Pay Thousands Of Dollars To Learn Everything You Donít Need To Know To Have A Successful Career In The Film Industry
David Weddle, Sam Peckinpah biographer and episodic television writer/producer, sends his daughter, Alexis, to UCSB film school for $73,000-plus -- and it turns out to be his own very expensive lesson in what's become of film theory. (Roger Ebert, whom he interviews, calls (neo) film theory "a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a New Age cult...") Hereís what Weddle says about a little sample of his daughterís coursework:

"The prose was denser than a Kevlar flak jacket, full of such words as 'diegetic,' 'heterogeneity,' 'narratology,' 'narrativity,' 'symptomology,' 'scopophilia,' 'signifier,' 'syntagmatic,' 'synecdoche,' 'temporality.' I picked out two of themó'fabula' and 'syuzhet'óand asked Alexis if she knew what they meant. 'They're the Russian Formalist terms for 'story' and 'plot,' she replied.

'Well then, why don't they use 'story' and 'plot?'

'We're not allowed to. If we do, they take points off our paper. We have to use 'fabula' and 'syuzhet.'' Forget for a moment that if Alexis were to use these terms on a Hollywood set, she'd be laughed off the lot. Alexis wants a career in film." more>>

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