Not Dead Poets Society: My Life as a COVID-Era College Professor
What ’70s story songs taught a room full of pandemic freshmen (and me) about taking the first creative risk.
by Jeff Fisher
On my first day of teaching class, a student showed up in a shower cap and started clipping his fingernails. During my lecture.
When I asked this student — let’s call him Ralph — to please stop, he nodded like I’d asked him to pass the salt.
Welcome to college during the pandemic.
Let me back up.
It was COVID, and the entertainment industry felt, like so many other industries, very shut down. Or at least shut down to me. So I found myself very grateful for a job teaching Film and Television at a major university in the South.
I’ll admit, when I’d imagined myself as a professor, the fantasy was a lot more Dead Poets Society. Back in Chicago, I’d had a screenwriting teacher — let’s call him Mr. R — who had a big impact on me, and I wanted to be that guy. Kids leaning in, interested. Somebody standing on a desk.
Did I mention class started at 7:30am? And that each class was a three-hour block that met TWICE a week? If they were leaning in, it was so their heads could get closer to the desk for some more sleep.
Within the first week, a student asked me, with total sincerity, “Who is Martin Scorsese?”
Reader, I had been a P.A. on a Martin Scorsese movie. C’mon, man. How did you get into film school?
Now, some of my credits did buy me a little street cred. A lot of these kids had grown up on The Vampire Diaries and Gossip Girl, so the minute they found out I’d worked with Paul Wesley, the questions started. What was he like? (He’s great.) And was I actually on set when Leighton Meester was there?
“Um, yeah. I was directing the movie. So I kind of had to be.”
Between the shower cap and the Scorsese question, my Dead Poets Society balloon was losing helium real fast.
FILMMAKING 101
I was drinking from the fire hose here. Prepping EIGHT three-hour classes a week (four courses, each meeting twice) was a lot. It made pre-production on a movie seem kind of easy. And being the new guy on the block, I got handed two sections of the, er, more challengingclasses on the roster. Let’s call it: Filmmaking 101.
Here’s the deal with Filmmaking 101. In ten weeks, you teach students the basics of writing (including screenplay format), pitching their project, operating a camera, sound, lighting, and editing. And over those same ten weeks, they make three films.
Three.
Now, I had not actually built a camera myself since film school. And by the second week, I was doing it in front of a bunch of bleary-eyed, masked college kids just after the crack of dawn. Yeesh. How lucky for all of us.
And these were kids who’d had COVID gobble up their senior year. Kids who had missed their prom. Missed their graduation. Spent the past year staring at a laptop instead of doing the things you’re supposed to do at eighteen — like going away to school right after Senior year, navigating newfound freedom, getting blackout drunk and figuring out how to talk to strangers. Some seemed to have forgotten what it was like to be around other humans in public. Case in point: Ralph.
Having spent my career in this business, I knew something they didn’t yet: pitching is a huge part of the job. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t stand up in a room and sell it, it stays in your notebook. These kids seemed sheepish about even talking to each other after what they’d been through— and in a matter of days, they were going to have to floor-pitch their first idea for a (one-minute) film they’d actually have to go shoot.
So the first thing I did was give them a reason to talk.
Before the semester, I’d emailed everyone to come to the first class prepared to discuss their three favorite movies or TV shows, plus one thing they loved about each — the cinematography, the performances, the music, whatever. On day one, they picked numbers out of a hat that dropped them into breakout groups of four. I figured they’d at least walk out of the first class knowing three new people. They told each other where they were from, walked through their three favorites, and — this was key — took notes on what each person said.
Because after the breakout groups, each of them had to stand up and introduce someone else in their group to the class.
It seemed a lot less terrifying to talk about somebody else. It gave them something to focus on besides their own nerves. And for the first time all morning, the room felt a little less like a DMV waiting room and a little more like a class. There were actual tiny slivers of bonding going on.
THANK YOU, BARRY MANILOW
Filmmaking 101 moves at a breakneck pace, so on class one, we had to break story for their first project. Right away.
When I was building the syllabus, I kept trying to think of a painless way into ideation for kids who’d maybe never done it before. And I landed on the story songs I grew up with. The ones that play like a mini-movie in three minutes.
So I assigned a playlist to listen to in their breakout groups:
• “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass — a barmaid in love with a sailor who’s already married to the sea. Longing!
• “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence — a murder, a hanging, and a twist ending. Uh, justice?
• “Wildfire” by Michael Martin Murphey — a girl, a pony, a blizzard, and a ghost story. Loss!
• And (ulp) “Copacabana (At the Copa)” by Barry Manilow — Lola the showgirl, Tony the bartender, and Rico with the diamond. Jealousy!
The assignment: listen in your groups, and see if there’s a relatable theme in there — longing, justice, jealousy — that could spark your first film.
To be clear, the songs weren’t the only way in. Their creative spark could come from a billboard, something on Pinterest, a news article, something they overheard in the hallway. All they had to do was tell me what their creative impulse was. The songs were just a door I knew would open.
The initial reaction was…a lot of confused, tired faces.
But here’s the thing about ’70s story songs: they have really catchy hooks. As they listened in their little groups, I couldn’t help noticing some finger tapping. Some toe tapping. And the can you believe this sh*t? glances shared across the room slowly turned into a group of kids giggling and humming the chorus to “Copacabana.”
That Barry Manilow. He creeps up on you!
Before anyone pitched, I passed along one of the best lessons I ever learned: the elevator pitch.
When I was an assistant at a big talent agency, I spent my one week of vacation making my first post-film-school short film. I had my heart set on Peter Berg for the lead. Before he was a huge director, Pete Berg was one of my favorite actors, in movies like Late for Dinner— and he happened to be a client of the agency where I worked.
So I got his agent’s assistant to tip me off when he was coming into the building for a meeting. Then I did something that, in retrospect, was completely insane: I forwarded my boss’s phone and went down to the valet. (If you read this story the time I got fired and un-fired over an O.J. Simpson fax, you know I was not exactly in a position to be forwarding phones.)
Pete pulled up. He got in the elevator. I got on too. And I pitched him my short film between P1 and the third floor. Typing this, in retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t report to management that there was a psycho in the building.
Here’s the thing: he didn’t do it. But he read the script, and he called me — personally — to say he liked it. He’d just booked a role on Chicago Hope that week and wasn’t available.
I didn’t get that actor. But I got to pitch an actor I really believed in. And he called me back. Sometimes that’s the win.
Then my students’ pitches came in.
“Copacabana” became a revenge story about a messy dorm roommate.
“Brandy” became a story about longing for a guy on a classroom Zoom who turned his camera off after the very first class — never to show his handsome mug again.
And “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” became a grim, one-minute horror movie. Shot, like roughly 80% of all the student horror movies I’d see that semester, in the deserted parking garage on the school’s main campus. (A location I would grow to dread, thanks to its wild popularity and overuse. It was creepy at night and close to the freshman dorms — in other words, a dream location for students.)
But the great thing was, these kids had ideas. They’d stood up and pitched them. Out loud. In front of the class.
Now they just had to go make them. And I had to teach them how.
MINNIE, RALPH & A DARK TAKE ON BARRY
We made it through the demos. It was time to screen the first round of films.
I had to remember what it felt like to show my first film in film school. How nerve-wracking it is to put your creative work up on a screen in front of an audience and just…sit there while they watch it.
These kids had worked with their classmates. Navigated the equipment cage. Spent their weekends crewing on each other’s projects. And now it was time to sink or swim.
And some of them really came out of their shells.
There was a super shy young lady — let’s call her Minnie. On day one, she barely looked up or made eye contact with anyone. Her film was the “Copacabana” roommate revenge fantasy.
It went like this: our hero arrives back at his dorm room, fed up with his roommate’s complete lack of tidiness. On the counter sits the roommate’s half-finished protein shake, left out overnight. In goes a bottle of poison.
And playing our hero, the neat freak out for retribution? Ralph.
Minnie casting Ralph (sans shower cap) as her avatar was…a choice. I would have definitely cast him as the messy roommate — the guy who leaves fingernail clippings where fingernail clippings do not belong (for instance, in my classroom). But it was her movie. And it ended on his sly little smile as the roomie guzzled his last protein shake. Ever.
Dark!
The class loved it. Minnie gave a genuine smile.
And she got an A.
Just looking at her on day one, I would have guessed Minnie related more to Lola’s heartbreak than to Rico’s pistol prowess. Which just goes to show you: don’t judge a book by its cover. (Or a student filmmaker by her first-day silence. Or a student by his shower cap.)
The truth is, things rarely turn out the way we imagine them. Sometimes the best scene in your whole movie comes from a tiny moment that just blooms into something special.
But until you take that first creative risk, nothing happens.
These were kids who had missed a whole year of being around people during one of the most memorable times of their lives. And here they were, spending their weekends in a parking garage, holding boom poles for each other. I could see real friendships being made. And the start of some real voices shining through.
LITTLE VICTORIES
Now, I’ll be honest with you.
My fantasy that I was going to make a meaningful difference in every student’s life — the way Mr. R did for me — that was a fantasy.
Out of the hundred or so students I had each semester, a few of them took what I was teaching and ran with it. Some of them just weren’t that…interested. And that’s okay. I leaned into the ones who were along for the ride and did my best to prepare all of them for a pretty crazy business.
It turns out, those few were enough for me to walk into every single class giving it my best shot.
Let’s face it: not everyone is going to like your movie. Or your class. And the internet gives everyone a public forum to eviscerate your work. (By the way, thank you, @SlimTim26, for your thoughtful one-word review of my last movie: “Horible.” Slim misspelled “horrible,” but I got the idea.)
But if a few were entertained by it? That was the goal. I’ll take it.
Mr. R had been a produced screenwriter — someone who had actually sold a script — at a time when everyone else was telling me I’d picked a career that was nearly impossible. He looked at my pages and said, basically: There’s something here. Keep at it.
That was it. And it gave me hope.
I’d bet Mr. R had his own rooms full of bleary-eyed kids who weren’t that interested. I just happened to be one of his few.
So every so often, when a kind note pops up on Instagram or LinkedIn from a former student — some I was super impressed with, and some I had no idea were even enjoying the class — I think about him. Some of the ones who showed real promise back then are starting to see the fruits of their labor now. That makes me very, very happy.
Teaching felt like giving back — a chance to share real-world experience with kids who’d had a lot taken from them. I didn’t get my Dead Poets Society moment. Nobody stood on a desk.
But somebody poisoned a protein shake and smiled about it. And that protein shake wasn’t mine. I’ll take that too.
THE TAKEAWAYS
→ Borrow a story to find your own. A great story song is a whole movie in three minutes — a character, a want, a twist, an ending you remember. When you’re stuck, start with someone else’s story and follow the feeling it gives you. A billboard, a headline, or a Barry Manilow song all count.
→ Be ready for the elevator. Know your idea well enough to pitch it between P1 and the third floor. You may not get a yes. But you might get a callback — and that counts.
→ Don’t cast by the cover. The quietest person in the room might be the one with the darkest, boldest idea. That includes you.
→ “Close enough” gets you in the game. You don’t have to be an expert to start. You have to be willing to go down to the equipment cage, ask the dumb questions, and watch the tutorial videos.
→ A few is enough. Not everyone will love your movie, your class, or your work. Make it for the ones who will. And if you see something in someone, tell them: There’s something here. Keep at it.
So now I’m curious: what’s the story song that would be YOUR first movie? Tell me in the comments. (Bonus points if it’s not shot in a parking garage.)
Stuck on your first idea, or your fortieth? Getting ready to pitch and feeling a little deer-in-the-headlights? I offer one-on-one coaching and consulting sessions. Reach out at reeltalkwithjeff.com and let’s find your story.
Jeff Fisher is a director and writer whose credits include Paramount Pictures’ “The Stranger in My Home” and “The Image of You,” Hallmark’s highest-rated film of the year “My Christmas Love,” and reality hits spanning from “The Simple Life” to “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.” Visit www.jefffisherdirector.com to see his work and www.reeltalkwithjeff.com for more industry insights. @jefffisher_insta
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