Vinegar over Wine: What Film Schools Should Teach by Gary Hainsworth

Film schools should not be allowed to show good movies. If this is not there way, and their selection is far more varied on the spectrum of quality between awful and good, disregard the previous sentence. However, if it is not, let us proceed shall we. Film schools should not be allowed to show good movies. Rather, film students should be required to watch a steady diet of the worst of the worst: Battlefield Earth, Foodfight, The Room, Samurai Cop, Lawnmower Man: Beyond Cyberspace (incomprehensibly called Jobe's War in the original video releases), Showgirls, Troll 2, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Who's Your Caddy?, Son of the Mask, Theodore Rex, Subspecies 2-4 (and Vampire Journals), Plan 9 from Outer Space. Manos: The Hands of Fate, and so forth. The benefit would be four-fold. One: you deconstruct where a movie went wrong (and to a lesser extent: what went right) using what are tantamount to real-life case studies. In effect, learning from other people's mistake with the intention to not replicate their respective failures. Two: encourage confidence. After all, if these movies could be produced then there's hope for the rest us with nothing more than a dream and a notebook. Three: a quasi-memento mori reminding us what Geoff Colvin has been reminding us for years: that talented is overrated. It certainly is. Many of these aforementioned movies, not to mention terrible movies in general, were made by talented people and don't say that people like Tommy Wiseau aren't talented (at least a little). I don't know if I could have raised six million dollars to finance a movie just by importing leather jackets from one of the Korea's. I'm sure few can. Could I replicate the business savvy of Roger Corman or Meachem Globus (1929–2014)? I don't know. Yet even in their pursuit of quantity they occasionally made quality. In other words, bad movies are made by talented people all the time (and even what constitutes as bad and what constitutes as good is quite murky). Four: separate the wheat from the chaff. It requires no effort whatsoever to sit through "Citizen Kane", "Goodfellas", or "North by Northwest" (1959). I'd watch those movies when I'm bored any day. However, it takes a certain level of dedication to the craft to sit through "They're eating her....and then they're going to eat me!......OH MY GOD!!!" or "What does "katana" mean? ~ "It means Japanese sword."