This Teaching Life

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

As many of you know, I’ve been teaching since 1981. I started as a teacher and dorm master (it was mistress at the time. . .) at the all-male boarding school Deerfield Academy and taught at the Hotchkiss School in the summers. 

 

The students at my first ever teaching job.

 

The students living on my "hall."

 

Then I worked as a Teaching Assistant in the Film Criticism course at the University of North Carolina from 1983 to 1986, started teaching Screenwriting in the Graduate Film School at UCLA in 1996, and since 2000, I’ve also lectured and run various courses in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

 

Of course, the international jobs have always been the most fun, as they include travel, hotels, working with wonderful, creative people, and lots of other perks (including meeting my husband). 

 

My "classroom building" on one teaching trip to Italy.

Doing one of my "Living Room Lectures" in San Francisco.

Teaching in Brisbane.

The Sofitel Melbourne, where I stayed during my first years lecturing at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

 

I was lucky in Melbourne to be working beside the most knowledgeable film person I know, Adrian Wootton, head of Film London.

 

And wound up next to Geoffrey Rush at dinner in 2015.

 

Here James and I are with our now "forever friend," script editor extraordinaire Claire Dobbin.

They are also the most stressful, as they require the most prep and can be marred by many things out of my control, like typhoons, cancelled flights, incompatible or non-working equipment, bureaucracy, miscommunications, and fear that my work visas won’t come through in time, etc.

Our bed when I am prepping for lectures.

 

The long search for an Australian, NTSC compatible VCR/DVD player is finally sucessful!

I’m recently back from Melbourne, where I am lucky enough to be running a year-long initiative to develop genre-friendly feature films for the State of Victoria’s film agency, VicScreen. https://vicscreen.vic.gov.au/news/genre-at-the-forefront-of-vicscreens-latest-originate-initiative

 

At the beginning of the course, I presented eight hours of Zoom lectures on film structure and characterizations, with a specific emphasis on thriller, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and comedy films.

 

A few of the films I reference.

I am now in the second portion of the scheme, working directly on eight projects chosen out of 146 applications. I can report that we have chosen well and that my week-long workshop with the writers was an absolute delight, from beginning to end. They were smart, funny, diligent, attentive, worked well as a group, and were a general joy to be around. 

Official photo by the wonderful Daniel Mahon.

The view from our workspace.

Writers hard at work.

 

Teaching is very hard and often underpaid work. Almost everyone I know who does it for a living is currently trying to get out.

Every once in a while, though, all the work is worth it, and this was one of these times. If you’d like to read about the initiative or the projects, you can find an article here:

https://if.com.au/vicscreen-advances-eight-genre-films-through-originate/

 --Wendall