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It’s only a class, after all.
    Still, 507 is a big deal. The lead instructor of every 507 group is also a big deal because this one instructor establishes the ground rules for the semester. This instructor sets the tone for how we will critique our films. This one instructor will determine the grade we get for the class. We students know a bad grade in 507 can seal our doom because we will be shown the door if we don’t maintain at least a B average.
    I have a problem. My lead 507 instructor seems to hate my guts from the first time he meets me.
    The instructor is tall—about six foot two—and thin and muscular. He’s not much older than I am and has an almost-shaved head, a four-day stubble, a frayed trucker’s cap pulled low over his eyes, a pair of torn bell-bottom jeans, and a faded gray T-shirt. In my mind, I give him a nickname: Frayed Trucker’s Cap or FTC.
    FTC introduces himself to our class by sitting in a chair, head down, inside the classroom. He appears to be sleeping or meditating or just plain ignoring us. We students file past and quietly take a seat. We hardly know each other, much less who this guy is. We think he’s the lead instructor, but maybe he’s a wayward parent or a homeless guy. A couple of my classmates look at me questioningly, wondering if I have a clue what’s going on. I shrug. I know as little as they do.
    We’re in the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, an outpost of sorts for lowly first-year production students. The Zemeckis building is located several blocks from the main campus, outside the iron fence that surrounds USC. To get to Zemeckis, we have to walk across the hot Shrine Auditorium parking lot every day, which guarantees most of us are sweaty by the time class starts. So now, on this first day of class with FTC, we’re sweaty and confused.
    Finally, the mysterious FTC lifts his head. He introduces him-self. He talks slowly. He has a nasal, languorous accent no one in class can put a finger on. It sounds like a Deep South–Southern California–Mainline Philadelphia mix. He talks about what will happen in the class, how we each make five short films. His favorite word seems to be dour , as in, “I find this film very dour,” or, “The mood in the scene was very dour.” He pronounces it doooooooer . He stares at the ceiling for long seconds while he formulates a thought. The energy in the room slowly drops while he stares.
    Aware that I had muffed my first introduction, I want to be a bit more expansive among this smaller group of classmates, a group I will be in close contact with for the entire semester. So I’m dropping the less is more thing. I look around at my fifteen classmates. Five are women, ten are men. We’re a collage of colors and accents. There’s a guy from Japan, another from India, and a woman who was born in Ecuador. There are plenty of children of recent immigrants, and we’re from the four corners of the United States. I’m by far the oldest—by almost a decade—but a fair number of my classmates worked after graduating from college prior to applying to USC. One is a novelist, another worked for a film studio in marketing, another worked as a young executive for a major corporation, another worked in television.
    I’m not the only married person: two of the women are also bringing spouses along for this ride through film school.
    As we go around the room, sharing a bit more of ourselves, a thin student with a Deep South twang captures our attention. J. says he grew up in a small town and that his grandfather ran the local movie theater. He says he watched films constantly, and that one day, when he was a teenager working at the theater, his grandfather had a massive heart attack in the projection booth. J. says that as his grandfather lay on the floor, barely breathing, he uttered a wish that someday J. would become a filmmaker.
    J. pauses, looks up. We