On a Tuesday evening in November, Netflix co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos spoke to a “Master Class” of around 100 students at Chapman University.
Sarandos, who is the chief content officer of a company that last year planned to spend $17 billion on creating entertainment, was the latest visitor at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, joining notable Hollywood stars like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Halle Berry and Guillermo del Toro.
“The one thing that’s really cool about this school, unlike others, is that kids hit the ground with a camera in their hands,” Sarandos told the Business Journal after the event.
“They’re creating right out of the gate. I find the curriculum here to be more practical about the creation of television and movies.”
Networking is one part of the three-pronged strategy of Stephen Galloway, who became the school’s second dean in 2020, following the retirement of legendary founding dean, Robert Bassett.
“We need a much greater degree of Hollywood osmosis,” Galloway said. “We are on the doorsteps of Hollywood. We need to be much more connected to the living, breathing industry.”
THR Connections
Chapman’s film school has grown to 1,550 students, who annually produce hundreds of films and shows, far more than any other university, Galloway said. It also offers classes in broadcast journalism, public relations, advertising and soon a minor degree on “the business of entertainment.”
It has 59 full-time faculty and 130 part-time instructors, including makers of famous Hollywood movies like “Saturday Night Fever” Director John Badham, “The Nutty Professor” Writer Barry Blaustein, and “Pirates of the Caribbean” Art Director John Chichester.
Galloway’s been able to push Chapman up to No. 4 on The Hollywood Reporter’s ranking of best American film schools, a list which was begun by none other than Galloway himself when he was the executive editor of that venerable industry publication.
Why Chapman hired a journalist rather than a filmmaker is “an excellent question,” Chapman President Danielle Struppa said.
“No filmmakers would apply for such a job,” Struppa told the Business Journal. “So, why not an academic? Because our Dodge School is essentially a professional school, whose task is to prepare students for industry.
“A strictly academic dean would be good in terms of curricular development, but I don’t think he could build the bridge between academia and industry that somebody like Stephen could.”
Galloway “knows the environment very well, knows all the right people, knows what movie making and movie-education is all about,” Struppa said. “I thought he’d be the right guy, and in fact he is.”
Film Lover
Galloway, a British native who was raised outside London, often spent his free time watching new movies, including in Paris where his aunt lived.
“I was obsessed with films” while a youngster, he said. “I loved films and dreamt of making films.”
After graduating from Cambridge University with First Class Honors, he came to America on a Harkness Fellowship, which is the British version of a Rhodes Scholarship.
Why did the lover of French and Italian films choose America?
“It was Hollywood,” he said. “The American dream is incredibly powerful. It ripples through the world. Hollywood was a very big factor in spreading that dream.”
Then he made a surprising discovery.
“When I came here, I found out Hollywood is about money,” Galloway recalled. “It’s an industry. Somehow, I had this illusion that everybody was only interested in art. That’s not the way the business works.”
After stints at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and French TV, Galloway eventually made his way to The Hollywood Reporter, where he worked for almost three decades.
Hanging With Stars
Galloway wrote hundreds of articles, including traveling to Haiti with Sean Penn, hitting the gym with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and spending a summer afternoon at Italy’s Lake Como with George and Amal Clooney.
“I’ve had a conflict with and threatened with more lawsuits and firings than you name it,” Galloway said. “I’ve been in a hotel room with Harvey Weinstein threatening to maim me, wound me, throw me through a window.
“Then you get some wonderful people. Most of the people are wonderful, passionate. It’s the bad ones who stand out.”
Galloway also created and hosted “The Hollywood Masters,” an interview series with top filmmakers that is still available on Netflix.
He wrote a biography of Sherry Lansing, the first female head of a major studio. That book helped inspire him to start a program where he would pair female high school students from South Central Los Angeles with role models who were in the top tier of Hollywood.
“It changed my life even more than probably the students,” Galloway said.
After that experience, Galloway became more interested in education. A couple of years ago, a headhunter contacted him about Chapman.
“To my absolute shock, they offered me the job.”
Goals
While Hollywood has long had a reputation as a low-paying industry except for those at the top, it’s been changing dramatically in recent years, Galloway said.
He predicted that the older Hollywood studio companies will soon become units of large technology companies, noting that both Apple and Amazon are now in the business of making shows. Facebook, TikTok and YouTube are providing opportunities to young professionals, he said.
“There are ways for young filmmakers to make a living that haven’t existed before.”
Another big change in Hollywood is the intermingling of film and television worlds, which in prior years were kept apart. When he arrived at Chapman, his first focus was merging the TV and film departments, a bureaucratic process that took 18 months to accomplish.
The school is teaching students about globalization, such as penetrating markets in places like Spain, India and China.
“If you said five years ago, the biggest show on the planet in the past year would be a Korean-language drama, nobody would have believed you,” Galloway said, referring to “Squid Game.”
No OC Hollywood
Galloway is a realist by not promoting Orange County as a place for Hollywood to make films, citing the high prices of real estate that dissuade studios that need large sound stages. Studios prefer cheaper locations such as Atlanta or southern Europe.
“Laguna Beach is drop-dead gorgeous. It’s also drop-dead expensive.”
As part of his first goal to help his students get a head start in Hollywood, he created a career center now operated by a former prominent agent named Joe Rosenberg, who represented David Fincher among others. The center provides workshops where students can write anything from resumes to scripts and help them network to get internships or jobs.
“I want to create the CAA of career centers,” Galloway said, referring to the famous talent agency, Creative Artists Agency, where Rosenberg once worked as an agent.
A second goal is to create more diversity, to help students crack new markets.
“You need to be thinking as the modern world thinks and the modern world is global and diverse and it’s going to be much more so.”
His third goal is to “build a state-of-the-art virtual studio where every screen will be capable of looking like you’re on another planet or you know you’re in the realm with the dinosaurs.”
He foresees Chapman as a feeder school for a “gigantic” media industry that nowadays employs 2 million in America.
“This a global industry that is hungry for skilled professionals and that doesn’t necessarily have the training facilities to groom them,” he said.
“This is no longer the old studio system where there was a romanticism and glamor and free-wheeling place like it was the Wild West. This is a major industry that traffics in billions of dollars of trade and is still one of the businesses with the best export balance of any in the United States.
“These students are prepared for that business.”
A Chapman Star is Born
Parker Finn, a 2011 graduate of Chapman University’s film school, recently debuted his first full-length theatrical release called “Smile,” a horror film about a therapist who witnesses the death of a patient.
Since its release Sept. 30, the movie, which cost $17 million to make, has gone on to gross about $216 million.
“The spectacular worldwide performance of ‘Smile’ demonstrates what is truly possible when you deliver a brilliantly sticky marketing campaign on top of a masterfully made high-concept horror film,” Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins said in a statement.
Finn now joins other Chapman grads who have broken through to Hollywood stardom, such as Matt and Ross Duffer, brothers who created one of Netflix’s most popular shows, “Stranger Things,” Justin Simien, who made the film “Dear White People,” and Ben York Jones, author and co-star of “Like Crazy.”
Finn told the Chapman University newsroom that he didn’t anticipate the film’s success.
“Everybody who wants to make movies dreams of making something that’s seen widely and embraced, but I wasn’t scheming toward this by any means,” Finn said.
“I love genre films, and I also love telling stories about the human condition that are really character-driven.”
—Peter J. Brennan
Timeline of Chapman Film Studio
• 1981: Robert Bassett hired as its first full-time faculty member to teach filmmaking in the Department of Communications.
• 1983: First location film project when Bassett took some 30 students to Death Valley, where they camped out in the desert, sat around the campfire in the evenings and worked together on a film for days.
• 1992: the program became a separate Department of Film and Television.
• 1996: the film department had mushroomed to 210 students and nine faculty members, becoming the School of Film and Television with Bassett as the founding dean.
• Bassett decided to build a film school based on a studio with sound stages, post-production facilities and a state-of-the-art theater. “Film is the literature of this century. When I went to school, we all wanted to write the great American novel. Now, young people want to make a great film,” he said.
• The film school highlights several people who have been instrumental in its success such as Cece Presley, granddaughter of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. Some donors are well known in the OC business community and have their names attached to buildings or chairs including: Marion Knott Studios; Twyla Reed Martin Dean’s Chair in Film and Media Arts; (Paul) Folino Theater; and the Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.
—Peter J. Brennan
The Art of Grieving
When Preston Zeller’s brother Colin died at 35 from a drug overdose in 2019, he found a way to use his Chapman University film degree to make “The Art of Grieving.”
The documentary features Preston creating one abstract painting a day for a year straight. After 365 days, he put all the pieces into a 10-foot by 20-foot mosaic and hung it in his home.
That 69-minute documentary went on to win Best Documentary at three film festivals—the Love Wins Festival in New York, the online Bridge Fest competition, and the Los Angeles Film Awards.
It premiered on Amazon Prime last July, has been viewed in 25 countries, and comes out on Apple TV this year.
The 2009 graduate who grew up in Orange County said the Chapman film school helped him make many connections in the industry.
“There’s a lot of great staff” at Chapman, Zeller told the Business Journal. “Above all, they emphasized good story telling. It’s one of those things that I’ve taken with me throughout my career.”
—Peter J. Brennan
