In addition to Lucas and Edlund, other notable graduates of the school confirmed as participants include writing team Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flint), Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now) and director Randal Kleiser (Grease). Fox 2000 President Laura Ziskin and Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman and CEO Bill Mechanic will also participate.
Along with the Lucas and Zemeckis clips, excerpts will be screened from Proof, an action-comedy made by Kevin Reynolds in 1980; The Committee: A Behind the Scenes Look at Film Education, a short animated film by Skywalker Sound's Gary Rydstrom; and Black Top Lingo, a film by recent graduate Rick Famuyiwa, writer-director of The Wood. Zemeckis' A Field of Honor was a Student Academy Award winner in 1975.
Tickets for the Academy's Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the USC School of Cinema-Television are $5 for the general public, $3 for Academy members. They may be purchased in advance at the Academy during regular business hours, by mail, or if still available, on the night of the event when the doors open at 7 p.m. A ticket order form can also be downloaded from the Academy's website. The Academy is located at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California. For more information, call (310) 247-3600.
The College Affaire Committee was one of the first committees established by the Academy. It met for the first time just 13 days after the Academy's organization banquet in 1927 and that meeting's purpose was to confer with USC President Rufus von KleinSmid about the possibility of introducing appropriate motion picture courses into the university curriculum. The result of that and future meetings, as well as the friendship that existed between von KleinSmid and the Academy's first president, Douglas Fairbanks, was "Introduction to Photoplay." First offered in the spring of 1929, this lecture series course featured speakers that included Fairbanks, directors D.W. Griffith and Ernst Lubitsch, MGM Production Chief Irving Thalberg and Producer William deMille. William Ray McDonald, a USC speech instructor and university play director, was the course instructor.
The class proved so popular and successful that it became a regular part of the USC curriculum. It was soon joined by courses in scientific cinematography, which addressed technical issues of filmmaking, and architecture and decorative arts, which was slanted toward set designers. In 1932, the Cinema Department of the university was formed and offered the nation's first bachelor of arts degree with a major in cinema.
Since that time, USC has gone on to develop one of the most successful training programs in the world for students interested in motion picture (and subsequently television) production. It has maintained strong ties with the Hollywood film industry, not only through its professional faculty, but by the tremendous professional success of its graduates. Its alumni include well-known directors, producers, writers, composers, editors, executives, visual effects masters, sound designers and cinematographers.
