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By Michael Lane
In
the fall of 1979, the Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program opened its doors to its first class of students. A lot has changed since then—in the industry, at SCA, and within Stark. But as the old adage goes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Four decades later the fundamentals of a Stark education are still intact and are a large part of why it remains the premier program in creative producing for media, new and traditional forms. It’s also the reason why its alumni speak so passionately about their time in the program and the people with whom they spent that time. On October 20th, 2019, SCA welcomed those alumni back to campus to reminisce and celebrate this milestone together. It all started with a generous gift from famed producer Ray Stark and his wife, Frances—enough to endow the program and get it on its feet.They asked that the program be named in honor of their recently deceased son, Peter. Its first Chair was film critic and Professor Art Murphy. The program was organized as a way of combining the educations of art and commerce. Students would take
10 • In MOTION • USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
some classes within the film school, which was then a department within the School of Performing Arts, and other classes at USC’s business school. From the time the program started, students were required to have internships or jobs in the industry, so most classes were held at night. Academy Award-winning producer Ed Saxon (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia,) class of 1984, remembers the business school classes were not as filmspecific as he had hoped. “I was still in the part of the program where half would be business courses. There were some real business-y courses. There were a couple of classes where I had trouble connecting the dots.”
Eventually, the program would bring all of its classes in house and the Chair would be responsible for securing faculty from both the creative disciplines of the industry and its business corners. Under consummate producer Larry Turman (The Graduate, American History X), Stark began to focus on creativity and the business courses were seen as tools to achieving those creative goals. “I don’t know if I can teach creativity, but I try to have the students get in touch with themselves, get in touch with their creativity, and unleash it so that each one will receive the most personal satisfaction and hopefully create work meaningful not only to themselves but to the larger community,” says Turman.
Stark continues to be about the delicate dance between art and commerce that dictates decision-making in Hollywood. As such, students don’t just learn how to be creative or how to make good business decisions, but how to, as Turman puts it, “think like a producer.” The program actually changes the way students think about a creative project, any creative project. They learn to assess its creative merits while simultaneously vetting its business viability and thus strategizing how it should be made, when, where, and for whom. Screenwriter/ playwright/tech entrepreneur John August (Big Fish, Go, Highland) class of ’94, notes, “It wasn’t strictly a creative degree, it wasn’t just about ‘let’s make art,’ it was also, ‘let’s
