Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [25]
The USC film school, the more practical-minded alternative to UCLA, was best known for training filmmakers for the army and navy, but by the late sixties, a new breed of aspiring directors were interested in socially relevant drama. The war was raging and student strikes and demonstrations were a part of daily life. The big man on campus was O. J. Simpson, who won the Heisman Trophy in 1968 but was ignored by most of the film students who generally weren’t interested in football.
Everyone smoked pot and grew their hair long and hung around commune-like group homes, taking advantage of the new availability of the Pill. One gifted student named Charles Adaire, openly gay and from small-town Georgia, stood out by starting to make a zombie movie. “No one wanted a horror film, but Chuck did something inspired by Night of the Living Dead,” Dan O’Bannon says. “It was about a woman living alone in a farmhouse who was attacked. He never finished it.”
The film program was sober and rigorous, starting first year when students were required to make short, silent films every two weeks. They were screened and critiqued, sometimes brutally, by peer review. In later years, they made longer and more expensive movies, creating a divide between those who could afford to direct and those who needed to join a crew. “It was like a microcosm of Hollywood,” said Terence Winkless, who had directed O’Bannon in Foster’s Release. “Nobody makes it without friends, but everyone is still trying to beat each other.”
One required class was film history, taught by Arthur Knight, who invited the most famous directors in Hollywood to discuss their new work. Orson Welles cantankerously informed the students that there was nothing taught in film school they couldn’t learn in two weeks in the real world. John Ford was soft-spoken. But Roman Polanski got attention for bringing along his blond wife, Sharon Tate, an actress who had gone topless in The Fearless Vampire Killers. The students were impressed.
By 1969, Polanski had transitioned from an art house director to a hotshot Hollywood player and fixture in gossip columns. Rosemary’s Baby was a sensation among young audiences. The controversy that the movie generated only increased its credibility. But after screening the film for the class, Polanski did not discuss horror or Satanism or the line between fantasy and reality. He had been troubled by the flood of threatening letters he received from people angry about the film’s supposed religious message, but the response was not mentioned either. That kind of thing was for journalists.
Polanski focused on the nuts and bolts: lenses, angles, editing. Polanski explained that Rosemary’s Baby was shot with handheld cameras and on the street, far away from a studio lot. It was important, he said, to keep the shots moving, and to use a wide-angle lens that slightly expanded the faces of his actors and the screen so he could sneak the horror into the corners of the frame. The oddness of this view could be exploited. He also said that he made sure to shoot a little askew. Characters’ faces would be cut off. Only half of the action would be revealed, adding to the sense of unease. The scares would hover at the edges. Polanski explained that when using wide-angle there is a certain distance from an actor that still won’t distort their face. It was a master class in the technique of horror. “From Polanski I realized,” said John Carpenter, a student in the class, “you really have to know what the fuck you are doing to make movies.”
Carpenter stood out at school as someone going places, a rising star. It helped that he had a laconic, quiet presence that always seemed a little distant, not in a cold way so much as businesslike. There was a mystery about him. He had a swagger that commanded respect. His melancholy short film The Resurrection of Broncho Billy, about a lonely, alienated kid from the city who loved westerns, made his reputation at school. Wasting time in his bedroom wallpapered