Group to give grads mentorship and moola. Want diversity? Most of the students and 40% of the faculty are nonwhite, including screenwriting prof Michelle Amor Gillie — lead author of the famous #DearHollywood letter that helped change the place. Long before Chicago elected its first Black woman mayor, her show about one, The Honorable, was optioned by CBS.
9. CalArts
Though most renowned for character animation, CalArts’ School of Film/Video has four distinct programs, all of which have churned out award-hogging alumni. Indie film writer/directors Eliza Hittman (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always”), Andrew Ahn (“Driveways,” “Spa Night”), and Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias (“Cocote”) are perennial favorites at Sundance. Alumni working in zeitgeisty TV include producer Rhys Ernst (“Transparent”) and director Nijla Mu’min (“Insecure,” “Queen Sugar”).
CalArts is well-known for its minimalist documentary style, exemplified in the work of multidisciplinary artist Deborah Stratman and experimental filmmaker Laida Lertxundi. Mainstream animation’s gonzo cousin experimental animation trains filmmakers in stop-motion animation (Henry Selick), interactive live performances (Miwa Matreyek), and abstract and handmade films.
1. AFI Conservatory
The small, elite institution that produced David Lynch, Carl Franklin, Patty Jenkins and Julie Dash — and preserved 60,000 priceless historic films now residing in the AFI Collection at the Library of Congress — has plenty to celebrate half a century after it began. It comes after a very bad period when deans came and went amid nasty controversies, and AFI fell to its lowest ranking yet on our 2019 list. But new dean Susan Ruskin, who previously put the University of North Carolina School of the Arts on the national cinematic map, rode to the rescue, and AFI shot to the top of the list for the first time ever, lauded by experts and voters in TheWrap’s poll.
The proof’s in the illustrious alums like Max Barbakow and Andy Siara (Class of 2015), whose “Groundhog Day”-like film “Palm Springs” broke the record for the highest sale at Sundance, or Asher Jelinsky, Hao Zheng and Omer Ben-Shachar (Class of 2018), who swept the Student Academy Awards. With teachers like producer Lianne Halfon (“Juno,” “Ghost World,” “Art School Confidential,” “Crumb”), Oscar-nominated screenwriter Anna Thomas and ASC president and cinematographer Stephen Lighthill, it’s no wonder.
This year, new voices will be joining the faculty, including Dime Davis, who recently made history as the first Black woman nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series for “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” In AFI’s Harold Lloyd Master Seminars, fellows meet and learn from the likes of Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Spike Lee, Sofia Coppola, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Joel Coen, Mira Nair and Lesli Linka Glatter. And with gifts from zillionaires like David Geffen, things are looking up on the financial end, too.
10. ArtCenter College of Design
As alum Michael Bay exemplifies, it’s a good career move to train alongside advertising and graphic design people at ArtCenter or in the Media Maker’s Lab, a collaboration between advertising and film departments. You can deconstruct Coen brothers films in a Visual Literacy in Film course taught by “The Wire” writer/co-director Joy Kecken, or take ArtCenter’s newest course, Powerful Black Voices in Film, by writer/director Shannon Bennett. Director/cinematographer Ericson Core (“The Fast and the Furious,” “Point Break”) credits his success to “often grueling” ArtCenter, which “developed skills that empowered us to say what we wanted with clarity and precision.”
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