developmentnews Reuben Cannon Encourages Aspiring Filmmaker to ‘Perfect Craft’
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tephen Love’s future plans to become a filmmaker is coming into focus. Love, a senior, helped found the Morehouse Filmmakers Association (MFA) in 2010. Not long after, the College launched its Cinema, Television and Emerging Media Studies program (CTEMS). The association now has nearly 100 members, many of whom are enrolled in CTEMS. Then in October 2011, MFA and CTEMS collaborated to bring legendary casting director and producer Reuben Cannon to campus for the inaugural master class for CTEMS. Held at the Executive Conference Center in the Bank of America Auditorium, the aptly titled “Candid with Cannon” conversation offered Love and his classmates an up-close and personal opportunity to engage with one of Hollywood’s most revered and respected industry titans. Cannon shared his insights on how to get discovered in one of the most lucrative, yet elusive of career fields – the film and television industry.
“Being discovered is simply expanding the light on someone who was doing it all along,” he said. “Perfect your craft,” he said, stressing that “being good at what you do” paves the true road to success. Love was able to talk personally with Cannon about his future aspirations in film. Cannon urged him to consider applying to the prestigious Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California. Love applied and was admitted to the selective program, which only admits 25 students per year. He is the first Morehouse student to be accepted into the program. According to Terry Mills, the CTEMS program administrator who wrote the grant to the Mellon Foundation that yielded $450,000 to plan and implement CTEMS, this type of aspiration is behind the program’s creation. “Considering the impact and direction of cinema, television and media within society in general, it is important to have CTEMS as a major because it helps us to influence a conversation of who and how we are across mediums
Reuben Cannon and Stephen Love ’12
that still have problems in considering us as whole persons,” said Mills. David Wall Rice ’95, assistant professor of psychology who co-directs CTEMS with Stephane Dunn, assistant professor of English, concurs: “CTEMS allows us to establish conversations and paradigms that contribute to the story and fabric of who ‘we’ are, however we might define ‘we’ to be,” he said. The next phase of development for CTEMS, slated for fall 2012, is Studio M, a sound stage and digital media editing facility that will be located in Brawley Hall. n
The Follett Higher Education Group Donates $125,000 The Follett Higher Education Group, which runs the Morehouse College Bookstore, has donated a total of $125,000 to the Morehouse College Renaissance Now campaign for student scholarships. On Feb. 2, Follett presented Morehouse with a check for $25,000. Pictured from left to right: Follett Regional Manager Jim Cope; Julie Sills, Morehouse’s director of Corporate and Foundation Relations; Steve Pribyl, Follett executive vice president; Ralph Johnson, Morehouse’s chief procurement officer and associate vice president for Procurement and Contracts; Follett President Tom Christopher; Phillip Howard ‘87, Morheouse’s vice president for Institutional Advancement; Howard Taylor, Follett vice president-Eastern Region; and Cedric Hughes, manager of the Morehouse College Bookstore. One month later on March 15, Follett’s Cope, Taylor, Hughes and Jennifer Hatton, group vice president-Eastern Region presented President Robert M. Franklin ‘75, Johnson and vendor specialist Clayton Monroe with a $100,000 check for the campaign.
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