Is Film School a Waste of Time and Money?

There really was a time when Hollywood studios asked young film school graduates to take over the industry.
In the late sixties and early seventies, stumped by the mystifying success of such offbeat fare as Peter Fonda’s film Easy Rider, the studios handed unprecedented creative power to a new generation of filmmakers. They reasoned that these kids must have understood something they didn’t. This was how such living legends as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorcese, and Francis Ford Coppola got started. This was also when some of the greatest movies ever made came out of Hollywood.
At the end of the seventies, Hollywood began to formalize the process. They had studied and quantified the formula that Spielberg, Lucas, and others had unknowingly invented, and learned to synthesize it. This was the birth of the summer event blockbuster.
Over the last thirty years, Hollywood has continued to streamline the formula, creating a fairly predictable profit-generating machine running on hype and spectacle.
What does this have to do with you?
Well, the truth is, you stand a better chance of landing a good Hollywood job with a Masters in Business Administration that with a film degree.
Filmmakers have not been in charge of the industry since at least the 1940s. Hollywood has long been run by massive corporations whose primary interest is making money, not movies. The industry exists to make profits, and a motion picture is a very large monetary proposition. Hollywood movies with artistic value are created despite the system, not because of it.
Does this mean no one should ever go to film shool? Of course not!
Film school can be an awesome place if you really love movies, and really want to make movies. What better place for a budding filmmaker than an environment filled with like-minded students, established mentors, and access to some of the best filmmaking equipment available? If you can afford it, film school can be a great place to forge relationships that will last you a lifetime.
Film school presents an opportunity for you to focus on the art of filmmaking. It gives you a chance to follow your muse wherever she will lead. Write what you want. Film what you want. Ignore the call of “real life.” This might be what you need to develop your filmmaking voice. And it might be just what you need to get the attention of someone established in the business, someone who can give you a helping hand.
Some believe that the money you spend on filmmaking courses should be spent actually making a film. That’s not a terrible idea. After all, it is true that few people get a job in the film industry based on a degree. And no screenwriter sells a script because they have a BA in film or writing. It always comes down to the product, to what you can do.
If you can show without a doubt that you are a filmmaker – that you have reached a significant level of accomplishment in your field – you can make it in the industry. The film degree is just one step on that long path toward your career goal.
Besides, who knows? Things change.
Eventually, the current Hollywood formula will stop working –it always does. And then what will the industry do? Maybe they’ll hand the power over to a whole new generation of film school brats.
You could be one of those brats!

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Adam Campbell is an award-winning screenwriter with professional credits in television and web video. He has taught writing and filmmaking for over five years. You can learn more about film education programs at http://www.filmmakingcourses.net.