rom time to time Jeffrey Tufano encounters fresh young graduates from his alma mater’s School of Communication, all looking to get ahead in the madness that is Hollywood. As a matter of personal policy, he does not mince words. “I give ’em the good and I give ’em the bad,” says the 1991 University of Miami graduate turned leading Hollywood cameraman. “I tell them that when I first left Miami in 1977, I came out to L.A., passed out my résumé, and then spent the next year shuttling cars for Avis at the airport.”
    Articles about young folks making it big in Hollywood are often peppered with anecdotes about landing lucky breaks, glamorous jobs, and hefty salaries. Indeed, thanks to an ever-growing reputation, the University of Miami’s School of Communication has graduated a young group of professionals who seem to have risen to positions of considerable influence in all areas of movie production, distribution, and exhibition with amazing speed. This includes David Nutter (’83), who recently won an Emmy Award for Band of Brothers, an HBO miniseries he codirected with executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.
    As you might expect, many of them say they love their work. Yet most of their Hollywood stories are not fantasy flicks but epics of hard labor. Directors, screenwriters, and agents, ex-Miamians all, prefer to talk about paying one’s dues, starting at the bottom, and developing realistic professional expectations. That’s how it is in the entertainment biz.
    Still, if there’s one constant piece of advice offered by University graduates who’ve made a go of it on the left coast, it’s that you have to go after what you want most in life.

“You can’t be sitting around in Miami waiting for it to happen,” says Ryan Provencher (A.B. ’01), who’s already a Los Angeles-based booker for Miramax Films. “It doesn’t work like that. You have to come out here and start putting in the grunt work.”

Jeff Respress (A.B. ’96), a former manager with Artists Management Group and agent with Innovative Talent, used the University’s extensive alumni network to land an internship in Los Angeles between his junior and senior years. One month after graduation, he had a job for the television pilot season. Since then, Respress has moved to progressively larger agencies, also moving up to bigger and bigger roles therein. He enjoys dealing with young innovators best.

“I’ve worked in areas where you are representing $10 million or $15 million players,” Respress says. “The stakes are different there. But I enjoy working with young people who are open-minded and like taking chances.”

It took Craig Sherman (B.S.C. ’93) eight years and any number of tiring day jobs to finally realize his goal of selling his first screenplay. “It was,” Sherman says, “a very long road.”

But it was worth traveling. Sherman’s New Suit, the semi-autobiographical story of a once-optimistic screenwriter worn down by Hollywood power games, finally was produced last year by Trillion Entertainment with Dan Hedaya (First Wives Club, Usual Suspects) and Heather Donahue (The Blair Witch Project) in leading roles. It even was seen in December 2001 at the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen, Colorado. Based somewhat on The Emperor’s New Clothes, Sherman’s movie concerns a script that does not even exist but nonetheless sparks a bidding war. He may wish it had all come together quicker but Sherman sees the last eight years as essential preparation time.

“I worked for all those years to meet enough people so that when I did write something, I had enough people who would read it,” he said. “I finally reached put-up-or-shut-up time.”

“I’m increasingly convinced,” says Bob Hosmon, the associate dean of the School of Communication, “that success in the entertainment industry is a question of having talent, knowing what to do, and then not being bothered by people telling you ‘no.’ You just have to go on to the next person. And we’ve found that once our students are finally in the loop, their phones ring off the wall.”

These days, University of Miami film students are getting themselves in the loop even before they’re done with school.

onsider the remarkable persistence of Alfred Spellman and Billy Corben, two 23-year-old students who took a sabbatical from their undergraduate studies to film a controversial documentary. While enrolled at the School of Communication, the two long-time friends (“we met in middle school,” Spellman says) heard about a strange Gainesville, Florida, case involving an exotic dancer who was hired by a fraternity at the University of Florida. The fraternity members filmed the dancer engaging in sexual acts. Initially, the dancer attempted to file rape charges against some members of the fraternity, but when the local police viewed the videotape that had been made that night, they in turn accused the dancer of filing false charges. Due to Florida’s sunshine laws, the sexually explicit film became part of the public record and available to anyone who asked for a copy. Yet, Spellman says, “there had been no investigative backstory into the case.”

Spellman and Corben hopped in a car for Gainesville and made a powerful documentary about the incident, which involved “republishing” the notorious videotape and interviewing many of the participants in the case. When the resultant explicit 99-minute film, Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, was shown at the 2001 Sundance Festival, it caused nothing short of a sensation.

“It was a film,” says Mark Caro, movie reporter for the Chicago Tribune, “that everyone was trying to get in to see.”

ollowing Sundance, where all screenings sold out, there were numerous rave reviews and a shell-shocked article about the rape case. The film showed up on the front page of the New York Post. Large audiences attended screenings at the University of Miami and in Miami Beach.

“It’s a very moving film and completely even-handed,” says Hosmon, who attended the Miami screenings.

For their part, Corben and Spellman both say they were trying to get audiences to appreciate that wherever there is videotape, sex and lies probably are not far away. “Everyone,” says Spellman, “has come to expect videotape to tell an objective truth. Yet we found that the people who watched the actual videotape could not agree on what it was they were seeing. In the film, we try to let the audience decide.”

Though Spellman and Corben plan on completing their degrees, they’ve devoted themselves for now to several projects at Spellman/Corben Productions, based in Miami. They are shooting two television pilots—one about a group of young adults who live in the Stiltsville homes of Biscayne Bay, and the other a reality TV series set in the realm of the nightlife industry. They also are lining up clients for their new spot and music video production company, Sea Spot Run, and this spring they’ll begin shooting a dramatic feature set on a Florida college campus, written and directed by Corben. Raw Deal will be released in theaters nationwide in early 2003.

“They’re remarkable talents,” says Hosmon. “They know the business end as well as the creative end. They bring with them the entire package. We try to train our students for that.”

Marilyn: The Final Days

t the time of her death in 1962, screen legend Marilyn Monroe was working on a romantic comedy costarring Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. It had an aptly dark title—Something’s Got to Give. Things did not go well on the set. Fighting a slew of personal demons, Monroe was hired, fired, and rehired. Then with only 37 minutes of the movie completed, Monroe was found dead.

Over the years, there has been a raft of documentaries on Monroe’s demise, often employing conspiratorial tones. But when Marilyn Monroe: The Final Days showed up on the American Movie Classics cable channel last spring, it offered something entirely different. This new look at the final days of Monroe’s life featured a painstaking reconstruction of the 37 minutes of original footage (which had been shot roughly in sequence), and it was University of Miami graduate Tori Rodman (B.S.C. ’93) who had put it all together.

“Our company was the first to get permission to take the dailies and remaster them,” said Rodman, the stepdaughter of UM faculty member George Capewell and a busy Hollywood editor.

The Boston Herald described the Emmy-nominated documentary, which is now available on videotape and DVD, as both “absorbing” and “beautifully produced.”

“She’s one of those people whom people actually call for jobs,” says Capewell, who has taught film in the School of Communication since 1975. “That’s rare in Hollywood.”

Rodman says she got her start by answering a bulletin-board job posting about an editing job in Zurich, Switzerland, on the eve of her graduation from the University. “I think I was the only one who applied,” she says. After gaining experience in Europe, she returned to the United States and landed a post-production job at Warner Bros.

Rodman says it was her stepfather’s Film 222 class that initially sparked her career. “I went from enjoying movies on a personal level to being able to analyze them on a basic but nonetheless professional level,” she says. “I learned all the basic foundations at the University of Miami.”