By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Patterson's Film School Confidential: bad art about art, rotten films about film, tedious novels about writers
The Guardian’s John Patterson has a film school tale or two on the occasion of Art School Confidential, as he describes Terry Zwigoff as “the merry misanthrope with a hair-trigger bullshit detector.” Writes JP, “I came to think as I watched the movie, film school may be worse… because so many cosseted rich kids end up there thinking they’re artists, not realising they have in fact joined glorified trade schools for the media-industrial complex. If they learn a little about camera placement and pacing and spend… their time cultivating industry connections, they should be able to land a regular gig directing episodic TV… a day job for life… [F]ilm school is packed with precisely the people who have the fewest interesting things to say: those with parents who can sponsor them in education until they turn 30, and for whom the one transformative locale in life has been … a college campus. [In] recent art there is that strong, perhaps ineradicable tendency to make bad art about art, rotten films about films and tedious novels about writers.” Patterson says he hasn’t got “an axe to grind” but that twenty years ago classes at the U of C taught him “that I had the solitary temperament of a writer, not the collaborative one required of a film-maker… It is time for film-makers to learn the lesson of Quentin Tarantino, whose success a decade ago, ironically, helped pack the film schools with wannabe[s]… That lesson? Skip film school, just watch a lot of movies…. Because if you can’t learn how to watch a movie without a teacher standing in front of the screen with a pointer, you’ll never be any use to anyone when you’re standing in front of your… cast with a bullhorn. As the careers of Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Raoul Walsh and John Ford amply prove, if you wish to make movies about real life, it’s best to live some of it yourself first.”