Yeah, Drew still talks about how he went to Jesuit school and how he has a special connection to Hitchcock because both he and Hitchcock were Jesuit trained. That, his obsession with John Ford, and his love of Bette Davis seem to be constants throughout the years. We've got something similar to Arthur Knight's class called "Film Symposium" with Leonard Maltin. Same gig, where we screened movies and the actors, directors, producers, etc. came in to discuss them. I think Anthony Hopkins was my favorite, very humble and laid back.
We've got a re-manifestation of the 901 club on Fig half a block north of Jefferson, but it's infested with sorority and frat types. I lived within 2 blocks of the school the entire time I went there except for one semester. There's no way I was going to fight traffic and try to find a parking spot every day whilst getting to class.
I imagine the school is much more rigid and structured these days than it was when you attended. There are alot of hoops to jump through if you want to step outside of the prescribed tracks of your major, but like anything else if you want it bad enough you can make it happen. There are a number of courses at USC that are technically "barred" to undergrads, but if you attend the class and do your work with passion the teachers could care less if you're officially registered or not. No one in the administration building needed to know I was taking classes that will never appear on my transcript.
I was something of an oddball with how I went about my classes at USC. I was a critical studies undergrad, but my first production class was the graduate production course 546 (grad version of 480). How did this fly under the radar of the ever-watchful USC, you ask? The TA for my editing class freshman year was the director for a 546. I mentioned to her at the end of the semester that I'd like to help out on any projects she had coming up, and boom! I became one of a two-man sound team for 546. They couldn't find grad students who wanted to work the sound positions, so I was more than happy to steal the best job on set. That semester ended up being a huge catalyst in my cinema career. I knew absolutely nothing about film sound coming into it, and finished the semester knowing the basics of production sound (we were equipped with an old Shure FP32 mixer, a 416 on a stick and two lectro lavs, and we recorded single system into an enormous BetaCAM camera), how to edit in Pro Tools, and how to do a final mix on a Euphonix System 5 console. Talk about a rush of blood to the head!
I finished off that semester hooked on sound. I started taking every sound course offered by USC, from Tom Holman's Advanced Sound course (focused on re-recording mixing) to Bill Whittington's Sound Theory course (a scholastic approach to sound history and application) to the Episodic TV class (which is basically the equivalent of doing 3 mini-480s in one semester).
I ended up being a TA for the sound department my last year at the school, teaching the sound portion of the graduate 508 class (equivalent to the undergrad 310). I remember Tom balking the first time he found out I was an undergrad in crit studies and TAing a production course full of graduates.
Unfortunately we don't have a course that focuses solely on production sound, so I just boomed on as many thesis films and the like that I could. Doug Vaughan is the faculty member who teaches production sound at USC (used to be a boom op for Jim Webb), so most everything I knew about booming coming out of USC was born of his tutelage and on-set experience. Doing production sound for USC is always a challenge because the campus is right under LAX's flight path, the productions never have enough money to rent proper tow-behind generators so you have to fight the little put-put gennies, and the sound stages have bad transformers that put out an awful buzz (the kind of sound you'd need a Cedar box to get rid of in post). A good training ground for the noisy world of LA, one might argue.
I think one of my best sound memories from USC was while booming on a thesis film. We were shooting at night on a school campus, but lighting to cheat it for day. It was about 11pm, so naturally the crickets were out in full force. I talked with the director about the problem of having crickets in his production track during a shot that's supposed to be during the day (crickets=night). We spent about 15 minutes hunting down every cricket in the immediate vicinity we could, and hoped the more distant crickets could be justified or hidden in post. Just as we were about to get off the first shot, the producer came over to me and asked if I could just turn on the cricket filter. I played along, thinking he was joking, but soon realized he was dead serious. A cricket filter...
-Landon
P.S. This was my Episodic TV class, my last semester at USC. I'm the guy in the black shirt in the top left striking the Capt Morgan pose.
