Education

I know there’s a post in the archives about film school, and [whether it’s necessary,](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2003/is-film-school-necessary) but I would love to hear any advice you have on actually applying to film school.

How can someone improve their chances for getting accepted to a MFA program in film production/writing? What in your opinion are film schools really looking for in applicants? Any thoughts on what to avoid in an application?

–Oz
Honolulu, HI

This time, I decided I would go right to the source and ask [Howard A. Rodman](http://imdb.com/name/nm0734912/maindetails), who in addition to being a fine writer and all-around good guy, is the chair of the MFA and BFA programs in screen and television writing of the USC Cinema School.

Here’s what he had to say.

**Howard Rodman:** I read many, many applications. [We just this week finished selecting this fall’s incoming class.] Here’s what we’re looking for:

1. Writing. Good writing. Not necessarily in screenplay format. We’re less interested, at this point, in whether you know what we’re here to teach you, than in whether you can put together a sentence. Tell a story. Create a dimensional character. In short: do you have your very own voice? [P.S. – We know the difference between “its” and “it’s,” and we actually care.]

2. Grades, good enough to pass muster with the larger USC admissions apparatus, and good enough to give us the confidence you’ll be able to execute a demanding program. Four point something GPAs and 1600 SATs (or GREs) are truly lovely, but are not in and of themselves guarantors of anything. We’re looking for writers [see #1 above], but we do need to know you can handle the load.

3. Diversity. Folks with life experience. Folks from strange and wonderful places. Folks who’ve had interesting ‘first’ careers before turning to writing. Not just your typical work/study/get ahead/kill types. The New York Times says that a cinema MFA may be the new MBA; but I’m not sure we’d view it that way.

4. A good mix. Not all Hummers, not all Priuses.

What’s the first movie where the writing really made an impression on you?

–Kate

I remember watching WAR OF THE ROSES on videotape with my brother, and liking
it so much that I immediately rewound it and started watching it again. I wrote
down the dialogue for the first few scenes,
and suddenly realized that somebody really had to write this all first — the
actors weren’t just making their
lines up. There was an invisible plan behind the movie I was watching.

That seems strange to me now, because at the time I’d read plays and even
acted in a few. But plays are basically just dialogue, while a movie script
had to show what was happening even when no characters were talking. I wouldn’t
read an actual movie script until a few years later, but it didn’t stop me
from transcribing an entire episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." (Incidentally,
transcribing a show is a great exercise to get comfortable with standard formatting
and writing scene description, since the big work — structure, character,
dialogue and plot — are already handled for you.)

When someone says about a movie that "the writing was really impressive," I
always wonder if that means that some other aspect of the movie wasn’t very
good, such as the acting or the directing, which let you notice the words.
In my experience, if everything in is working at top form, you’re not even
aware the movie is written. It seems to simply exist.

It’s only as you stop to think back about what you saw that you recognize
how good the writing must have been. Experience has shown that you can make
a bad movie from a great script, but you can’t make a great movie from a bad
script.