6/15/23
Newsletter #368
The Crack of Dawn
Even though I was only 16 when I started Oakland Community College, and had previously been a D-student in high school, in two semesters I managed to get a 4.0 grade average and make the Dean’s List. I then attended Eastern Michigan University. Because I was living away from home for the first time, and there were pretty girls everywhere, my grade point dropped to 3.5. I was then accepted to the University of Michigan, and I didn’t want to go: I had a good thing going at EMU. However, at my father’s urging, at the age of 17, I went to U of M. That was a bad idea. Every class was over my head, and there were very few pretty girls. I had a miserable time, my grade point dropped to 1.9, and halfway through the semester I decided to get the hell out of Michigan and move to Hollywood, where my real future lay.
When I told my parents that I was moving to L.A. – I didn’t ask – they made one request: that I keep going to college, which they’d pay for. Since I really didn’t have a plan, and agreeing was easier than arguing, I acquiesced. I signed up for Columbia College in Hollywood, which was known as the backup film school for those who couldn’t get into UCLA or USC, neither of which had I even applied to.
Soon after moving to L.A. I met Sheldon Lettich. When I told him that I would be attending Columbia College, he laughed. He said that he’d just gone there, and quit (he got into AFI) and it was “worthless.” With that glowing accolade in mind, I started Columbia. It may have been worthless, but it wasn’t easy. They had a curriculum, and you either took all of it, or none of it. So, I had a full class load consisting of: Filmmaking, TV Direction, TV Journalism, and the History of Journalism, all of which sounded interesting, except the last one. At 17 I didn’t give a shit about journalism, just movies.
Half of the school was filled with Asians, most of whom spoke very little English. Therefore, classes had to be geared down a bit for them to follow along. The filmmaking class seemed like it was for kindergarteners. And the TV Direction class, which I thought was fun, was impossible for the Asian students because it’s all dependent on precise language. We had a TV news set-up. Two newscasters at a table, three cameras, and a spokesperson in a sound booth. The director is in the control room with technical directors. Everybody is on headphones and microphones. The idea is if you ask for everything properly, and you get it; if you ask improperly, you don’t get it. For instance, everybody always gets a warning. It goes like this – the director says, “Ready on camera two?” Camera number two replies, “Ready.” The director says, “Take camera two,” and the technical director pushes the button, and you see camera two. But if you don’t ask, “Ready?” you don’t get shit. The teacher was 300 lbs. with a salt and pepper beard who thought he was Orson Welles, with a big, booming voice. Well, these poor kids from Japan, China and Korea had just arrived in America and could barely ask where the bathroom was. What can I say, for me it was easy. Therefore, I was over-confident and snarky, and the fat teacher hated me.
TV Journalism was kind of interesting. We were broken into teams of two, and each group was assigned two “stories” that were to be 3 minutes each. These were not news events, they were more attractions that a news show might use for filler. Our subjects were the Watt’s Towers, which are contemporary artworks in Watts, which is a shitty neighborhood; and demolition derby in Ontario, CA, which is about 50 miles. What was cool about the class was that each of us shot one, then each of us edited the other person’s film. That was cool. I went to Ontario and saw my one and only demolition derby, then got to cut a bunch of arty shots of funky artwork in Watts.
But finally, the class I didn’t want to take, History of Journalism, turned out to be the best class. I can’t remember huis name, but he was your standard, middle-aged white guy, with leather patches on the elbows of his green sweaters, who had worked for several of the companies he discussed: Hearst Newspapers, Triangle Publications (which was Walter Annenberg), Pulitzer, etc. This teacher was a “wry” character, smoked a pipe, and told great newspaper stories.
I often sat next to a French girl who smoked Gitane Cigarettes in class. You could smoke in class then. Anyway, Gitane Cigarettes taste and smell like shit. As do the other French cigarettes, Gauloises.
But the teacher was good – whatever his name was – and that’s everything. He loved his subject. All of these Charles Foster Kane-like newspaper moguls tickled the hell out of him.
Our one and only test in the class, which was our whole grade, was an essay based on any newspaper tycoon we liked – except William Randolph Hearst, who he hated more than anything in the world. So, I decided right there to write my essay on Hearst. I read one book, Citizen Hearst by W. A. Swanberg.
When William Randolph Hearst bought The Morning Journal, The Evening Journal, and Das Morgen Journal (the German version sold in NY), he had a combined circulation of 100,000 readers. Joseph Pulitzer, on the other hand, with the New York World, had a circulation of 1,000,000 readers, the largest in the world.
Hearst is best-remembered as the inventor of “Yellow Journalism.” In other words, Yellow Journalism is called "Lying." With this practice, in the course of ten years, Hearst drove his circulation up to over a million. Yet Pulitzer lost no readers, staying at a million. Therefore, Hearst got a million people to read the newspaper every day that previously had not. He improved literacy.
My teacher gave me an A-plus and said, “I never looked at it that way.”
I’m off to Berkeley, California.