The below NARRATIVE goes together with THUG Installment Two -- Spielberg (DOCUMENTS). This Narrative Installment tells the story of how CSULB President Alexander and Provost Para misused money donated by Steven Spielberg, breached his pledge agreement, and then threw away the chance for a further multi-million dollar donation. Nice work, guys! After you read the below NARRATIVE, CLICK to continue on to see the ACTUAL LEGAL DOCUMENTS which prove the case against Alexander and Para, including the signed Spielberg pledge of money which Alexander and Para breached.
Preface
Last week (March 5, 2013), CSULB President "King" Alexander issued one of his patented and appalling "let them eat cake" quotes to the Union Weekly (www.lbunion.com.).
According to the King: "...we can easily get a 90% graduation rate; all you do is turn away every academically challenged student and take in nothing but valedictorians..." Yes, that's what he said.
Contextually, Alexander was channeling the imperious and power-mongering policy of his godfather, former CSU Chancellor Charles Reed, even as he used rhetorical tactics that would make Goebbels blush with pride and a century of tyrants give the thumbs up. The intent of Alexander's statement was to frighten. It was designed to make 97% of the readers realize they would be deprived of a taxpayer-promised State University education unless they put all their trust and faith in Alexander to protect them.
It also deflected the statistical truth that only a tiny percentage of CSULB students who enter as freshmen will graduate in four years, about half will graduate in six years, and more than one-third will never graduate at all. Never. Not ever. One in three. And the numbers are even worse if you are African American, Latino, or Native American.
But, rather than find a remedy for the failure of his University to educate and graduate, Alexander's quote blames the students. As with all sons of privilege and all those who practice discrimination as if they didn't know they were discriminating, Alexander recognizes the folks who have "the necessities" (as Al Campanis infamously phrased it), the folks who have been born into opportunity and the reward side of every "ism", while he mocks the fundamental mission of the CSU in leveling the playing field and providing equal opportunity for all.
Hey King, I'm one of your teachers, and I've got something to tell you: all my students are equal. I don't know who's a High School valedictorian, and I don't think of any of them as "academically challenged". They're all here to learn and they're all equal and starting from scratch when they walk into my classroom, where my job is to treat each of them as in individual, to work within their talents, to raise their goals, and to help them accomplish more than they ever imagined.
But what I've found since you took over is that you play favorites and you fight for students who are fraternity presidents or children of donors. Remember how you weren't happy about a certain student being rejected from the Film Department's Production Option? Remember that? You weren't happy because you knew that student and you liked him, and you particularly liked his daddy's money covering our exorbitant out-of-state tuition. And, when that student was rejected, the first thing he did was protest simultaneously to the Department Chair and to You. Not to me (the person who signed the rejection letter), not to the Admissions Committee (the faculty members who rejected him based on his file). Nope, he wanted your help, and he got it. He even argued that he deserved special treatment because he was paying more than California kids paid. And you and your man Para didn't disagree.
Is this all coming back to you now, King?
The rejection letter had specifically invited that applicant (and all those rejected) to contact me and go over the reasons for the rejection, to make it a teachable moment and to caringly and carefully advise him as to curriculum specifics so that he could achieve all his goals and take the courses he wanted even without admission into the option. But that wasn't good enough for him. What was good enough for everybody else wasn't good enough for him. He went right to the King, and the King went to Para, and I got dumped on. The Film Department rejected seventy applicants to the Production Option that year. But neither you nor Para contacted me about any of those others, did you? And what was most ironic was that the applicant you were championing had received negative reviews from the very people he had listed as his recommenders!
Anyway, just in case you've forgotten this sorry chapter, I'll be writing it in a future installment of THUG, complete with documentation (although I will delete the applicant's name, because, in the end, I believe he did learn his lesson and did overcome the false sense of entitlement to which he'd been bred and you reinforced).
The fact is that CSULB has an endlessly diverse enrollment. Diverse cultures, diverse ethnicities, diverse languages. Up until recently, more than half the students were the first in their families to go to college, and most needed to work full-time outside of school in order to be able to afford to go to school. As well, English is a second language to many. And, with tremendous enrollment demand creating "impacted" majors which cannot admit you until your junior year, many disciplines keep trying unsuccessfully to cram four years of learning into two years of teaching. These are the realities that explain CSULB's sorry graduation rates, which have improved from utterly unconscionable to embarrassingly pathetic in the last decade. It has nothing to do with valedictorians or the "academically challenged". But maybe there is a causal aspect to having a white male dominated administration that does not come within a bus ride of mirroring the diverse student and teacher population it manages, let alone the city, county, and state venues within which it resides.
So, what has the King Alexander offered as his "trust me" solution to increasing CSULB graduation rates (other than freezing out those he considers inferior and unlikely to graduate)?
First, as overall admissions have been slashed, he has dramatically upped the admission of out-of-state and international students who pay vastly higher tuition and can afford to stay in school for as many years as it takes them to graduate. That's what's known as a "twofer". More income, more years of matriculation. Unfortunately, these students -- however worthy they may be -- are taking the spaces that should have gone to Californians whose taxes go to University funding. Indeed, the situation got so egregious during the middle of the recession, CSULB claimed that -- whoops! -- they'd accidentally made a mistake and sent out admission letters to a cohort of international students above and beyond enrollment limits. But, heck, why not just bill them for tuition and make room for them by shoehorning them in anyway? Not hardly fair to them, not hardly fair to residents who'd been rejected. But that's what happened. Even though no teachers thought the mistake was a mistake -- it was an obvious tactic to raise more money. Had it been a mistake, it could easily and timely have been undone. (You can find the contemporaneous e-mail exchange on this in the documents section at the end of this Installment Two.)
Finally, Alexander's latest "trust me" solution to increasing graduation rates is to spend money on hiring more student advisors. More money spent at the level of the administration. Money to be spent on people who, with only a few notable exceptions, haven't the slightest idea what really goes on in any of the classrooms and curricula they advise students about. So, what advice could they give Alexander's academically challenged, non-valedictorians? Take easy courses? Take stuff that doesn't challenge you? Take stuff where you won't learn much but, hey, a few years from now we'll hand you a degree? Is that Alexander's plan? No, his only plan is to get more money into administration. Period. Thank you Charlie Reed. Go back to Installment One if you want to understand that equation and how it inures to the benefit and self-produced self-image of Alexander and those like him.
In the meantime, down in the trenches, the teachers are only too happy to advise their students and help them in every way. But, giving more money or power to teachers would be a contradiction of the King Alexander way of doing things at a University, so it ain't gonna happen long as he's on the throne.
Now let's see how Alexander's headline quotes tie to this week's chapters of THUG.
We begin with Steven Spielberg.
PARA AND ALEXANDER
SLAUGHTER
THE GOLDEN GOOSE
(a) The Return of The Prodigal
As of 2001, Steven Spielberg was the most celebrated, honored, accomplished, visionary, important, (add hyperbole here) non-graduate in the history of California State University Long Beach.
That status would be rectified on May 30, 2002, when, wearing a cap, a gown, and a wide smile, Spielberg would "walk" with the rest of that year's graduates to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Film and Electronic Arts Department in the College of The Arts.
According to University recollections, back in the late 1960's Spielberg had left what was then called California State College, Long Beach, and what was then called the Radio TV Department, with about a year of courses left before graduation. Without question, he left because the brass ring was about to be handed him in the form of a term deal to be a director for Universal Studios, first assigned to television episodes and television movies, from where he would rocket to independence and stardom and an entertainment industry career that has no equal.
Also according to University recollections, Spielberg left because one particular professor -- a gentleman with an affinity for the bottle -- had accused Spielberg of being talentless and certain never to amount to anything, even as folks in Hollywood were gratefully "discovering" him and handing him funding and production services so he could make his next student film.
Finally, as is usual for film students, that last year of matriculation would have meant facing all those pesky general education courses that had been repeatedly pushed off in favor of filming stuff rather than studying stuff.
So, for more than thirty years, Spielberg had said little or nothing about his unfinished days at The Beach. And, if there's one truism in Hollywood, it's that no one ever asks a director or a writer or a producer where or if they went to college. It's simply irrelevant.
But then, according to University recollections, in 2001 Spielberg was reckoning with his daughter's graduation from Brown, and his "people" contacted CSULB to see what it would take for him to finish his degree as well.
Mind you, Steven Spielberg can have an honorary doctorate from any university in the world anytime he wants. Between his creative work, his global humanitarian efforts, and his drive to foment education and excite the desire for learning and communication, he's on everyone's wish list for awards and thanks. But what he wanted from CSULB was an earned degree, his degree, the degree he'd forsaken so long ago. And he wanted it on the same terms as everybody else. He wanted to follow course syllabi, to research and write assignments and term papers, to take tests and mid-terms and final exams. The only hitch was that he was out of the country or otherwise on movie sets for months on end, back to back to back, and so "monitored independent study" at a distance would have to substitute for actual classroom attendance. Without that agreement, Spielberg could not complete his matriculation. Were he to accede to blowing out of his production schedule, it would have a deleterious effect on an entire industry. It's really that simple.
But, for Spielberg, his request had an even larger and more beneficent motive. In the thirty plus years since he'd dropped out of college, at least 60,000 other CSULB students had done the same thing. And the only way they could ever come back and finish up would be to ditch their income and their careers and re-enroll to finish their degree programs within a set time. Obviously, for all but a handful, that was impossible. They could never hope to graduate. Then again, if the school would bend over backwards to create a way for Spielberg to take his courses without altering his life, that same process could and should be made available to the other 60,000 non-graduates. Out of Spielberg's personal educational accomplishment would come a legacy for so many and for all time.
Unfortunately, the stories at CSULB don't have the same happy endings as Steven Spielberg movies. The instant that Spielberg's "people" contacted CSULB in 2001, Film Department Chair Sharyn Blumenthal and College Dean Don Para each rubbed their hands in glee. This wasn't going to be a story of an institution rising to inspire students and taxpayers and the cause of education, this was going to be a cash-on-the-barrelhead shakedown that would pit Blumenthal and Para against each other in a fight for their careers, with collateral damage everywhere you turned.
(b) Out of The Frying Pan and Into The Fired
Professor Brian Alan Lane always begins his narrative film writing and production courses with a little speech.
"Congratulations and welcome to the production track," he says, "and congratulations for being megalomaniacs. Because that's what you are. Think about it. Each one of you in this room truly believes that every one of you owes him or her a hundred dollars. And, those people out in the corridor, you think each of them owes you a hundred dollars too. You think that everyone in every classroom all over this campus, and all your family and friends, and all the people you've never met, they all owe you a hundred dollars, each of them. You think that you have an idea for a story, a script, that is so important you need to take the next year or two of your life to write it, and your parents or others should subsidize you while you do so, and then, when that script is done, Hollywood studio moguls should leap to attention to throw tens of millions, maybe a hundred million dollars to produce your movie, and tens of thousands of people should put their careers on the line to work on your movie, and, once the movie is done, then those studio moguls should pony up millions more to market and distribute your movie, and, on a Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. America should hire a babysitter, head to the multiplex, pay for parking and dinner and two tickets to your movie, and maybe some sodas and popcorn and Milk Duds, all of which will cost them no less than one hundred dollars per person.
"So that's what you think you're worth, right now, as you sit here. You think that's you're due. You think everyone in the world owes you one hundred dollars. And I think that's megalomania, and I'm proud of you. Because you cannot succeed in the narrative theatrical film business unless you know for a fact that you are worth it. And yet you cannot succeed unless you are collaborative and compromising, even if you are the captain, the director or producer of a given project. And you also cannot succeed if you think filmmaking and film school are about learning how to light lights and aim cameras and position actors. Because film is first and foremost a technological medium and a business. The business we just discussed. But to understand the technology you need to know physics and chemistry and neurophysiology. You cannot be creative and unique within the technology unless you understand how it works and how it connects to human perception and human consciousness. And you cannot connect, you cannot find resonance with your audience unless the content, the vision of your film and its story is born of psychology and sociology and philosophy and religion and politics and law and education and war and peace and every other institution devised by human beings. Film school and filmmaking require the study of the entire history of human epistemology. Anything less, and you're a pretender, a copycat rather than a voice. And, while film may or may not be art, it is certainly artful when done right and with important intent. And that better be your intent. To matter. To make films that move us and to make us realize that you matter and that our hundred dollars was wonderfully well spent."
Lane's speech is designed to snap students out of vocational skill focus and into the scholarly and academic and literary gravitas of good filmmaking, a call to arms to treat their Bachelor's degree program as a complete liberal arts education.
It is the same intent that Spielberg espoused when he sought to complete his degree. It is a far cry from where his head was at when dropped out of college because all he wanted was a career.
By Fall 2002, when Lane arrived at CSULB just after Spielberg had walked for his diploma, Lane had crisscrossed Spielberg's path many times over many years, personally and professionally. And now those paths would cross again in ways most unexpected.
Chronologically, it had all begun in 1970 when Lane was a film student at UCLA and showed up at a post-production house in Hollywood to get some visual effects and titles made for his film, his magnum opus, the student film that would change the history of professional filmmaking. The same film that every student filmmaker makes, only to wake up later and hide it under their beds.
The post house was called CINEFX, and the owner was a lovely chap named Denis Hoffman, and hanging prominent on the wall was a film poster that depicted a guitar case and the title Amblin'. At the bottom of the poster was the announcement that Amblin' had won some big prize at the uber-prestigious Venice International Film Festival.
And Hoffman couldn't wait to tell Lane that he'd funded and produced Amblin' for this totally genius film student named Steven Spielberg who'd now left school and signed a big deal with Universal. Even better, Hoffman's contract with Spielberg gave him an option to hire Spielberg to direct a feature for him in the near future, and Hoffman had recently paid a USC film student to write a feature film script which Hoffman was going to take to Spielberg next week. It was to be the culmination of Hoffman's lifelong dream to cultivate young talent and produce feature films.
Lane didn't walk out of CINEFX that day, he floated out on a cloud of dreams and possibilities. Who knew that guys like Denis Hoffman were just through that next door looking for guys like Spielberg and, dare he even think it, Lane himself?
But, paths diverge, and dreams come true in ironic ways. Spielberg and Hoffman never made that next movie, but Spielberg quickly moved on to direct Duel and Sugarland Express and then a little thing called Jaws. Lane, seven years younger than Spielberg, continued on through graduate degrees in film and in law, his next Spielberg flyby happening in the intellectual ether when the great director and critic Francois Truffaut fell for what had been Lane's MFA thesis script and championed it into a development deal with a film company, Lane's first paycheck from the industry.
Truffaut did not want to direct a film in English at that time, and so Lane pushed for trying to get Spielberg to direct, fond of the way Spielberg could inject comedy into life and death situations on screen. But Truffaut, likewise a fan of Spielberg's, felt that Spielberg was "not yet comfortable in the dark" (although Truffaut said it in French, so it sounded much more portentuous and rather sexy), and the fact was that Lane's script was a dark comedy about death. Truffaut believed that it would take a "European sensibility", a "European history" to handle the material, and he pointed Lane to European directors who had been slashed and seared by the aftermath of war and forcibly confined by the delusions of tyranny. War is, after all, the massiveness of death, and its ripples resonate without heed of time.
And, of course, Truffaut was right. Lane's film script was not about to be made by an American studio or made well by an American director at the time. Decades later, the dramatic stageplay palimpsest of Lane's work would succeed on home soil; and, after missing the target on 1941, Spielberg would trade comic relief for courage and become the greatest dramatic war film director ever, with a succession of works that captured the big picture and the tiniest human nuance at the same time. Spielberg now owns war, and with it, death.
Meanwhile, as our chronology of Lane/Spielberg "near misses" comes to the late 1970's, Lane found he had a great friend in his class at the University of Southern California law school. And that friend, Jerry, would romance and eventually marry Spielberg's sister, Susie. Lane saw Susie on many occasions, but not Spielberg. Similarly, in the next years, Lane's surrogate mother Aunt Lorraine would spend endless coffee klatching with Spielberg's mom at the latter's kosher cafe The Milky Way in Beverly Hills. Stories of Spielberg from one and all, but no direct contact. Nonetheless, Lane began to get a true sense of the man from the consistency of the stories about him.
Next, Lane would become longtime close friends and professional colleague of fabled writer/producer William Link who, with his writing partner Richard Levinson, created Columbo and Murder, She Wrote and about two dozen others series and award-winning TV movies and Broadway plays. The Spielberg tie? As Link tells it, he and Levinson tricked Spielberg into directing a Columbo when Spielberg was first at Universal, and then they were stupid enough to turn down writing the script for Jaws when Spielberg offered it to them. "Who wants to see a movie about a fish?" they said to Spielberg. But when Link heard how incredible the preview screenings were performing, he snuck out and stocked up on Universal stock. Later, Spielberg created a small role for Link in Close Encounters of The Third Kind, but it was dropped from the production schedule when externalities forced a change in schedule. Of course, Truffaut notably played in the film as he and Spielberg shared a mutual admiration society. Once again, Lane heard stories, but do stories really make the man?
Then, as 1990 beckoned, Lane became good friends with an industry wunderkind who would become one of Spielberg's handpicked first presidents at Dreamworks SKG. And, later, by the purest and most accidental of coincidences, that friend would have a longtime professional assistant whose daughter would attend and graduate from none other than the Film program at CSULB. It is indeed a small world and the entertainment industry is a vastly small business.
Finally finally finally, in the early 90's, after a decade as a successful TV and movie writer and showrunner, Lane was winding down a multi-year series of deals at Tri-Star Pictures, a successful working relationship with Gene Roddenberry at Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the creation of A&E's first original dramatic series, among other projects, when Lane's agent called. Seemed that a development executive at Amblin' TV wanted Lane to come in and tell them what he wanted to do next, creatively-speaking. In particular, the executive had suggested that Mr. Spielberg was interested in hearing more about a period adventure novel that Lane was writing and had pre-sold to Putnam's for publication some years before, a Victorian murder mystery starring Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, with Bismarck as the villain, and a vast trove of carefully researched and credible steampunk technology, including submarines.
Lane had to admit that the piece was the most "Spielbergian" piece he'd ever embarked on. But, much as he was thrilled to talk to Amblin' about it, their apparent interest was in doing it as an ABC mini-series starring Fred Savage (star of The Wonder Years at the time), and Lane wasn't sanguine about knocking out the script before finishing the book. Twice before he'd had book projects pre-empted by script deals, and he'd found that writing the script sapped him of the conviction needed to go back to finish writing the book. Reducing a big story to its essential nature for a script made the subsequent book feel bloated at best. Better to complete the novel and then adapt it to other media, a process which requires a fresh and energized take on the material.
But of course Lane went to the meeting at Amblin' TV, sitting down with the one executive, soon joined by others, including company president Tony Thomopoulos who was a mutual friend with a writer/producer friend of Lane's from Thomopoulos' days at KABC-TV. All in all it was a great and comfortable meeting, and Lane was hooked. He went home and worked at revising the book outline by creating a lead character who could be played by Fred Savage. When Lane returned to Amblin' for the next meeting, all the same execs were there, and Steven Spielberg too. And, the next meeting after that, Spielberg was back.
Even though he was about to head off to do Jurassic Park and Schindler's List consecutively on location, Spielberg still found time to pop into those meetings, fully up to speed on the material and offering critical creative suggestions.
Lane vividly remembers the energy and the passion of Spielberg, his vast ability to problem-solve, and that he treated all projects with equal intensity and involvement, never giving less than all of himself to everything.
For that very reason, Lane's project (and the other longform projects at Amblin' TV) suddenly wound up tabled. Spielberg himself explained it in front of Lane, that it was as much work for Spielberg to be a producer on a longform TV project as it was for him to direct and produce a feature film, and he had to face the fact that he was just then out of time. In addition to Spielberg's immediately impending features, Amblin' was now greenlighted to production on The Class of '61, a Civil War TV movie, and the company's slate and Spielberg's attention was full up. As for Lane, he was sorry but he was relieved. It was meant for his project to be a novel first and a movie second, and a period piece is by definition timeless, so some day perhaps it would fall into Spielberg's lap again.
Now jumpcut, as we say in the film business. Jumpcut to Fall 2002. Interior. The UTC Building at CSULB. Office of FEA Chair Sharyn Blumenthal. In May, Spielberg had graduated. Only days before, imbibing the Spielberg intoxicant, CSULB President Maxson had momentarily taken leave of his senses, making a big, surprise, congratulatory "Thank you for getting Spielberg graduated!" presentation (including flowers) to Blumenthal at the last campus-wide Academic Senate session before Spielberg's graduation. Needless to say, not something Maxson did every time a drop-out dropped back in. And, even more needless to say, not something anyone dared tell Spielberg about. But it was something that Blumenthal treated as etched in gold, because, at the time, she got Maxson to agree that when Spielberg made the vast donation that Blumenthal was certain would be forthcoming, it would go to FEA and be under Blumenthal's control.
So, before the ink had dried on Spielberg's diploma, Blumenthal had a colleague drafting a massive proposal for a massive project, literally The Institute for Creative Thinking that she wanted Spielberg to build. She'd basically carbon copied USC's Annenberg School, with the main difference being that she would personally run the CSULB version of it. That was its real purpose. And, in Fall 2002, while Blumenthal insisted that she was in personal touch with Spielberg and that he was "all in" as well as slipping her anonymous $10,000 donations when she requested them, Lane was not only dubious, he was appalled.
But, at the same time, across the quad and in the offices of The College of The Arts, then Dean Para was telling Lane the same thing, that the school was anticipating lots of money out of Spielberg, and Para's only concern was that it not be controlled by Blumenthal, regardless of what Maxson might have said without thinking it through. Para wanted to spread the wealth to all six departments over which he lorded -- Art, Dance, Design, Film, Music, Theatre Arts -- so he could hit his fundraising targets and cement his tenure as Dean. For Para, he had one more year to reel in the Spielberg fortune in time to get another three year contract for himself.
So, as Blumenthal kept devising proposals for projects that Spielberg could fund on her behalf, Para began drafting inter-disciplinary proposals, taking the logical position that all the disciplines in the arts were contributors to filmmaking. Seriously, don't films require music? And art design? And acting? And body movement?
In Fall 2002, Lane walked out of Hollywood and into this scene and was positively mortified. Years earlier he'd picked up an expression from his then pal, entertainment monster lawyer Ernie Del, and it perfectly fit the way Blumenthal and Para were behaving. "Amateur Nite in Dixie" was the expression.
See, the industry press was already questioning whether Spielberg had actually earned his degree, and outwardly the University was going to great lengths to assure the world that Spielberg had done all the work and been treated just like any other returning student. After all, that had been Spielberg's intent, and he'd done his part.
But the University never did theirs. They had no idea how to turn a good thing into a great thing, no idea how to follow the lead that Spielberg had so painstakingly laid out for them. The school was giddy at their momentary moment of reflected celebrity, and they didn't just drop the ball, they spiked it and spun it like a top and dervish danced until the moon was full.
After publicizing their photos of Spielberg in cap and gown, CSULB did not open its doors to those 60,000 other drop-out students. Whether in 2002 or today or any years in between, if you want to come back to finish what you started at CSULB you have to come to class just like everybody else, except Steven Spielberg. And, you have to graduate by current curriculum requirements, meaning you probably have more and different classes to take now than you had remaining when you first dropped out. And, you may not even be allowed back in at all, by current entrance standards. Bottom line: no one makes it easy on you to come back. There ain't no welcome mat for late bloomers, and no respite for regret. Again, unless you're Steven Spielberg. Or unless the school's current president thinks you or your parents have big money to donate.
So, as Spielberg was graduating, Lane was 100% certain that there was no way Spielberg was contemplating any sort of donation to CSULB at that time, nor did Lane think he should. Better for Spielberg to use his muscle to radically improve the way CSULB did things, not just throw money at them and play into Charlie Reed's "trust me" campaign.
But Blumenthal and Para were undeterred. And they had a supporter in imposter Michael Berlin, who'd attended the Spielberg graduation even before he had the job offer from CSULB, renting a cap and gown so he could hang with Spielberg and lobby for writing jobs which he desperately wanted instead of teaching.
The hilarious thing about Berlin's performance at the Spielberg graduation is that he was like the character Zelig in Woody Allen's movie of the same name. Until recently, the FEA lobby photo display case and the FEA website contained picture after picture of Spielberg graduating, and Michael Berlin was in them all. Now he's still in some, while photoshopped out of others. At that graduation, he was all over Spielberg like a cheap suit.
Needless to say, Lane did not attend the Spielberg graduation. He never even considered it. He didn't work there yet. Graduations are for the graduates and their teachers and their families to share this grand and frozen shutter in time; anyone else is an interloper.
As Fall 2002 led into Spring 2003, Lane kept trying to convince Blumenthal to back off Spielberg before she destroyed the fragile rapport that had been rebuilt after so many decades. But Lane knew Blumenthal would never listen.
Lane had first met Blumenthal when he was interviewed for his job in April 2002; she'd arranged for him to meet her for lunch on campus, just the two of them. It was an interior location, but Blumenthal wore dark sunglasses the entire time, and Lane could tell this was some sort of interview trick she'd learned, making it hard to read her reactions. But, since he was in on the trick, Lane found it was easy to see what was what, particularly when Blumenthal kept insisting that "It's so funny, you're coming in and I'm going out," as she explained that she'd just completed a Holocaust documentary and was in post-production on a very personal creative non-fiction memoir feature film, and so she was finally planning on leaving academia for the bright lights of Hollywood after all these years. To that end, she let it be known that she would welcome Lane's help in meeting agents and managers, and having Lane help her write out her biography page and credits, as well as draft teasers for her feature film and even give her a good title for it. Blumenthal counted on Lane to liaise her into the industry.
But first, she wanted to question him about his teaching of scriptwriting. "What would you say to a student who wanted to write a short script that begins with a woman -- a mother -- standing on the runway of a rural airport, watching a small plane piloted by her son take off and fly up over the hills, and disappear into the distance? If a student told you that idea, how would you suggest it be written?"
Lane didn't have to be Freud or even Dr. Phil to know that this was either a story about a mother's fear of letting go, the irrational but very real and simultaneous fear that she had not done enough and that she might be forgotten, or it was a story about a mother who had had been horrible and deservedly lost her son. The only issue was which mother Blumenthal was, because clearly she was the mother in this "student's" film idea. Not a question you really want to face in a job interview.
So Lane said to Blumenthal, "Well, you've already told me the story. The viewers will see themselves in it, whatever and whoever they are."
"My son's a pilot," said Blumenthal, "a commercial airline pilot. The last time he was in town, with my grandchild, he didn't call me until he was back at the airport and leaving."
Now Lane knew which kind of mother Blumenthal was. This would be confirmed when Blumenthal's feature, which she'd titled Re-making Silverman and he re-titled for her as Take Two, proved to be the story of a mother who up and abandoned her dentist husband and six year old son to "become" a lesbian and a filmmaker.
In light of everything he saw and heard about Blumenthal, Lane decided the best for all concerned was to help her try to fulfill her quest to exit the University. But as Lane would conclude about her and many many folks he would meet in academia, from administrators to teachers to staff, even though they really need to go and leave the University where they are terribly unproductive, they won't go until they have somewhere to go, and they never have anywhere to go. These are people who are risk-averse and don't much believe in themselves, no matter how loudly they proclaim that more is due them. There is no work for them outside academia. It is a very bizarre population, and the opposite of anything Lane knew.
In Hollywood (once you take nepotism out of the equation), past success may get you in a door but every project is a new project and an opportunity to judge you from scratch, hence the famous question from each and every employer: "What have you done for me lately?"
Lane knew that the Hollywood gate key for Blumenthal was going to have to be her feature film. Lane gave DVDs of it to his manager (Barry Krost) and his agent (Mitch Stein). A few days later, Stein told Lane: "I watched a few minutes of it and I didn't understand what was going on. The production quality was odd, not professional. This is a student film, right?" Lane said nothing in reply. Then Krost called up Lane. "Brian, you've spent twenty-five years establishing your honor as a person and your credibility as a 'writer's writer' -- don't throw it away now," said Krost. To which Lane gamely tried to make a case: "Barry, I know it's not a commercial film, that's not her intent, but it is independent and experimental and personal." Krost quickly headed that lob into the goal: "If it's so personal, she should keep it to herself," he said. Even worse was the opinion of Lane's then wife, who woke up from a dead sleep while Lane was watching the film one night. "What the fuck is that?" she said, squinting and twisted around toward the TV. "It's Sharyn's movie," said Lane. "Yeah," said Lane's then wife, "well tell Sharyn her movie's so shitty I couldn't even sleep through it." And she piled pillows atop her head to drown out the sights and sounds. Lane sighed. Getting Blumenthal out of CSULB and into Hollywood was mission impossible.
But, when Lane gave Blumenthal the bad news, she didn't bat an eye; she thanked Lane for his efforts and shifted seamlessly over to her Spielberg focus. Then, in early Spring when Para showed the first phase of his inter-disciplinary plan (with his home department, Music, getting new curriculum responsibility for aspects of film projects), Blumenthal blew a gasket. She made her FEA faculty sneak away from Long Beach and meet her at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant in Hollywood where she quickly plotted an assault on Para's Deanship, claiming he was trying to co-opt the Spielberg donation that did not yet exist.
In fact, Blumenthal was quite right about Para, but Lane didn't see it, he believed Para's private insistence that the inter-disciplinary initiative was a University-wide mandate and had nothing to do with Spielberg. Regardless, Lane's first concern was that everyone leave Spielberg alone and let the guy enjoy the accomplishment that his degree represented. Secondly, for Lane, it was critical that Spielberg be positive about CSULB, not that he give any money. Lane was cultivating many entertainment industry friends and contacts and businesses to tie themselves to CSULB, for jobs and internships and projects and equipment and services they could offer to students, as well as for donations. Lane's own experience was that he had lived on a private pond in Belmont Shore, just a stone's throw from CSULB from 1986-1994, and yet he'd never once ventured to the campus. And he knew that folks in the entertainment industry regularly dropped in on USC and UCLA and the AFI, and even CSUN and Loyola, but all felt that Long Beach was in a different time zone. Lane knew no one in the biz who had ever driven down to CSULB, and he was absolutely determined to change that. But if Spielberg pissed on CSULB, then that would end that dream. Spielberg's opinion mattered.
To Blumenthal, only her own opinion mattered, and she was following the money. She had her eye on the Spielberg prize, and she was not about to let Lane get in her way. She quickly sent around mass e-mails critical of Lane, separating him from the rest of the faculty herd. She alleged that Lane was in on Para's plot to "steal" the Spielberg money. She criticized the scripts coming out of Lane's students and denied them opportunity for project funding. And, as Lane's and Berlin's and other faculty personnel reviews impended, Blumenthal made sure to bring in a ringer from outside the Film Department to be on that Retention, Tenure & Promotion (RTP) Committee just for Lane's review and no one else's. (That ringer would show up at the FEA RTP committee meeting with his review pre-written even before discussion and without him ever observing Lane's classes as required, but that saga will await a later chapter in this tome.)
The critical thing that Blumenthal did (and which led to her undoing as FEA Chair in March 2003) was, just after Para had a meeting with all FEA faculty to become the official governor of any Spielberg donation proposals, Blumenthal sent Lane a legally required "mentoring" e-mail in which she explained in detail what she needed him to do to prepare his personal/personnel file of work for review by the FEA RTP committee. But, in that same e-mail, she let Lane know that he needed to get on board her plan to attack Para for attempting to co-opt the Spielberg donation.
That e-mail was a pristine case of workplace threat and conflict of interest, and Lane forwarded it immediately to Dean Para. (You can find that e-mail and subsequent correspondence in the documents section of this Installment Two.)
It was the last straw for Para, the last spring for the Blumenthal mousetrap he'd been soldering together for quite some time. Para had a stockpile of complaints and grievances against Blumenthal, as well as grievances from her and a friend of hers against him. But now, this e-mail to Lane had tipped the scales. Para could take himself out of the equation and re-position the ostensible dynamic: by gosh, this wasn't a squabble between him and Blumenthal, this was Blumenthal violating policy in order to target a new Professor who'd been nothing short of an immediate godsend to FEA, to COTA, and to the Dean's fundraising targets. This Professor was already the highest donating Professor in COTA, and he'd amped up departmental curriculum and gotten an MFA Program Proposal through the first committees after starting from scratch. The Provost (Dr. Gary Reichard) loved this guy and saw him as the bright and shining future of the University.
So, Para told Lane to sit tight: Para was going up the food chain to Academic Affairs, every meticulous step all the way to the Provost, and would have a plan of counter-attack in short order. All t's would be crossed and all i's would be dotted, because Para wanted to end Blumenthal's Chairship and he did not want to leave her any opening to appeal the result by criticizing the process. Para wanted Blumenthal out and his own power consolidated, particularly as it related to this Spielberg business.
Immediately, the higher-ups gave Para permission to get Blumenthal to resign or be fired as Chair. With the Chairship came an approximately 10% pay boost, and Blumenthal's appointment as Chair had another year and a half to run. Para didn't want Blumenthal to continue to get the extra pay after she would be out as Chair, particularly since that impacted FEA's and COTA's budgets, but that would be up to Academic Affairs to deal with later. Their best advice to him now was to get Blumenthal to resign because then she'd have a tougher time trying to get the Union (the CFA) to help her claim any more money was due her.
Exactly one week after Blumenthal had sent her not-so-veiled e-mail threat to Lane, Para met with her. It was short meeting. When it adjourned, both she and he announced that she'd resigned as Chair. Soon enough, she and her CFA representative would tweak that announcement to say she'd actually been fired. And, yes, according to Para she did get continue to get her extra pay for a time, even though he was not happy about it.
"Congratulations and welcome to the production track," he says, "and congratulations for being megalomaniacs. Because that's what you are. Think about it. Each one of you in this room truly believes that every one of you owes him or her a hundred dollars. And, those people out in the corridor, you think each of them owes you a hundred dollars too. You think that everyone in every classroom all over this campus, and all your family and friends, and all the people you've never met, they all owe you a hundred dollars, each of them. You think that you have an idea for a story, a script, that is so important you need to take the next year or two of your life to write it, and your parents or others should subsidize you while you do so, and then, when that script is done, Hollywood studio moguls should leap to attention to throw tens of millions, maybe a hundred million dollars to produce your movie, and tens of thousands of people should put their careers on the line to work on your movie, and, once the movie is done, then those studio moguls should pony up millions more to market and distribute your movie, and, on a Saturday night, Mr. and Mrs. America should hire a babysitter, head to the multiplex, pay for parking and dinner and two tickets to your movie, and maybe some sodas and popcorn and Milk Duds, all of which will cost them no less than one hundred dollars per person.
Lane's speech is designed to snap students out of vocational skill focus and into the scholarly and academic and literary gravitas of good filmmaking, a call to arms to treat their Bachelor's degree program as a complete liberal arts education.
It is the same intent that Spielberg espoused when he sought to complete his degree. It is a far cry from where his head was at when dropped out of college because all he wanted was a career.
By Fall 2002, when Lane arrived at CSULB just after Spielberg had walked for his diploma, Lane had crisscrossed Spielberg's path many times over many years, personally and professionally. And now those paths would cross again in ways most unexpected.
Chronologically, it had all begun in 1970 when Lane was a film student at UCLA and showed up at a post-production house in Hollywood to get some visual effects and titles made for his film, his magnum opus, the student film that would change the history of professional filmmaking. The same film that every student filmmaker makes, only to wake up later and hide it under their beds.
The post house was called CINEFX, and the owner was a lovely chap named Denis Hoffman, and hanging prominent on the wall was a film poster that depicted a guitar case and the title Amblin'. At the bottom of the poster was the announcement that Amblin' had won some big prize at the uber-prestigious Venice International Film Festival.
And Hoffman couldn't wait to tell Lane that he'd funded and produced Amblin' for this totally genius film student named Steven Spielberg who'd now left school and signed a big deal with Universal. Even better, Hoffman's contract with Spielberg gave him an option to hire Spielberg to direct a feature for him in the near future, and Hoffman had recently paid a USC film student to write a feature film script which Hoffman was going to take to Spielberg next week. It was to be the culmination of Hoffman's lifelong dream to cultivate young talent and produce feature films.
Lane didn't walk out of CINEFX that day, he floated out on a cloud of dreams and possibilities. Who knew that guys like Denis Hoffman were just through that next door looking for guys like Spielberg and, dare he even think it, Lane himself?
But, paths diverge, and dreams come true in ironic ways. Spielberg and Hoffman never made that next movie, but Spielberg quickly moved on to direct Duel and Sugarland Express and then a little thing called Jaws. Lane, seven years younger than Spielberg, continued on through graduate degrees in film and in law, his next Spielberg flyby happening in the intellectual ether when the great director and critic Francois Truffaut fell for what had been Lane's MFA thesis script and championed it into a development deal with a film company, Lane's first paycheck from the industry.
Truffaut did not want to direct a film in English at that time, and so Lane pushed for trying to get Spielberg to direct, fond of the way Spielberg could inject comedy into life and death situations on screen. But Truffaut, likewise a fan of Spielberg's, felt that Spielberg was "not yet comfortable in the dark" (although Truffaut said it in French, so it sounded much more portentuous and rather sexy), and the fact was that Lane's script was a dark comedy about death. Truffaut believed that it would take a "European sensibility", a "European history" to handle the material, and he pointed Lane to European directors who had been slashed and seared by the aftermath of war and forcibly confined by the delusions of tyranny. War is, after all, the massiveness of death, and its ripples resonate without heed of time.
And, of course, Truffaut was right. Lane's film script was not about to be made by an American studio or made well by an American director at the time. Decades later, the dramatic stageplay palimpsest of Lane's work would succeed on home soil; and, after missing the target on 1941, Spielberg would trade comic relief for courage and become the greatest dramatic war film director ever, with a succession of works that captured the big picture and the tiniest human nuance at the same time. Spielberg now owns war, and with it, death.
Meanwhile, as our chronology of Lane/Spielberg "near misses" comes to the late 1970's, Lane found he had a great friend in his class at the University of Southern California law school. And that friend, Jerry, would romance and eventually marry Spielberg's sister, Susie. Lane saw Susie on many occasions, but not Spielberg. Similarly, in the next years, Lane's surrogate mother Aunt Lorraine would spend endless coffee klatching with Spielberg's mom at the latter's kosher cafe The Milky Way in Beverly Hills. Stories of Spielberg from one and all, but no direct contact. Nonetheless, Lane began to get a true sense of the man from the consistency of the stories about him.
Next, Lane would become longtime close friends and professional colleague of fabled writer/producer William Link who, with his writing partner Richard Levinson, created Columbo and Murder, She Wrote and about two dozen others series and award-winning TV movies and Broadway plays. The Spielberg tie? As Link tells it, he and Levinson tricked Spielberg into directing a Columbo when Spielberg was first at Universal, and then they were stupid enough to turn down writing the script for Jaws when Spielberg offered it to them. "Who wants to see a movie about a fish?" they said to Spielberg. But when Link heard how incredible the preview screenings were performing, he snuck out and stocked up on Universal stock. Later, Spielberg created a small role for Link in Close Encounters of The Third Kind, but it was dropped from the production schedule when externalities forced a change in schedule. Of course, Truffaut notably played in the film as he and Spielberg shared a mutual admiration society. Once again, Lane heard stories, but do stories really make the man?
Then, as 1990 beckoned, Lane became good friends with an industry wunderkind who would become one of Spielberg's handpicked first presidents at Dreamworks SKG. And, later, by the purest and most accidental of coincidences, that friend would have a longtime professional assistant whose daughter would attend and graduate from none other than the Film program at CSULB. It is indeed a small world and the entertainment industry is a vastly small business.
Finally finally finally, in the early 90's, after a decade as a successful TV and movie writer and showrunner, Lane was winding down a multi-year series of deals at Tri-Star Pictures, a successful working relationship with Gene Roddenberry at Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the creation of A&E's first original dramatic series, among other projects, when Lane's agent called. Seemed that a development executive at Amblin' TV wanted Lane to come in and tell them what he wanted to do next, creatively-speaking. In particular, the executive had suggested that Mr. Spielberg was interested in hearing more about a period adventure novel that Lane was writing and had pre-sold to Putnam's for publication some years before, a Victorian murder mystery starring Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, with Bismarck as the villain, and a vast trove of carefully researched and credible steampunk technology, including submarines.
Lane had to admit that the piece was the most "Spielbergian" piece he'd ever embarked on. But, much as he was thrilled to talk to Amblin' about it, their apparent interest was in doing it as an ABC mini-series starring Fred Savage (star of The Wonder Years at the time), and Lane wasn't sanguine about knocking out the script before finishing the book. Twice before he'd had book projects pre-empted by script deals, and he'd found that writing the script sapped him of the conviction needed to go back to finish writing the book. Reducing a big story to its essential nature for a script made the subsequent book feel bloated at best. Better to complete the novel and then adapt it to other media, a process which requires a fresh and energized take on the material.
But of course Lane went to the meeting at Amblin' TV, sitting down with the one executive, soon joined by others, including company president Tony Thomopoulos who was a mutual friend with a writer/producer friend of Lane's from Thomopoulos' days at KABC-TV. All in all it was a great and comfortable meeting, and Lane was hooked. He went home and worked at revising the book outline by creating a lead character who could be played by Fred Savage. When Lane returned to Amblin' for the next meeting, all the same execs were there, and Steven Spielberg too. And, the next meeting after that, Spielberg was back.
Even though he was about to head off to do Jurassic Park and Schindler's List consecutively on location, Spielberg still found time to pop into those meetings, fully up to speed on the material and offering critical creative suggestions.
Lane vividly remembers the energy and the passion of Spielberg, his vast ability to problem-solve, and that he treated all projects with equal intensity and involvement, never giving less than all of himself to everything.
For that very reason, Lane's project (and the other longform projects at Amblin' TV) suddenly wound up tabled. Spielberg himself explained it in front of Lane, that it was as much work for Spielberg to be a producer on a longform TV project as it was for him to direct and produce a feature film, and he had to face the fact that he was just then out of time. In addition to Spielberg's immediately impending features, Amblin' was now greenlighted to production on The Class of '61, a Civil War TV movie, and the company's slate and Spielberg's attention was full up. As for Lane, he was sorry but he was relieved. It was meant for his project to be a novel first and a movie second, and a period piece is by definition timeless, so some day perhaps it would fall into Spielberg's lap again.
Now jumpcut, as we say in the film business. Jumpcut to Fall 2002. Interior. The UTC Building at CSULB. Office of FEA Chair Sharyn Blumenthal. In May, Spielberg had graduated. Only days before, imbibing the Spielberg intoxicant, CSULB President Maxson had momentarily taken leave of his senses, making a big, surprise, congratulatory "Thank you for getting Spielberg graduated!" presentation (including flowers) to Blumenthal at the last campus-wide Academic Senate session before Spielberg's graduation. Needless to say, not something Maxson did every time a drop-out dropped back in. And, even more needless to say, not something anyone dared tell Spielberg about. But it was something that Blumenthal treated as etched in gold, because, at the time, she got Maxson to agree that when Spielberg made the vast donation that Blumenthal was certain would be forthcoming, it would go to FEA and be under Blumenthal's control.
So, before the ink had dried on Spielberg's diploma, Blumenthal had a colleague drafting a massive proposal for a massive project, literally The Institute for Creative Thinking that she wanted Spielberg to build. She'd basically carbon copied USC's Annenberg School, with the main difference being that she would personally run the CSULB version of it. That was its real purpose. And, in Fall 2002, while Blumenthal insisted that she was in personal touch with Spielberg and that he was "all in" as well as slipping her anonymous $10,000 donations when she requested them, Lane was not only dubious, he was appalled.
But, at the same time, across the quad and in the offices of The College of The Arts, then Dean Para was telling Lane the same thing, that the school was anticipating lots of money out of Spielberg, and Para's only concern was that it not be controlled by Blumenthal, regardless of what Maxson might have said without thinking it through. Para wanted to spread the wealth to all six departments over which he lorded -- Art, Dance, Design, Film, Music, Theatre Arts -- so he could hit his fundraising targets and cement his tenure as Dean. For Para, he had one more year to reel in the Spielberg fortune in time to get another three year contract for himself.
So, as Blumenthal kept devising proposals for projects that Spielberg could fund on her behalf, Para began drafting inter-disciplinary proposals, taking the logical position that all the disciplines in the arts were contributors to filmmaking. Seriously, don't films require music? And art design? And acting? And body movement?
In Fall 2002, Lane walked out of Hollywood and into this scene and was positively mortified. Years earlier he'd picked up an expression from his then pal, entertainment monster lawyer Ernie Del, and it perfectly fit the way Blumenthal and Para were behaving. "Amateur Nite in Dixie" was the expression.
See, the industry press was already questioning whether Spielberg had actually earned his degree, and outwardly the University was going to great lengths to assure the world that Spielberg had done all the work and been treated just like any other returning student. After all, that had been Spielberg's intent, and he'd done his part.
But the University never did theirs. They had no idea how to turn a good thing into a great thing, no idea how to follow the lead that Spielberg had so painstakingly laid out for them. The school was giddy at their momentary moment of reflected celebrity, and they didn't just drop the ball, they spiked it and spun it like a top and dervish danced until the moon was full.
After publicizing their photos of Spielberg in cap and gown, CSULB did not open its doors to those 60,000 other drop-out students. Whether in 2002 or today or any years in between, if you want to come back to finish what you started at CSULB you have to come to class just like everybody else, except Steven Spielberg. And, you have to graduate by current curriculum requirements, meaning you probably have more and different classes to take now than you had remaining when you first dropped out. And, you may not even be allowed back in at all, by current entrance standards. Bottom line: no one makes it easy on you to come back. There ain't no welcome mat for late bloomers, and no respite for regret. Again, unless you're Steven Spielberg. Or unless the school's current president thinks you or your parents have big money to donate.
So, as Spielberg was graduating, Lane was 100% certain that there was no way Spielberg was contemplating any sort of donation to CSULB at that time, nor did Lane think he should. Better for Spielberg to use his muscle to radically improve the way CSULB did things, not just throw money at them and play into Charlie Reed's "trust me" campaign.
But Blumenthal and Para were undeterred. And they had a supporter in imposter Michael Berlin, who'd attended the Spielberg graduation even before he had the job offer from CSULB, renting a cap and gown so he could hang with Spielberg and lobby for writing jobs which he desperately wanted instead of teaching.
The hilarious thing about Berlin's performance at the Spielberg graduation is that he was like the character Zelig in Woody Allen's movie of the same name. Until recently, the FEA lobby photo display case and the FEA website contained picture after picture of Spielberg graduating, and Michael Berlin was in them all. Now he's still in some, while photoshopped out of others. At that graduation, he was all over Spielberg like a cheap suit.
Needless to say, Lane did not attend the Spielberg graduation. He never even considered it. He didn't work there yet. Graduations are for the graduates and their teachers and their families to share this grand and frozen shutter in time; anyone else is an interloper.
As Fall 2002 led into Spring 2003, Lane kept trying to convince Blumenthal to back off Spielberg before she destroyed the fragile rapport that had been rebuilt after so many decades. But Lane knew Blumenthal would never listen.
Lane had first met Blumenthal when he was interviewed for his job in April 2002; she'd arranged for him to meet her for lunch on campus, just the two of them. It was an interior location, but Blumenthal wore dark sunglasses the entire time, and Lane could tell this was some sort of interview trick she'd learned, making it hard to read her reactions. But, since he was in on the trick, Lane found it was easy to see what was what, particularly when Blumenthal kept insisting that "It's so funny, you're coming in and I'm going out," as she explained that she'd just completed a Holocaust documentary and was in post-production on a very personal creative non-fiction memoir feature film, and so she was finally planning on leaving academia for the bright lights of Hollywood after all these years. To that end, she let it be known that she would welcome Lane's help in meeting agents and managers, and having Lane help her write out her biography page and credits, as well as draft teasers for her feature film and even give her a good title for it. Blumenthal counted on Lane to liaise her into the industry.
But first, she wanted to question him about his teaching of scriptwriting. "What would you say to a student who wanted to write a short script that begins with a woman -- a mother -- standing on the runway of a rural airport, watching a small plane piloted by her son take off and fly up over the hills, and disappear into the distance? If a student told you that idea, how would you suggest it be written?"
Lane didn't have to be Freud or even Dr. Phil to know that this was either a story about a mother's fear of letting go, the irrational but very real and simultaneous fear that she had not done enough and that she might be forgotten, or it was a story about a mother who had had been horrible and deservedly lost her son. The only issue was which mother Blumenthal was, because clearly she was the mother in this "student's" film idea. Not a question you really want to face in a job interview.
So Lane said to Blumenthal, "Well, you've already told me the story. The viewers will see themselves in it, whatever and whoever they are."
"My son's a pilot," said Blumenthal, "a commercial airline pilot. The last time he was in town, with my grandchild, he didn't call me until he was back at the airport and leaving."
Now Lane knew which kind of mother Blumenthal was. This would be confirmed when Blumenthal's feature, which she'd titled Re-making Silverman and he re-titled for her as Take Two, proved to be the story of a mother who up and abandoned her dentist husband and six year old son to "become" a lesbian and a filmmaker.
In light of everything he saw and heard about Blumenthal, Lane decided the best for all concerned was to help her try to fulfill her quest to exit the University. But as Lane would conclude about her and many many folks he would meet in academia, from administrators to teachers to staff, even though they really need to go and leave the University where they are terribly unproductive, they won't go until they have somewhere to go, and they never have anywhere to go. These are people who are risk-averse and don't much believe in themselves, no matter how loudly they proclaim that more is due them. There is no work for them outside academia. It is a very bizarre population, and the opposite of anything Lane knew.
In Hollywood (once you take nepotism out of the equation), past success may get you in a door but every project is a new project and an opportunity to judge you from scratch, hence the famous question from each and every employer: "What have you done for me lately?"
Lane knew that the Hollywood gate key for Blumenthal was going to have to be her feature film. Lane gave DVDs of it to his manager (Barry Krost) and his agent (Mitch Stein). A few days later, Stein told Lane: "I watched a few minutes of it and I didn't understand what was going on. The production quality was odd, not professional. This is a student film, right?" Lane said nothing in reply. Then Krost called up Lane. "Brian, you've spent twenty-five years establishing your honor as a person and your credibility as a 'writer's writer' -- don't throw it away now," said Krost. To which Lane gamely tried to make a case: "Barry, I know it's not a commercial film, that's not her intent, but it is independent and experimental and personal." Krost quickly headed that lob into the goal: "If it's so personal, she should keep it to herself," he said. Even worse was the opinion of Lane's then wife, who woke up from a dead sleep while Lane was watching the film one night. "What the fuck is that?" she said, squinting and twisted around toward the TV. "It's Sharyn's movie," said Lane. "Yeah," said Lane's then wife, "well tell Sharyn her movie's so shitty I couldn't even sleep through it." And she piled pillows atop her head to drown out the sights and sounds. Lane sighed. Getting Blumenthal out of CSULB and into Hollywood was mission impossible.
But, when Lane gave Blumenthal the bad news, she didn't bat an eye; she thanked Lane for his efforts and shifted seamlessly over to her Spielberg focus. Then, in early Spring when Para showed the first phase of his inter-disciplinary plan (with his home department, Music, getting new curriculum responsibility for aspects of film projects), Blumenthal blew a gasket. She made her FEA faculty sneak away from Long Beach and meet her at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant in Hollywood where she quickly plotted an assault on Para's Deanship, claiming he was trying to co-opt the Spielberg donation that did not yet exist.
In fact, Blumenthal was quite right about Para, but Lane didn't see it, he believed Para's private insistence that the inter-disciplinary initiative was a University-wide mandate and had nothing to do with Spielberg. Regardless, Lane's first concern was that everyone leave Spielberg alone and let the guy enjoy the accomplishment that his degree represented. Secondly, for Lane, it was critical that Spielberg be positive about CSULB, not that he give any money. Lane was cultivating many entertainment industry friends and contacts and businesses to tie themselves to CSULB, for jobs and internships and projects and equipment and services they could offer to students, as well as for donations. Lane's own experience was that he had lived on a private pond in Belmont Shore, just a stone's throw from CSULB from 1986-1994, and yet he'd never once ventured to the campus. And he knew that folks in the entertainment industry regularly dropped in on USC and UCLA and the AFI, and even CSUN and Loyola, but all felt that Long Beach was in a different time zone. Lane knew no one in the biz who had ever driven down to CSULB, and he was absolutely determined to change that. But if Spielberg pissed on CSULB, then that would end that dream. Spielberg's opinion mattered.
To Blumenthal, only her own opinion mattered, and she was following the money. She had her eye on the Spielberg prize, and she was not about to let Lane get in her way. She quickly sent around mass e-mails critical of Lane, separating him from the rest of the faculty herd. She alleged that Lane was in on Para's plot to "steal" the Spielberg money. She criticized the scripts coming out of Lane's students and denied them opportunity for project funding. And, as Lane's and Berlin's and other faculty personnel reviews impended, Blumenthal made sure to bring in a ringer from outside the Film Department to be on that Retention, Tenure & Promotion (RTP) Committee just for Lane's review and no one else's. (That ringer would show up at the FEA RTP committee meeting with his review pre-written even before discussion and without him ever observing Lane's classes as required, but that saga will await a later chapter in this tome.)
The critical thing that Blumenthal did (and which led to her undoing as FEA Chair in March 2003) was, just after Para had a meeting with all FEA faculty to become the official governor of any Spielberg donation proposals, Blumenthal sent Lane a legally required "mentoring" e-mail in which she explained in detail what she needed him to do to prepare his personal/personnel file of work for review by the FEA RTP committee. But, in that same e-mail, she let Lane know that he needed to get on board her plan to attack Para for attempting to co-opt the Spielberg donation.
That e-mail was a pristine case of workplace threat and conflict of interest, and Lane forwarded it immediately to Dean Para. (You can find that e-mail and subsequent correspondence in the documents section of this Installment Two.)
It was the last straw for Para, the last spring for the Blumenthal mousetrap he'd been soldering together for quite some time. Para had a stockpile of complaints and grievances against Blumenthal, as well as grievances from her and a friend of hers against him. But now, this e-mail to Lane had tipped the scales. Para could take himself out of the equation and re-position the ostensible dynamic: by gosh, this wasn't a squabble between him and Blumenthal, this was Blumenthal violating policy in order to target a new Professor who'd been nothing short of an immediate godsend to FEA, to COTA, and to the Dean's fundraising targets. This Professor was already the highest donating Professor in COTA, and he'd amped up departmental curriculum and gotten an MFA Program Proposal through the first committees after starting from scratch. The Provost (Dr. Gary Reichard) loved this guy and saw him as the bright and shining future of the University.
So, Para told Lane to sit tight: Para was going up the food chain to Academic Affairs, every meticulous step all the way to the Provost, and would have a plan of counter-attack in short order. All t's would be crossed and all i's would be dotted, because Para wanted to end Blumenthal's Chairship and he did not want to leave her any opening to appeal the result by criticizing the process. Para wanted Blumenthal out and his own power consolidated, particularly as it related to this Spielberg business.
Immediately, the higher-ups gave Para permission to get Blumenthal to resign or be fired as Chair. With the Chairship came an approximately 10% pay boost, and Blumenthal's appointment as Chair had another year and a half to run. Para didn't want Blumenthal to continue to get the extra pay after she would be out as Chair, particularly since that impacted FEA's and COTA's budgets, but that would be up to Academic Affairs to deal with later. Their best advice to him now was to get Blumenthal to resign because then she'd have a tougher time trying to get the Union (the CFA) to help her claim any more money was due her.
Exactly one week after Blumenthal had sent her not-so-veiled e-mail threat to Lane, Para met with her. It was short meeting. When it adjourned, both she and he announced that she'd resigned as Chair. Soon enough, she and her CFA representative would tweak that announcement to say she'd actually been fired. And, yes, according to Para she did get continue to get her extra pay for a time, even though he was not happy about it.
(c) Spielberg Standard Time
With Blumenthal out, FEA faculty wanted to step up one of their own as Chair. Dr. Micheal Pounds is African American, erudite, fearless, and a renowned and oft-published scholar. In 2003, he was senior faculty and the best candidate for Chair. His colleagues supported him. Para did not. Previously Para had knocked Pounds by referring to him as "deadwood", but then he admitted to Lane that he didn't actually know the guy, so Lane suggested the two men have a sitdown. After taking a meeting with Pounds, Para wrote Lane to thank him and to praise Pounds after all.
Nonetheless, when the FEA Chairship opened up, Para would not consider Pounds. (His reasons would surface later and they were not savory. There's an upcoming chapter on this). Instead of Pounds, Para brought in Dr. Craig Smith.
Nonetheless, when the FEA Chairship opened up, Para would not consider Pounds. (His reasons would surface later and they were not savory. There's an upcoming chapter on this). Instead of Pounds, Para brought in Dr. Craig Smith.
Smith was CSULB's ultimate "hired gun". His home department was Communication Studies, and he'd been Chair of that. But he'd also been Chair of the Journalism Department, and the Department of Comparative Literature and Classics. Whenever and wherever there was a CSULB Department on the verge of headlines that could embarrass the administration, the bat signal flashed across the sky, and Smith rode in. Now he was being called to FEA, a Department that interested him much but was quite removed from his own discipline and expertise. However, he considered himself a fast learner.
To his credit, Smith would only agree to chair FEA if the faculty voted him in. He met with each before the vote and pledged to make sure that each would feel he or she was being heard and responded to. He promised Blumenthal that he would abide by the deal Blumenthal had made with V.P. Kathy Cohn in Academic Affairs not to be cut out of any initiative involving Spielberg.
Smith was unanimously approved by FEA voting faculty to serve out the Spring and Summer as Chair. In Fall he would be re-elected, this time to the full three year term.
Para and Smith quickly got to work on the "Spielberg Proposal", intending to present it to Spielberg's "people" in May 2003. At that point Spielberg's "people" was his publicist Mr. Marvin (Marv) Levy. Lane was recruited by Para and Para's own "people" to help with drafting, and Lane used that as a bully pulpit from which to try to convince Para to hold back on actual requests for Spielberg's money, rather to just update the celebrated graduate on all the new and cool and important academic and production programs and projects that had been instituted since Spielberg graduated the year before.
Smith had an important entertainment industry tie of his own -- with old friend actor/producer Michael Douglas -- and so he understood Lane's point. Behind the scenes, with Lane's prompting, Smith was also trying to get the University to make good on the moral pledge to help all drop-outs to the same extent as the school had helped Spielberg. Lane and Smith conspired as best they could to hold back Para from his pursuit of Spielberg, but to no avail. And Blumenthal was in the mix for the money as well, albeit the back seat, thanks to her deal with Kathy Cohn.
Away from the goings-on at school, Lane met and conferred with his Hollywood connections, including those close to Spielberg, including Spielberg's colleagues and even the lawyer to Spielberg's financial advisor.
Lane's message to the clandestine Spielberg pipeline was simple: the kids at CSULB's FEA Department are worthy and talented and smart, certainly as worthy as students at USC and UCLA. But most of CSULB's FEA kids are the first in their families to go to college, and most work full-time to afford to go to school. New curriculum and new programs and new opportunities were being created for them now that Lane was aboard donating his own money and calling in his industry posse, and now that Smith was in place and calling in his own industry favors, so FEA was rapidly morphing into a cutting edge and solidly academic department that Spielberg should be proud to have his degree from. But the message continued with this caveat: the publicly-funded CSULB administrators were not yet wise about Hollywood or how to connect with the private sector in general, so they might act in ways that were well-intended but potentially problematic. Simply put, it was Amateur Nite in Dixie, but please, Mr. Spielberg, don't hold that against the students! It matters tremendously to them that you and they would share the same degree. And that is more than enough legacy here.
Lane was certain his message had gotten through to the right people in the right way. But Para and Blumenthal were unstoppable in their determination to prune Spielberg for money. So, in May 2003, Lane had no choice but to insist that his name and projects be completely deleted from any proposals that the school was bringing to Spielberg's people. (See documents section of this Installment Two.)
Smith stayed involved and made sure the proposal presentations would be rational and low key. As it turned out, Marv Levy had an even lower key in mind.
Spielberg's colleagues had assured Lane that, as Lane thought, there was no way Spielberg would entertain a large named donation to CSULB this soon after his graduation. And Levy put that intent into practice, using the tried and true Hollywood Standard Operating Procedure of setting meetings a couple of months in advance, and then cancelling them at the last minute, eventually re-setting them for months later, and cancelling again. The good news about all that was that Spielberg wasn't saying "go away, you bother me", but he also wasn't saying anything at all.
Lane repeatedly told Para that he believed Spielberg was testing the folks at his alma mater to see if they were still the small-minded idiots he recalled from 35 years before, and that it was vital that the school stopped pestering Levy for Spielberg money. Lane also met with CSULB President Maxson and exhorted him to be the point person -- "President to President" -- to contact Spielberg personally and become buds, then to get to the point in the future when the time was right. To Lane, that time would be when the MFA DW would be approved and implemented. But Maxson kept insisting that Para and Smith should handle this.
In the meantime, as 2003 rolled into 2004, there had been phone conversations between Smith and Para and Levy about possible donations, proposal letters had gone back and forth, and there'd been an informal review of some of the notions within those proposals. But, nothing noteworthy had actually happened other than Levy requesting a "cafeteria list" of ideas from which he hinted that, if any proposal were ultimately to be presented to Spielberg, it would need to be visionary, signature, and academic, conferring scholarly legitimacy to film curriculum. It would also need support from others first. The proposed MFA in Dramatic Writing and the concept of Donor (Your Name Here) Scholars were possibly worthy of further discussion down the road. Both those proposals were Lane's, but the MFA was likely years away from fruition due to school politics (more on that in a subsequent chapter!), and the Scholars Program was already being funded by Lane and his friends and industry colleagues on a project hiring and subsidy basis called "Tales Told". But Lane was shocked to hear that his projects had been included, after all, despite his request they be deleted. As for Blumenthal, her Institute had been rejected out of hand, along with Para's attempts to get Spielberg to become the name above the door of COTA or FEA, or to provide inter-disciplinary sponsorship.
Then in May 2004, Blumenthal reared her head and demanded her due. She had just learned that her Institute proposal had not gone forward to Levy in the large volume form she'd intended. She was once again on the warpath. She wanted Para out, and now she was laser-locked on Smith too, seeking to get the FEA faculty to give him a vote of "No Confidence" as Chair. (See the documents section of this Installment Two for the Blumenthal declaration of war, and its aftermath.)
The thing is, as a noted "consensus builder", Smith would take each faculty member aside and tell them what they wanted to hear. After years of work for CBS and as U.S. Presidential and corporate CEO speech writer, not to mention being a Log Cabin Republican on-air commentator, Smith realized you can never get anywhere unless you calm people down, and you can only do that by being a good listener and then assuring them there is a way for them to get their way. Then, if there is still a real conflict, you gently ease people into altering their goals while preserving their intents. But, again, this is best accomplished one person at a time. And, yes, it harks to a bit of advice that the author Truman Capote was fond of giving. "If you're at a party and you step into the bathroom and find a woman suitably indisposed, you are polite if you quickly say 'Pardon me, ma'am!' and you turn heel and go. But you are tactful if you say 'Pardon me, sir!' and you turn heel and go."
Craig Smith is nothing if not always tactful when doing his job at CSULB. When he saves the day he doesn't come riding in on a grand white horse, he comes with his pockets full of little white lies. But when it came to Blumenthal and her endless complaints and demands, those pockets emptied fast. No wonder Smith later regretted things he promised her. "I made a deal with the devil," is how he explained it.
In Spring 2004, finishing the third and last "academic year" of his contract as Dean, Para's performance had just undergone a reappointment review by a committee whose members and staff he carefully minded with direct and indirect help from his Dean's Discretionary Fund and other resources. He even had an obvious spy on the staff, so he knew the report would be favorable, but it was still up to the Provost and the President to decide whether to re-appoint him or not. If he could pull off a Spielberg donation, that would cinch the deal. But Blumenthal was now about to create a battle that could have negative repercussions.
In anticipation of that, Para had continued to support Lane in his own jousts with Blumenthal that academic year, advising him on various University processes he could use to get her to stop trying to get him fired. (More on that in a later chapter on the University's finding of reverse discrimination.) But Blumenthal was invariably her own worst enemy since she kept saying and writing things that could be used against her. In particular, she had one too many times taken personal credit for Spielberg's graduation; and the more she talked about that history, the more she made it sound like the degree was quid pro quo for a wink-wink-nod-nod handshake-promised donation.
So, with the blessing of both Para and Smith, Lane went to Maxson to complain about Blumenthal with respect to Spielberg. Once again, Maxson kicked it back to Para and Smith. The good thing for Para was that Maxson now knew that if Para didn't deliver Spielberg's money, Para could blame it on Blumenthal.
As 2004 moved along, the MFA DW proposal was approved by the faculties of four different departments -- FEA, Theatre Arts, Comparative Literature and Classics, and Communication Studies. Based on Lane's curriculum design, this Degree Program would be sui generis throughout the world. Unique, and academically challenging, the Program would lead to thesis scripts of publishable, producible quality. It would be perfect for Spielberg to support, although Lane had found other donors (including himself), and Lane's work as Core Writing Instructor and Thesis Committee Chair in the Program would be cost-free to the University since Lane would work an unpaid overload of courses. A legally binding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) had been signed by the relevant parties, including Para. (See the documents section of this Installment Two.) The MOU named Dr. Maria Viera from Theatre Arts as Lane's counterpart in that Department. Together, she and he would run the program, although she had more work in administrative coordination and student advising, while he had more curricular responsibility and creative/career mentoring. What had finally gotten the Program moving through the approval process after a long delay was the sudden forced retirement of Theatre Arts Chair Howard Burman. (There is a later chapter which exhumes a number of CSULB's bodies, including Burman's. Stay tuned.)
In Fall 2004, Smith got George Lucas to donate $100,000 to FEA to cover desperate needs in equipment repair and purchase, and for student film productions. Smith also got $10,000 from Spielberg. This was separate and apart from the proposals for a vast Spielberg Donation.
Meanwhile, as of Fall 2004, Para got his re-appointment as Dean, and he assigned Smith the onus of soliciting Spielberg money. Frustrated by Levy's delay tactics and Maxson's not choosing to follow Lane's advice to contact Spielberg directly, Smith asked Lane to please go to Spielberg's colleagues and try to get an answer as to if and when Spielberg would be making a large donation. (See the documents section of this Installment Two.)
Lane had to laugh. He'd been in contact with Spielberg's colleagues and friends all along, and he knew the answer: once the MFA DW would come into being, then Spielberg was interested in supporting it with substantial money that would spill into many of FEA's needs. But the MFA DW was the key.
This prompted Smith and Para to push hard at moving the MFA DW along, and the MOU resulted soon thereafter. Lane drafted the MOU. Its primary purpose was to ensure that academic politics could never interfere with the Degree Program once it was up and running. Lane wanted no risk that a new Chair or a new Dean or some malcontent Professor could suddenly alter the curriculum or stymie or even threaten the Program in any way.
Now, finally, passage of the Program was just a matter of checklists, committee meetings, program proposal reviews and tweaks, and approvals.
Because there was no Spielberg money just yet and all donations were always deemed as iffy, Para and Smith made sure that the financial affairs committees knew the MFA DW would cost nothing since Lane would be teaching unpaid for the new core courses, while the other courses were already being offered in other grad programs, under-enrolled and easily able to accept a handful of additional students from the MFA DW. Partial "assigned time" for Viera was reimbursed by a course transfer from FEA to Theatre Arts. Since Theatre Arts needed Graduate Assistants to grade papers in high-volume entry level courses (having nothing to do with the MFA DW), and the MFA DW students would be cheaper than Teaching Assistants or Faculty, this favor to Theatre Arts was funded by money already allocated to FEA for hiring after the retirement of previous faculty. (Later, Spielberg would cover this expense, even though there was money in the FEA coffers already. But we are getting ahead of our story.)
Para and Smith submitted paperwork that made all these financials crystal clear, and, just to sound more "right", among the long list of zero cost line items they listed one and only one new cost for the proposed program: $500 a year for xeroxing and office supplies. It was a number that was pulled out of a hat, and was higher than needed.
The timetable for final passage of the MFA DW was finally scheduled to culminate in late Spring 2006.
Meanwhile, in 2005 Spielberg moved his SHOAH Foundation to the University of Southern California (USC).
Then, in May 2005, Smith and Para met with Levy and were also connected with Andy Spahn and Jennifer Gonring who ran Spielberg's charitable foundation. Now the Spielberg "people" officially announced that, if Spielberg were to make a large donation, it would be to support the MFA DW, including $10,000 a year to each student, with additional sums for teacher hiring and to improve FEA facilities and equipment that would serve the new program and redound to the betterment of the undergraduate programs as well. But first the MFA DW would have to be passed and implemented, and then a lot of fine print would have to be negotiated and tax ramifications clarified. Smith and Para were ecstatic. Para was already thinking that, if this all went down, his next mantle would be Provost.
As of Fall 2005, Smith became the only CSU faculty member on the CSU Board of Trustees. He had been nominated, and then vetted and appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would eventually serve two two-year terms, and decline a third. The Trustee appointment was a huge honor, and it gave Smith a full vote along with the outside Trustees and the Lieutenant Governor on all crucial CSU matters. It made Smith a force to be reckoned with at CSULB, and Para was not happy. Now he had a Department Chair who had access to CSU information that Para did not, a Department Chair who had better access to the CSULB President than Para did, and a Department Chair who could say no to him and who could very much influence the course of his career.
This situation became all the worse for Para when Maxson retired from his Presidency and F. King Alexander was hired as of December 2005. Para sighed to Lane that he had heard that Alexander did not like the arts and was likely to sweep out the old Deans and bring in his own team. Para said that Alexander had not returned Para's welcoming e-mails or calls. Lane moved quickly to help his friend. Contacting Alexander by e-mail before the latter moved to Long Beach, Lane struck up a pleasant colloquy and gently sold Para to Alexander, exacting the latter's promise to meet up with Para for a chat sooner rather than later once Alexander arrived. Alexander also agreed to come guest lecture in Lane's Utopia class early in Spring 2006, as did the outgoing Maxson.
So, 2006 was a watershed year. At CSULB, Alexander and Para bonded, as did Alexander and Smith. In May 2006, the MFA DW was finally passed, got national and international publicity, then admitted its first cohort and began operation in the Fall. Unlike Maxson, Alexander listened to Lane about opening lines of direct communication with Spielberg. But still, the school did nothing to make it easier for its drop-outs to come back and finish up.
Meanwhile, George Lucas announced the largest donation in USC history, 175 million dollars. He also announced that Spielberg would join him in contributing a large sum of money. Together, the two men would expand and rebuild the entire USC School of Cinematic Arts, with buildings named after both Lucas and Spielberg.
Of course, the administrative folks at CSULB were terrified that this would mean that Spielberg would not have enough money left to go around. Lane shook his head at their worry. He had created a strategic alliance with SONY, which included cash donations, service donations, donations and loans of high-end equipment and supplies, and SONY taking CSULB FEA students and their films to the Sundance and Slamdance Film Festivals in 2006 and 2007, and he had created a film festival for SONY which he set up at CSULB in February 2007. For the latter, Lane had brought in William Link as one of his two Artists-in-Residence, and he then pushed Para and Alexander to get the University to honor Link be re-naming the University Theatre after him. Lane was sure that the MFA DW would linchpin a large Spielberg donation and the Link naming would encourage Spielberg to be public about any donation.
Those predictions proved out. Totally. After months of fine tuning the pledge documents from Spielberg and his foundation people, Spahn and Gonring, the donation deal was signed in June 2007 and funded immediately, so that current MFA DW students received retroactive subsidies for Spring 2007. The total donation was $1,378,000 over three years, with expected renewal and increase for another three years, and ongoing, so long as the MFA DW was operating. Every Spielberg document, from the pledge to the transmittal letters and e-mails, stated very specifically that this pledge was made in support of the MFA DW. (See the documents section of this Installment Two.)
The Spielberg money flowed. MFA DW students were subsidized. FEA facilities and equipment were upgraded, creating a small sound stage and digital studio. While Spielberg had wanted to be known as "the anonymous donor", that request came after 5 years of everyone in the FEA, COTA, and CSULB administration constantly talking about an impending "Spielberg donation". The school inconsistently attempted to close the barn door, but the horses were already in the next county sipping Mai Tais and playing with the little umbrellas.
Thankfully, when Lane got Link's name on the front of the University Theatre in 2008, finally establishing a Hollywood connection and Hollywood credibility, Spielberg okayed the use of his name on the small sound stage and digital studio that had been outfitted via a piece of his donation. So, now he was officially Spielberg The Donor.
(d) What The Lord Giveth, Para and Alexander Throw Away
In May 2008, Lane publicly blew the whistle on CSULB's failure to go after certain unnamed imposter Professors whose academic and professional credits were fiction, even though Lane had handed Para and Alexander clear, hard, incontrovertible, undeniable, and objective evidence and declarations from third parties like the Associate Provost for Academic Appointments at Columbia University. (This will be detailed in a later chapter of THUG.)
As Para recently admitted to Lane, when Lane went public about the imposture via an op-ed in the Union Weekly newspaper in May 2008 it burst the assurance that Para had given Alexander that Para could and would keep Lane quiet. And that led immediately to Alexander and Para retaliating against Lane.
The imposture story spread like wildfire, to national publications like the all-important Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as local and campus newspapers. After Alexander was made fun of at a Trustees meeting that month, the campus police descended on Lane at school the next day. They advised him that "someone at the highest level of the campus" had reported (quite falsely) that Lane was bringing guns to campus. Although these particular cops knew Lane and had pretty quickly figured that they were being misused to commit someone else's retaliation, their presence and their required searches of Lane, his bag, his office, and his car totally freaked out all the students around FEA that day.
Lane understood this was a shot across his bow, designed to shut him up, but there was really nothing more for him to say at that time, as the press was running with the story and doing their own investigations to out the imposters.
Suffering from undiagnosed but horrendously painful kidney cancer at that moment, it took all of Lane's focus just to get through the day, let alone the last weeks of that semester. The reporter at The Chronicle and other academic commentators had warned Lane that he would be in for unimaginable retaliation for whistle blowing, but Lane didn't care. Well, let's just say he wasn't afraid. Doing nothing in the face of the impostures was something he couldn't have lived with. Dealing with retaliation was something he figured he could handle.
He should have listened to the reporter's and commentators' advice.
Para ended his close friendship with Lane the day the op-ed appeared. He totally disconnected himself from Lane. No more phone calls, no more e-mails except one or two cursory lines about ongoing school business.
Lane had major surgery early in June, and there was a long recovery time and lots of percocets, so he didn't much notice the level of disconnection from his former friend. In Fall, when Lane set up a fundraiser to honor the naming of the William Link Theatre, both Para and Alexander attended the event in Beverly Hills, and Lane thought the threat of retaliation had been overblown. But then Para started questioning the way the fundraiser had been set up, even though the graduate student producer had worked hand in hand every step of the way with Para's people at COTA and with Alexander's people at Brotman Hall. And, after calling a post-fundraiser meeting to go over the financials, Para no-showed his own meeting.
Lane powered on, although, health-wise, he realized he really should have taken the semester off. Many times he thanked the god he didn't believe in for the magnificence of pain killers. The months passed quickly and without incident to Spring semester 2009.
During this period, Andy Spahn and Jennifer Gonring from Spielberg's foundation came to CSULB to review what had been achieved so far with Spielberg's money. Gonring had previously advised Smith that Spielberg had okayed putting his name on the door of the sound stage and digital studio that had been outfitted with his donation. This approval came on the heels of Lane slipping word to the Spielberg pipeline that William Link's name was going up on the University Theatre, and it was an awesome relief to the CSULB folks that their "anonymous donor" was now no longer anonymous since they'd never actually kept him anonymous.
So, 2009 saw a review of the MFA DW and the FEA facilities by Spielberg's "people", and they loved what they saw. They were particularly entranced by the academic challenge of this three year long MFA Degree Program, and the accomplishments of its diverse and talented students. Spahn and Gonring let Smith know that they were recommending and they were expecting that the Spielberg donation would be re-upped for another three years, no problem, 1.5 million dollars at least.
But there was a problem. In order to please Alexander and prove himself, Para knew that the way to get rid of whistle blower Lane was to kill the MFA DW.
After all, Lane had been hired and had chosen to commute from LA to CSULB primarily to run an MFA writing program, and Lane had fought day and night against all odds -- the unrelenting bull in the academic china shop -- resorting to every legal means, confrontation, and just plain hard work, to get the MFA DW on its feet. In 2006, Lane had even taken himself out of the running for a teaching job at USC's School of Cinematic Arts when he made the short list for what he thought would be a part-time Visiting Professorship which would allow him to recruit students and donations for CSULB's MFA DW, but was informed at his short list interview that the job had been upped to a tenured position. Lane told the astounded but understanding USC folks that he'd made a commitment to his MFA DW students and Maria Viera and CSULB to see everyone through the Program and graduation, so he couldn't and wouldn't even think of leaving at that time. "I feel like a football coach who just recruited all these great kids by promising I'd be there for them, and I just couldn't live with myself if I abandoned them. I've got to see this through for at least three graduating classes. Maybe you'll still have a job for me then, I hope!"
At the time, Para was so touched by Lane's loyalty he pledged to find a way to create an endowed chair for Lane, so Lane would never leave and would earn lots more money. But that was then, before the whistle blowing.
Now Para convinced himself and Alexander that ending the MFA DW would make Lane quit and go get a job somewhere else. Just what they wanted. So, Spring semester 2009 would begin with a bang, and would then get worse as Para and Alexander tightened the screws. The evil empire had a long and patient memory, and now the empire was striking back.
On March 12, 2009, Dean Donald Para showed up at FEA's regular monthly faculty and staff meeting and announced that, with Alexander's blessing, he was going to dramatically reduce resources (funding) to the Department as punishment for public whistle blowing.
Then, on March 28, 2009, a Saturday and the first day of Spring Break, Para sent a terse e-mail to the four members of the MFA DW Implementation Committee, the folks who were the legal authorities in charge of the Program: Lane, Viera, Smith, and Joanne Gordon (Chair of Theatre Arts). "I am calling an urgent meeting of the Implementation Committee (MFA in DW) for Monday, April 6 at 1:00 in the COTA Conference Room. If you cannot attend the meeting in person, please let me know." That was the e-mail, in toto.
Darth Vader would have been proud.
At the April 6 meeting, Para announced that he was suspending admissions to the MFA DW for Fall 2009. Lane was now seeing the fury of retaliation. He realized that Para and Alexander would have done this the previous year when the op-ed was first published, but the students for Fall 2008 had already been admitted. So Para and Alexander had lain in wait all this time.
Para's ostensible excuse for suspending admissions? The MFA DW was slated for discontinuance because it cost too much to run.
Yes, it was a lie. Lane worked an unpaid overload and Spielberg's money had made the program rich and substantially in the black for all the future. It was the only Program that anyone could think of that was actually profitable!
Over the next weeks, as Lane and Viera and Smith fought back, Para would keep changing his reasons for suspension and discontinuance, none of them honest, but the result never changed: admissions for 2009 were suspended. Then, as Para was rewarded with a promotion to Provost in Summer 2009 (because Alexander specifically wanted a Provost who could and would keep the faculty calm and quiet), Para moved Kvapil up to Dean, and by Fall both men announced that MFA DW admissions were suspended for Fall 2010 as well. (The full saga of this madness, in all its glory, will be forthcoming in a later chapter, including documents and audio recordings of Para's lies. Stay tuned! But a lovely sampling of the documents may be found now in the documents section of this Installment Two.)
Meanwhile, on May 27, 2009, Andy Spahn dutifully sent the annual Spielberg check -- this one for $388,000 -- specifically to be used for an MFA DW Program that was essentially out of business, the bulk of its remaining students set to graduate in 2010.
But Spahn didn't know, and Gonring didn't know, and Steven Spielberg didn't know. They were busy working on re-upping the donation for another three years.
And Para and Alexander didn't care. They didn't care whether Spielberg gave more money or not. They didn't care whether they had just cashed the latest check under false pretenses. They didn't care that students were being deprived of educational and career opportunities. They cared only about driving Brian Lane out of CSULB, because Lane represented chaos and anarchy and rebellion and insult and everything that was anathema to Alexander's institutional and elitist worldview.
As for the latest Spielberg money that was banked by Para and Alexander even though there were no longer enough MFA DW students to spend it on? In Fall 2009, Alexander had his people start finding ways to snatch it, in utter violation and breach of the Spielberg pledge agreement.
Smith had gone into partial retirement as of Summer 2009 (it's called FERPing at the CSU, Faculty Early Retirement Program), but his negotiated retirement agreement gave him the authority to mind the Spielberg donation. Although he zealously tried to protect the funds, Alexander and Para and their people knew there was nothing Smith could do once funds moved out of the donor Foundation account and into an FEA General Account in order to be paid out. So that nexus is where the empire struck.
Professor J. Todd Baker was a family man, a brilliant filmmaker and tech guru, who worked in professional production and also as a teacher. After an advertised search, FEA had lured him away from Chapman with the Spielberg money, and, pursuant to the donation agreement, had given him a full-time contract to teach audio and production in FEA. Baker's gig was funded entirely by Spielberg money. When it would be time to pay him, the money would move from the CSULB Foundation donor account to a brief stopover in the FEA General Account, and a paycheck would be cut. This was simply a payroll convenience for CSULB.
But now, in academic year 2009-2010, the California State budget crisis had reached critical mass, and Reed and Alexander had used it to cry poor even though, at CSULB, Alexander had millions and millions and millions of dollars stashed away in slush funds and rainy day funds and, get this, in allocations for high-priced administrative positions that were not filled. (Lane and Pounds would investigate this and blow the whistle on it, but that's a later chapter.) The point is that the CSU insisted in its best Sarah Bernhardt rendition of Camille that they simply could not go on unless tuition and fees were dramatically raised and the faculty took a 10% "furlough" pay cut for that year. To insure that faculty would approve the furlough, the vote took place during the Summer when no one was around for debate and too many permanent faculty were unavailable to vote, the permanent faculty being the most likely to say WTF? and vote against the cut.
So, the furlough came into existence as of Fall 2009. But the terms of the furlough agreement were specific and easy to understand: "Faculty Unit employees whose salary is 100% funded from grants and contracts not funded from the state general fund, shall not be subject to this furlough agreement."
Todd Baker's salary was 100% funded by Spielberg's money which was sitting in a CSULB Foundation donor account, not legally allowed to be commingled with "stateside" (taxpayer) money.
Yet, when Baker got his paycheck, 10% was missing. Alexander and Para and their team had grabbed that 10% of Spielberg's money and re-allocated it for general expenses rather than for what Spielberg had intended, breaching the pledge contract which Alexander himself had signed. And this money grab would go on all year. Who knows how many grants and donations were shaved this way, and how much it all adds up to? The administration's position was that if money was moved into a general account then it was subject to the furlough, even though the agreement specifically said that the origin of the funds had to be from the state general fund (taxpayer money) in order to be snatched. (See the documents section of this Installment Two.)
Baker filed a legal contract grievance with the help of the Union (the CFA). But he only had standing to demand his 10%, he couldn't represent all the other money grabs that must have been going on. Worse, the CFA told him it would take years before his case would go to arbitration. At the end of that academic year, Baker left CSULB for other and better and more lucrative work.
Of course, Alexander and Para didn't have the cajones or the belief in their ridiculous justifications to get on the phone and tell Spielberg or his people that they were taking his money and killing the MFA DW that he supported. So we hereby retract our earlier assertion that they didn't care what Spielberg thought about their actions. They cared. They cared enough that they decided to lie to him by their silence as they picked his pockets clean.
As Fall 2009 ground along, Lane finally understood what was happening with respect to the MFA DW. He found a policy which stated that if a degree program did not have admissions for three years then it could be discontinued by somnolence, by whispered fiat, by the Provost or President, with no inquiry or review whatsoever. Ignore a program long enough and it just goes away. And since Para and Alexander had already snuffed out two years of admissions, they would only have to wait a few months more to smother that third.
Lane and Pounds and Viera and Smith and folks from Comparative Literature and from Communication Studies and elsewhere all banded together to try to resuscitate the MFA DW. More than anything, Lane, a lawyer, wanted to pin down Para and Alexander to acknowledge they were truly seeking a permanent discontinuance, and to get them to take a stand on why. Only then could the fight be joined, only then could there be a counter-attack.
Again, the full story of this kickboxing chess match will get its due in a chapter all its own, but the bottom line for current purposes is that Para and Alexander and their lackey Kvapil falsified financial documents and pretended that the MFA DW would have to go away for financial reasons, after all. There was a big fat deposit of Spielberg money on hand, and yet the Program was being halted for financial reasons. Various subsequent review committees would gently suggest that there seemed to be "irregularities" in the Para/Alexander/Kvapil financials relating to the MFA DW, but no one other than Lane and his crew was prepared to fight City Hall.
As 2010 loomed, Lane made final attempts to get Alexander and Para to knock off their shit, get the MFA DW back on track and connect with Spielberg so that the donation could be re-upped for the next three years as planned. (See the documents section of this Installment Two.)
Para and Alexander declined to shift course. With Smith's blessing, Lane used his pipeline to update Spielberg's people. In his heart, Lane hoped that Spielberg would Hulk out and take on Para and Alexander and fix everything, but that was magical thinking. There was really nothing Spielberg could do, and, frankly, there was no reason he should try. Yes, he wanted the best for the students, but Para's and Alexander's iteration of CSULB was a cancer that devoured good intentions. CSULB had failed to live up to the promises it made to Spielberg; even worse, it had used him to tease out bigger and more costly corruption.
Early in Spring 2010, Craig Smith had a phone conversation with Jennifer Gonring. She was gracious and kind, advising him that Spielberg and his foundation were sorry but "the timing isn't right" for what had been the promised renewal of a 1.5 million dollar donation.
Spielberg has had no reported contact with CSULB since. Nonetheless, in 2010 and 2011, then COTA Dean Kvapil kept asking then FEA Chair Pounds when he expected more Spielberg money. "When you bring back the MFA DW," said Pounds, "And actually not even then. You've slaughtered the golden goose. Hope you enjoyed your dinner."
* * *
THUG The Book Is designed so you can read the Installments in any order you want.
Installment Three of THUG "The Long Beach Studios Hoax" the tale of how Alexander and Para got CSULB schmeckled by two con men in The Long Beach Studios Hoax is now posted and available for your reading pleasure.
After that, Installment Four "High Crimes and Pissy Demeanors" begins to expose the family soap opera, bogus corporations, unfiled tax returns, unpaid taxes, and all the perks and stock and cash that Alexander receives from outsiders, over and above his salary and benefits from the CSU, all while failing to disclose it all on California's famous annual Form 700. (Yes, this is what got LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in hot water. And there's plenty more heat to go around.)
And then, Installment Five "The King's New Clothes" where Alexander lies like a rug in his C.V. in order to get his new job at LSU!
And Installment Six "The Odor of Mendacity" where Alexander and his family prove themselves worthy of America's Most Wanted or a guest episode of Shameless.
And Installment Six "The Odor of Mendacity" where Alexander and his family prove themselves worthy of America's Most Wanted or a guest episode of Shameless.
THUG! Stay tuned.
As a previous student of Blumenthal, I am shocked and appalled by her sheer craziness. She is supremely rude and I don't know why the university keeps her near students. I feel ashamed that I even took her.
ReplyDeleteThis explains it all.
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=315537
Fascinating Read! Keep on going.
ReplyDeleteGrazie. The next installments only get better. I mean, worse.
DeleteI had her for one class. And only because I had to take that particular class and unfortunately, only she taught it that semester. She was routinely late by 15-20 minutes, sometimes longer. She frequently would make derogatory comments about other professors and complain about the FEA department and how they were all out to get her, or claimed they were sexist. There were times when we knew she was in her office before class, despite the door being locked and the lights being out. We'd just sit in the classroom across the hall and wait until she decided to come to class.
ReplyDeleteI just assumed she was bi-polar.
She definitely lacked tact in dealing with situations where she believed she was being disrespected. I can remember using the editing bay one day when it was open to all students and she came in 20-minutes before her class was to use the editing stations and just flipped out on us, telling us we needed to get out and that her class was going to use the equipment. Nobody had a problem with being out of there by the time her class was to use the equipment. We knew we had until a certain time and that the time was getting near. But her class wasn't for another 20-minutes. This was the final week of the semester. Everyone was trying to finish projects. She insisted that we stop immediately and leave. She then refused to tell us when her class would be done using the editing stations. I just packed up my stuff and walked away. As I left the room she was lecturing the remaining students about how nobody respects her.
Haha that was a delightful read in this chapter, shining light on a majority of topics that many of us Film Students on campus have been wondering about for our duration here. It is nice to have a real story to what happened with documents instead of the various versions of The Spielberg CSULB Fund Myth that has been running rampant.
ReplyDeleteAlso a minor point but one that I admired was the part about Lucas donating money to help clean up and fix equipment and such in the dept. Know its not a major point to the overall story here, but it did shine a bit of a positive light on Lucas making him not the money grubbing selfish finatic that the internet makes him out to be.
I do have a question though: With all the problems and such with Blumenthal, why is it that she is still allowed to teach? Is tenure really that powerful of a shield, that nothing can shatter it?
More importantly why are Don Para and King Alexander are still screwing over the film department and CSULB in general? If they hate life that much why don't they leave. Oh wait, I heard that Alexander might be leaving....thank God. Then Don Para will be the interm President. Well screw life.
DeleteLet's see, what's the lesson for you students? Number One, always fail up. Number Two, it's okay to lie cheat and steal provided you own your own police force and campus newspaper.
DeleteDon Para and Alexander are pathetic for screwing over Spielberg. Is it really that hard to not screw it up when someone is donating money. I remember the MFA program and was kind of planning on applying. We had a MFA for film writing for crying out loud and being founded. Instead those men ruined my chances in succeeding to my full potential as they increase the size of their wallets. PATHETIC...
ReplyDeleteIt was honestly the best MFA Writing Program anywhere ever. Ridiculously hard. But the students were awesome and their work was grand and their teachers across four different departments were superb. Para and Alexander are too cruel and arrogant to be entitled to pathos. Of course, that's my opinion. But it will have to suffice until someone creates a cruelty and arrogance meter and it explodes when it sees Para and Alexander.
DeleteI'm a FEA grad from 2010. I loved Brian's writing classes. They were great and really meant a lot to me. They were more than just about writing. They were about discussing life, people, and beliefs. Brian's classes helped me to find my voice as a writer and to identify the things that make me who I am today as a person. I also enjoyed having the MFA students as classmates. At first it was a bit intimidating, (they were all such incredible writers) but it quickly became obvious within the first week or two of class, how lucky we were to have them there. I think they helped to make the rest of us non-MFA students better writers. It's really sad the MFA program was shut down and for such petty reasons. It would've, could've, should've been a beacon for CSULB, a calling card, a real symbol of pride. But instead it was killed off by administrative greed and incompetence. Brian gave so much of himself, his energy, his endless resources and even his own money, to his students. It's really sad to see that the college's administrators didn't give a shit and were so conniving.
ReplyDeleteAmateur Night in Dixie, indeed.
-Chris
What scares me is I've already written and published more than 30,000 words here, and I've barely scratched the surface of the corruption and outrage. Stay tuned! And thank you so much for the kind comments. There were certainly many times when I thought I was the only one out there who gave a shit about the students and the school. Forgive me for being so idealistic and romantic and naive, but I thought schools and professors were supposed to be there to help kids. Silly me. Ha ha.
DeleteBrian, thank you so much for bringing this to light. Your reputation as a great teacher and mentor has already been solidified and whistle blowing on these gangsters only shows everyone the honesty and integrity you bring to the table. Thank you!
DeleteSince Alexander been president graduation rate has gone down I graduated in 05 tuition hike and the counselors there don't counsel like they should classes are impacted ans it forces students to drop out or transfer cause of the news for classes within their major. I started off a finance major but the extended department for business took all the space up for regular students
DeleteSince Alexander been president graduation rate has gone down I graduated in 05 tuition hike and the counselors there don't counsel like they should classes are impacted ans it forces students to drop out or transfer cause of the news for classes within their major. I started off a finance major but the extended department for business took all the space up for regular students
DeleteOh, and Todd Baker was my sound design instructor. He is truly a great guy.
ReplyDeleteIt is beyond sad to learn that Para and co. ran him out of town.
Todd is awesome. Period. Any of you who had him as a prof were truly fortunate.
DeleteI am quite gratified by the interest and response to this latest installment. Keep the comments coming! And feel free to ask questions or to see even more documents! This was a sorry chapter in the life of a formerly great institution. Wonderful students lost out on the chance for tremendous opportunity that Spielberg and good professors were excited to provide, all because other people were greedy and evil. There is much shame to pass around, and I will be pointing fingers and offering proof. As you saw yesterday, Alexander has been rewarded with a fat new job at LSU, earned by backstabbing and by taking money from CSULB students. And Para will now likely move up to President. But I refuse to accept that this is normal or acceptable. There must be oversight and there will be consequences. The story of THUG continues, and it will not stop until something is done to stop the bad guys and hold them accountable. Do stay tuned. As strong as Installment Two is, the most damning testimony is yet to come..
ReplyDeleteTod Baker was also my old audio teacher. He was one of professors that cared unlike Blumenthal & Anderson. The film department is filled with old farts. All Anderson ever did was taught me outdated film stocks and film cameras that no one uses. Seriously, I think Walking Dead is the only show to still be shooting on Super 16mm. Anderson also taught me nothing about lenses or Digital Cinema. Anderson knows nothing about digital cinema in general and told me and my friends that nobodies shoot with the RED. Here is a list of nobodies that shot with Digital Cinema.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_shot_in_digital
Thank you Anderson for teaching me nothing. Hey news flash, Kodak's annual loss reaches $1.38 billion.
I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy Anderson's class. My experience with him and his cinematography class was great. I learned a lot about film and lighting. We didn't work with video, but that was fine by me. I got my video fix in other cinematography classes. I always found Anderson to be very knowledgeable. He could come across as a bit grumpy at times, sure, but he always had time to answer my questions whenever I encountered him in the hallway and I wasn't even in the Production track most of those times.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, you were in the beginning cinematography class and not in the production/cinematography track. He is a good teacher for lighting and that's about it. He doesn't go over his favorite lenses, "Like you should use Zeiss Ultra Primes or Cooke S4 lenses or Hawk anamorphic lenses because of this..." Instead he says that Kodak stock is good and Fuji is shit. Kodak declared bankruptcy yet they spent $8,000 on repairing old 16mm cameras that no one outside of the forced class shoots uses. I think that one or two people shoot their thesis with film, but everyone else use RED and DSLRs. I have little to no respect when he rants in his advance cinematography course that if you don't shoot film then you're shit. He also rants that television is shit and nobodies go work in it when a good chuck of his work is in television. It's very hard to not ignore that or respect a person that is that much out of touch with the rapid rise of digital cinema. I am predicting, no wait foresee that you will never touch a film camera after you graduate. Don't use that will some films are still being shot on film when those Directors have their old DPs with crew that are not recent film school graduates.
DeleteIf I make you use a quill and bottled ink in my writing classes, you have my permission to slap me, even though fountain pens and bottled ink are awesome. Look, I'm an old film guy. I love the stuff. I love the smell of it. I love the feel of it in my hands. But it's dead and gone. Your generation missed it, and digital is miles better in terms of what you can do with it creatively. More importantly, if you want to work with film, have the courage to shoot and edit on film. If you shoot film and then edit on digital, you are lying to yourself -- that's not working with film.
DeleteI took Blumenthal for directing. After she gave us her first day of class speech, she had us arrange all of our desks in a circle, facing one another. One student got up and walked out. She asked him, "Where are you going?" and he told he quit and didn't want to be in her class. A minute later another student got up and walked out. Again, she asked, "Where are you going?" and the dude replied, "I don't do circle time."
ReplyDeleteHa ha ha
Reads like a Shakespeare novel.... can't wait for the next installment and I hope you get extensive publicity!
ReplyDeleteSusan C.
We're up on REDDIT
Deleteall help is appreciated
Bring your comments there
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1am8cm/multimillion_funding_by_steven_spielberg_for_mfa/
Please read, comment, question, share! Thank you.
DeleteI personally doubt Para will become Pres. They'll hire someone from the outside. I bet the provost under Maxson learned that the hard way.
ReplyDeleteThe Provost under Maxson was a great guy, and he had a chance to move on to a bigger better more challenging job at the Chancellor's Office. They then upped a person to Interim Provost who only wanted the job for a short time while they searched for a new Prez and the new Prez then searched for a new Provost who only took the job for a while to get street cred and become a Prez elsewhere. The point is that folks beg to get short term Interim jobs because that's a quick and substantial boost in pay, and when they retire their pension rate is based on the highest pay level they attained. So, the musical chairs I just described cost you millions of dollars. Clever, eh? Think it's time someone closed this loophole???
DeleteI'm sorry, but there is something that is incorrect in your statement. When Dr. Reichard left the campus in February 2006, Dr. Dee Abrahamse, who was Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, took his place. Dr. Abrahamse was supposed to retire at the end of the semester, but agreed to postpone her retirement to step in and act as Interim Provost for almost a year. It was not done for money. Dr. Reichard had to report to the CO in two weeks--the campus needed someone to step in and Dr. Abrahamse had served in that capacity previously. She was a wonderful administrator and a great joy to work with, as was Dr. Reichard.
DeleteAs ever, thank you for your comment! Actually, you are providing us with additional information as to campus history which I haven't gotten to yet (but it's coming)!! In the periods and subject areas of my installments thus far, it is relevant that Provost Reichard was a finalist for the President's job but was handed something else instead, for the reasons I have reported. It is also relevant that Karen Gould was Provost two years later when the impostures hit the press, and that she was Provost the following year when the crazy Long Beach Studios fiasco was made public. And, yes, in between Reichard and Gould was Abrahamse, but she has not yet needed to appear in THUG. In fact, she will be in the Installment which deals with the original founding of the MFA in Screenwriting, when she was CLA Dean. Again, thank you for reading and for commenting!
DeleteFurther reply: The pension amount paid by CSU/CalPers is based on the highest salary that a person has had in one year of the last few years at the CSU. Many administrators are therefore rewarded not only in salary increases for a brief time but increased pension for a lifetime, simply by serving as an Interim Whatever. So, unless Dee made a charitable gift of her salary increase and pension increase, I don't think it's possible to be ingenuous in saying that money was not at all an incentive for postponing her retirement. She may have loved her job and been a long and loyal trooper, but if they'd ever stopped paying her, she would have stopped coming to work. Having said that, please don't misunderstand my point: the head honchos at CSU and CSULB promulgate this reward system in order to have their way, and they give promotions to people they feel they have "in control". Sadly, sometimes the folks being controlled are not even aware of it. Para had me sucked in for six years!
DeleteYea, the current state of the film department is sad. We don't have any up to date cameras. We are told that DSLRs are shit yet everyone uses them. We are given film cameras yet no one wants to touch them, since none really work and everyone is pretty much using digital cinema. The admin screwing over the students. I am not really surprised.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. You think 1.5 million from Spielberg could have helped us fix and upgrade equipment? Duh. But Para and Alexander decided they'd rather throw away the chance for that money that would have helped students, as they gave themselves raises. In what other business do people "negotiate" with themselves for their own raises?
ReplyDeleteI came to CSULB to learn how to become a screenwriter and what it took to be successful. Instead of having great teachers along the way, I had Blumenthal. That was the WORST SEMESTER OF MY LIFE!!!! She told us that "we are all going to New York!" on the first day of class. I'm thinking in my head "The hell is this lady going on about?" She didn't teach us one good thing. She made us buy a packet filled with writing essentials, but taught nothing from it. She claimed to have met famous people, whom were very gracious to her, though I didn't believe she did just by her unprofessional demeanor and work that she showed in class. I'm not surprised that she is what she is in this installment, and quite frankly I'm glad that my classmates and I aren't the only ones who think she's a nut case.
ReplyDeleteI avoided her with this site.
Deletehttp://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=315537
New York? How was New York? My classmate and I weren't so lucky.
DeleteWe spent our Blumenthal semester in shock.
;)
I felt I was cheated out of my education thanks to the admin and old farts that still insist on using 16mm film.
ReplyDeleteI had Blumenthal and Reininger in the same year and it was an assault of narcissism, false credentials, and complete and utter violent loathing for their students. I felt like we were only there as an audience to listen to the professors talk about themselves for four months while we waited for any real lessons or assignments to arrive. Their delusional belief of their "impact" on the industry was hammered into us students weekly while we constantly gave each other looks like, "How did this person get a job teaching anything?" Luckily, with the student evaluations, we managed to get rid of the monster that was Reininger and if Blumenthal hadn't drugged/hypnotized/bribed her higher-ups into giving her tenure, I'm sure she would've gotten the boot years ago.
ReplyDeleteI can absolutely see Blumenthal turning her job interview with you and a question involving a teachable moment in screenwriting into yet another opportunity to talk about herself. Completely in-character. It's funny that Blumenthal is a writing teacher yet in real life is a poorly written character herself. She constantly speaks in exposition about her own life, it's hilarious.
This is a fascinating read. Anyone that wants to see Blumenthal's work that is absolutely "so shitty [you] couldn't sleep through it" should Google search "cooper sy blumenthal" and watch any and all videos you can find that she's put on YouTube/Vimeo. They're great for a laugh. Unfortunately that laugh will be followed by a sad sigh at what the CSULB film department has become.
You mean this.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/user/Coopersyc/videos?view=0
I want to vomit. This is what a tenure professor made?!?!? These things look severely dated hallmark channel movies (sorry Hallmark Channel), look like student projects, and it's 2013 and none of them are in HD. Come on dinosaur, get with the times.
A brilliant read from a brilliant man. This is a story I have been trying to understand for the last couple of years because the papers and the data that I could find never matched up with what was going on. I chose to go to CSULB for screenwriting because I believe it is a school or workers where you are taught to succeed with what you have and not what you can get. It was also my goal to continue into the MFA DA program after finishing my BA but that wasn't possible. I have seen the signs and the signs said that CSULB was on the fast track to becoming a premier screenwriting school. This read also provided reasoning why I have never seen returning alumni. I could never understand why Tim Minear, Chris Carter, Linda Woolverton, Joe Johnston, and many more never came back to guest lecture, donate, or just screen some stuff. If I was them I wouldn't want to come back either and face my wallet being milked or dealing with administration hoops. Because of Long Beach, I feel that I shouldn't get an MFA and should just try and make it in the industry. I wish i could have had MFA classes with you.
ReplyDelete-B
Why are we forced to still shoot film. None of my buddies from the other film schools are shooting film due to it being outdated. I hate the film program and it's professors that insist on still using film.
ReplyDeleteThat creature Blumenthal didn't show up this week to school. Yay! As a current student, I take this as a good thing.
ReplyDeleteJust in: CSULB President King Alexander -- LSU faculty senate vote on his move to LSU votes unanimously "No Confidence" against King.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.lbpost.com/news/2000001992-lsu-faculty-senate-unanimously-pass-no-confidence-vote-onto-alexander#.UU346VtATws
Here's another article about the no-confidence vote for Alexander at LSU. I give the faculty senate credit for their vote! http://www.nola.com/education/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2013/03/lsu_faculty_senate_votes_no_co.html#comments
ReplyDeleteAs per emails this morning - the King is dead, long live the... opportunity?
DeleteNot naive enough to think that one position change could rejuvenate an entire system, but despite someone failing upwards, they're also failing OUTWARDS - which gives us a chance at change. Right?
Seriously. Why is Blumenthal there? I always wanted to say to her when I was there wasting my life at her pathetic presence "Does it suck to be you?"
ReplyDeleteDing Dong The Witch is Gone! Which Old Witch? The Blumenthal Witch! I might actually learn something this semester! What a novel concept.
ReplyDelete