Is film school worth it?

It’s a complicated question that every person has to answer for themselves, but I wanted to focus on one aspect of it which I like to call the Film School Paradox: as the cost of making films goes down, the cost of film school goes up.

The absurdly high cost of a graduate education in the United States continues to rise with no end in sight. A recent article in the New York Times gives a dire prognostication:

With unemployment soaring, higher education has never been more important to society or more widely desired. But the collapse of our public education system and the skyrocketing cost of private education threaten to make college unaffordable for millions of young people. If recent trends continue, four years at a top-tier school will cost $330,000 in 2020, $525,000 in 2028 and $785,000 in 2035.

Seven-hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars!

UCLA holds a unique position at the eye of California’s budgetary storm, with tuition having gone up nearly $7,000 in the two years I’ve been here. As I’ve mentioned earlier, this development heavily contributed to my decision to graduate a year early.

That being said, if you look at the top five film schools and their respective tuitions, UCLA is actually somewhat affordable:

1. NYU (With Insurance Fees) $48,020
2. Columbia (First and Second Year) $50,873
3. AFI $42,329
4. USC $40,960
5. UCLA (In-State) $23,000

But it’s still a lot of moolah! For one year’s tuition at any of these schools, you could easily buy a nice camera package or even finance a whole feature (see my microbudget list).

With recent developments in digital technology, it seems like an increasingly viable option to go and shoot your own feature or short without paying forty grand a year. What to do with that feature after it’s done, or how to get the money to make it is outside the scope of this article.

In the old days, film students went to school to gain access to prohibitively expensive thirty-five and sixteen millimeter cameras. Those days are officially gone; this year all major manufacturers announced that they will no longer make film cameras. Meanwhile the new RED Scarlet, with accessories, sells for $15,000.

This is the film school paradox; as the difficulty and expense involved in making films decline, the cost of a film school education continues to rise. Or as William Butler Yeats put it:

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Film school can offer mentorship, feedback, a professional network, peer relationships, technical training and time to work on your craft. All of these are incredibly valuable, but it will be interesting to see at which price point film school applications drop off, if they haven’t already.

A Graduate MFA Directing student who becomes a top director is statistically comparable to an MBA becoming a CEO at a Fortune 500 company. But my guess is that most top-tier MBAs who don’t become CEOs have far fewer problems paying off their student loans.

I still believe that a film school education can be worth $100,000, but as the prices continue to soar high above that mark, students will be increasingly faced with the serious choice of whether two to seven hundred thousand dollars, or the price of most features in Sundance’s low-budget NEXT section, is really worth it.

What do you think, can the falcon hear the falconer?

These people? Yeah they're in debt.

A while back Short of the Week Editor Andrew S. Allen told me I should write about my thoughts about film school strategy. Here are the seven things I came up with that I find essential to any successful film school career:

1. Find Your Voice

This is a murky territory that a lot of people get confused by. Your voice is the kind of stories you want to tell, the kind of stories that move you. If you come into school loving romantic dramas, but decide to make an action picture just to “try it out,” the odds are it will probably not be as good. Basically this means finding and trusting your intuition, being able to listen to yourself for what you find important. Miranda July said in a Q & A at the Los Angeles Film Festival that she wakes up every morning and asks herself what she really wants to do today. That’s not a bad start.

2. Make A Lot of Short Films, Finish the Damn Things, and Make Them Cheap

One of the things that still baffles me about film schools is how instead of making a bunch of cheap films, we make a couple very expensive ones. The learning potential for a film generally remains the same no matter how much money you spend on it. Putting a film together, and then being forced to watch it over and over again is the best way to learn how to make a movie. Shoot digital, shoot a lot, and set deadlines to finish. I wrote a post earlier called “Good Enough,” and I meant it. Not every film will be a masterpiece. The best films are the ones you learn the most from.

3. Write/Develop A Lot of Features (Including One You Can Make For Nothing)

If you want to be a writer/director, as it seems most people in film school do, you have to write a lot of features. As with the short films, some of them will be better than others. The most common story repeated in film schools is:

Jimmy just won Sundance/Cannes/Berlin/the Student Oscars with his short film, he got repped at WME/CAA/Paradigm, but he doesn’t have any features done, so now he’s going to spend 6-12 months writing/rewriting while the buzz dies.

For a first person account of this, see this post on John August’s blog: http://johnaugust.com/2011/missed-opportunities-and-second-chances

The second (and far more common) thing that happens is that your short film is not a massive success, and you don’t get the great agent/manager to guide you to new career heights. That’s why you have to write something you can make, no matter what, for cheap.

I wrote last week about how Ryan Koo raised $125,000 on Kickstarter. He has no major credits, as far as I can tell has never had a short film at a major festival, and is relatively unknown. He did have a blog though, which was free, and a lot of savvy and hard work, which is also free. The point is you can make your first feature, you’re just going to have to be realistic and do it for CHEAP!

Abe Sylvia, a UCLA alum whose Dirty Girl hit theaters this weekend, said that the one thing he wished he’d done in film school was write more. The more scripts you have, the more movies you can potentially make. If you don’t have any scripts, you don’t have any movies. Period.

4. Submit to Film Festivals/Screenwriting Competitions

Hopefully one or two of your short films will come out well. In which case you’re going to have to learn to start throwing money and DVDs into the abyss known as film festivals.

The second portion of this is applying with your screenplays to contests like the Nicholls, Goldwyn (for UC Students), the Sundance Labs, Zoetrope etc. Development interns and assistants in Hollywood power through the finalists for these competitions all the time, and it is one of the best ways for an unknown to get read without representation, and even to secure representation.

Submitting to film festivals and competitions is pretty straightforward, and I already wrote a post about short film festival strategy, so I’m not going to go too in depth here.

Basically it’s a lot of work. You’re running a little office (I have a spreadsheet) and every few weeks or so you:

1. See which deadlines are coming up.
2. Pay entry fees and mail dvds.
3. Check to see if new deadlines have been announced.
4. Weep over the innumerable rejections.

5. Intern

Yes, this is the part where people go, “Internships? Isn’t that slave labor?” The answer is: kind of.

An internship will teach you how the industry works from the perspective of the people who actually get paid to make movies. If you do a good job, they will become contacts that can help you in the future with job searches, script notes, general encouragement or connections to other film people.

This is your way to spend two days a week learning how people who can make your movies think, and should not be overlooked. I’ve done two in my two years here, and I wish I could have squeezed one more in.

Every school (at least in NY and LA) should have some sort of internship listing. If your last name isn’t Coppola or Reitman, I suggest you give them a look.

Bonus: If you work for a small company, you may even find a mentor.

6. Form Long-lasting Relationships With Peers

Another oft-quoted cliché in film school is; “keep track of your peers, you will be climbing up the ranks together.” This is very true. How many friends did you have before film school who could Assistant Direct a movie? Shoot one?

Your peers are the people who you can go to in times of need, who might be able to help you make that $50,000 feature by providing some of the slave labor it implies, and who (hopefully) have a vested interest in your success.

In some ways this can be the biggest gift you have coming out of film school; a group of like-minded, passionate and motivated people who you can always call if you don’t understand color correction or need a last-minute grip.

7. Finish Fast and Minimize Your Debt

The bottom line is that America seems to care less and less about the rising costs of education and the welfare of its students. I recently posted the following commentary on facebook:

While we can petition our government as much as we like, the bottom line is it’s going to get more and more expensive to study here in America, at least until the education bubble pops. The sad thing is that we’re willing to bail out the banks, but not the universities.

I’m choosing to graduate a year early from UCLA because I didn’t see the point in going any farther into debt that I already had. You learn how to make a movie in film school. My feeling was that once you’ve done it a few times, you’re ready to leave. The factors that I had the most control over that contributed to my debt were:

1. The cost of my films
2. My lifestyle
3. How many outside jobs I worked

For $50,000

For $100,000

For $200,000

In the end I still think film school is worth it. It’s a lot to cram into 3 (to 7) years, but that’s why we pay the big bucks, right?

I saw Aleem Hossain’s Pinkerton in one of my first writing classes at UCLA. It remains one of my favorite short films, a genre-bending joyride. I sat down this week to talk with Aleem via Skype about the making of the film and life after completing his MFA at UCLA.

Jason Kohl: Tell me about your process creating Pinkerton.

Aleem Hossain: I kicked around a lot of ideas but eventually I figured out that I wanted my thesis to be two things:  Short and a cop movie. I’d seen a few good 25 minute thesis films and a lot of bad ones.

I love cop shows and movies – so I wanted to work in that genre.  But I kept banging my head against the wall when it came to finding an original story. And then I read this New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik where he was talking about his kid’s funny imaginary friend. I read that and suddenly I remembered my childhood imaginary friend.

But my childhood imaginary friend was a rock.  This small piece of stone I found in my backyard. That didn’t seem too cinematic.  And so I added one of my other favorite things, muppets. I started thinking about what my imaginary rock friend would make of my life a couple of decades later. And from there I found my twist on the classic “cop out to avenge his partner” story.

JK: How was the shoot?

AH: I shot for 4 1/2 days with a crew of about 10-15 depending on the day.

JK: And if you don’t mind my asking, what was the budget for Pinkerton?

AH: It cost $13,000 to get Pinkerton in the can.  And then another $4-5k for all the post.  Somewhere in the $17,000 range all told.  The most expensive film I’ve ever made.

JK: What did you do with the film from there?

AH: I sent it out to festivals but it didn’t get into many of them.  It’s been really interesting to watch it’s festival life. Every time the film gets into a festival, audiences love it. But I think a lot of people don’t know what to make of it when watching it alone.

I think they don’t know whether to laugh or not… in an audience, there’s always some people who will just react bigger than everyone – and that carries the crowd. I found that when I show it to producers or festival folks one-on-one, it’s success rate is lower.

JK: That’s too bad. Everyone I saw it with loved it I think. So what was your exit strategy leaving UCLA?

AH: I knew, even at the time, that I should have an awesome short and a feature script to go with it – either a feature version of the same movie or one in the same genre.  Bil McDonald told us that on the very first day of school 4 years earlier.

But I didn’t leave with that. I had written scripts – even a feature version of Pinkerton – but I wasn’t happy with any of them.

So I got a lot of buzz off of Pinkerton out of Spotlight but I didn’t have a good feature sample.  I did have the other script I’d co-written, but it was a comedy and I wasn’t going to direct that script, so it didn’t really propel me towards

I went to a lot of meetings – met a lot of nice people – but I didn’t have anything for them to work with, really.

JK: What do you feel would have been best for them?

AH: I needed a relatively commercial (at least somewhat high concept) feature script.  If I was just interested in writing, it could have even been a 100 million dollar type movie.  To direct, it ideally would have been a million or under (and that would still have probably been a long shot). I spent a number of years trying to write those scripts.

JK: How were your first years out of UCLA?

AH: I spent a lot of time in development on that comedy script I co-wrote.  Which was great b/c it introduced me to the strange pace, logic, and requirements of studio filmmaking.  But also drove me crazy b/c we worked and worked without getting paid.  And on the side I was trying to write high-concept thrillers and sci-fi films.  And after about 3 years I realized that I didn’t like writing like that.  I didn’t think:  high concept is selling out – or – commercial screenwriting is bad.  I just realized I didn’t like it and I didn’t produce good content when I was thinking about selling the scripts. And I didn’t want to be a screenwriter.

I often say – I learned what I didn’t want – and that’s about as important as knowing what I want. And I realized that it had been 3 or 4 years since I directed anything.

JK: Did you have debt coming off of school? What work did you do to help pay it off?

AH: I did have debt.  Less than many of my classmates but still a sizeable and scary amount.  The solution was teaching.  I got a job at a university – my MFA actually came in handy! – and started teaching Final Cut Pro, directing, videography, etc.  It was the best of both worlds – I like the job, it paid decently, it didn’t take up all my hours in a week, and I could use the equipment.

I think this question of how filmmakers make money is really important. It’s sort of this unspoken dirty secret.

JK: It’s really important, and one of the least addressed ones in film school.

AH: The fact is, surprisingly “successful” filmmakers don’t make enough money to only do film for a living.

If you talk to poets, many of whom are university professors, they are very upfront about the fact that they don’t make a lot of money off poetry.  And I certainly don’t think – well, if you don’t earn at least x dollars off poetry you’re not a poet.  I think the same thing about filmmakers.

So I’ve been trying to be up front about the fact that I don’t make all my money from filmmaking.

JK: I’ve read articles about films that premiered at Sundance and after two years still haven’t made their money back. Where else do you make your money from? Are you still teaching?

I am still teaching.  The university I first worked for closed – so now I’m an adjunct.  At the moment I’m teaching at Pasadena City College.  They have this fantastic program over there.  It’s a real film community. And it’s at community college prices.  Now it’s not a BA or anything – but it’s terrific. It’s really made me think hard about how expensive other film schools are.

JK: They’re getting more expensive all the time. Tell me about Agility studios and your project there.

AH: Basically, in early 2008 I got fed up with waiting for financing for an indie feature.  But I’d vowed not to make any more short films (I felt I’d made enough, wanted to advance career wise).

Then I started watching web series. And I found a convenient way around my self-imposed no more short films rule. I just made a bunch of shorts… but I called them webisodes.

And, to my surprise, they were taken so much more seriously than anything I’d ever done. I think it’s because web series are thought of as being related to television.  I made a 4 min pilot episode of sci-fi show called It Ends Today.

And it was a huge career step for me. I posted it online and literally within weeks I was signed by Gersh.

JK: Where did you post?

AH: I just made a simple one-page site with an embedded video (I didn’t want to do YouTube at the time b/c I didn’t know if that would ruin the premiere status of the pilot.  I put all my stuff on YouTube and Vimeo now, though).

And I sent the url to every person I’d ever met in the industry.  Via UCLA spotlight, via Film Independent’s Project Involve, via this Tribeca Film Festival program I’d been involved with called All-Access.

I just emailed like crazy. And I was surprised at the response rate.

Whenever I mailed a DVD or emailed a screenplay query (or even sent  the script when it was then requested) I felt like maybe 20 or 30% of people ever actually watched/read.

But everyone is bored at work at the their desk – and so when you send them an email with a link, and you tell them it’s only 4 minutes long – it’s amazing how many people click.  I estimating here, because the analytics aren’t perfect, but I think around 80 or 90% of the people I emailed watched the pilot.

I think timing had something to with it.  It was just before the financial crisis – so web series were this new hot thing and people were very excited.

I was sort of riding the second wave after earlier stuff like LonelyGirl and Dr. Horrible. And mine was  a sci-fi drama – which I think helped it stand out from the mostly comedy field on the internet.

JK: How did you get to Agility? And what do they do exactly?

AH: Agility is an internet studio.

JK: So they produce new media content like Warner Bros produces features?

AH: Exactly.  They saw the pilot and optioned it.  Their goal was to find advertising based financing to produce the rest of the series.

Unfortunately, they optioned it in the fall of 2008.  And the advertising market collapsed. They’ve regrouped – and just put out LXD, which is a pretty big series.  So we’ll see if that means mine can get off the ground.

Having made a pilot for It Ends Today and has some success, I wanted to do more in the world of web series. So I decided to do a new series and create not just a pilot but multiple episodes. The gritty cop show that I launched in late 2009.

JK: How do you produce the web series? What do you shoot on? Production budgets?

AH: I’ve tried to spend as little money as possible. Which has been good b/c online stuff – as millions of articles mention – attracts a lot of interest but not so much money. Both webisodes were shot on borrowed cameras with a volunteer crew.

Central Division is fresher in my mind.  So, for example, on that shoot we used a camera that belonged to the gaffer and lights from the school I was teaching at.  We shot using the AFTRA internet contract which is very flexible and super cheap.  And the crew volunteered.  I spent money on burritos, thai food, LAPD badges, and the guns. And I bought a hard drive, that was about it.

JK: So what are you working on now? Plans for the future?

AH: I’ve been pitching some web series concepts to internet production companies or internet divisions of larger companies.  It’s a long shot but there is money out there to fund serial web stuff.  And I’m thinking about making a microbudget feature.

I want to direct.  And I think the only thing for me to do is somehow make a feature.

JK: Do you have any last words of wisdom for young filmmakers?

AH: I feel like I’ve learned that I do my best work when I just make the stuff I want to make rather than trying to figure out what the market wants.  I’m happier doing that and I think the quality of what I do is better.  It doesn’t necessarily lead to a lot of money but I found that obsessing over what would bring in the most money didn’t actually do that either.

JK: Well thank you so much for speaking with me.

AH: I had a great time talking about all of this stuff.

A violent cop out for revenge meets an unexpected obstacle…

My Kickstarter Page

A few weeks ago I began the process of raising funds to get my last short film, A Son Like You, through post-production. This is a lengthy process that includes a colorist who cleans up the image, digital transfer to HD, foley (SFX) work, sound mastering and mixing, and DVD creation. It can be an amazing process to watch a colorist at work, as I saw on my last film:

Pre-Telecine

Post-Telecine

This is the kind of magic a great colorist can do. It’s night and day.

Please take a look at my Kickstarter page and donate to become a part of the film. I am offering some great perks for those who do.  Click on the link below to help out. Thank you for reading!

Here’s the Link Again

The Swimming Lesson is the first film I made at UCLA. We were given four hours and one roll of 16mm film (about 10 minutes) to shoot a film.

The Beginnings of Microbudget

In 1998 a hopeful article in Moviemaker Magazine summed up the rising phenomenon of microbudget features:

Many of the most talented American independent filmmakers began by making ultra-low budget features. During the 1970s and ’80s, very low budget films launched the careers of David Lynch (Eraserhead), Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus 7), Wayne Wang (Chan Is Missing), Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), and Gus Van Sant (Male Noche). Because they were made on such tiny budgets, these films were regarded as exceptions, not models that other filmmakers could follow. In the mid-’80s the availability of money from home video companies enabled a number of filmmakers to raise $3 million for first features. But this money soon dried up, and by the early ’90s it was harder and harder to find money for first features. Made for $27,000, Rick Linklater’s Slacker was a precursor to the ultra-low budget wave. (The Film School alums among them: UCLA (Burnett), AFI (Lynch), NYU (Jarmusch, Lee) and RISDI (Van Sant)).

Next Wave Films, the fund described in the article, was created by the IFC to help filmmakers finish low-budget films. It now appears to be defunct. Its website, last updated in 2002, has that tumbleweed feel of late-nineties ghost-sites.

In 2010, twelve years later, the microbudget feature world has swelled enough for Sundance to add a new micro-budget section to its festival, entitled NEXT;

The new section, also referred to by the symbol <=> by the Festival, highlights new films that have been made on very low budgets. Rather than vehicles to make money, these films are proudly modest. But make no mistake, this group of filmmakers is not limited by a low budget – they made their films this way by choice.

The studios have also taken note after the success of Paranormal Activity, with Paramount announcing a new micro-budget feature division:

Clearly dazzled by the fact that it could gross more than $100 million on a movie that barely cost $15,000 to make, Paramount Pictures is set to launch a new production wing devoted to films budgeted at less than $100,000.

These are but two of the major waves being made by micro-budgets, spurred by ever-falling production costs. These developments are slow to take hold at film schools, including UCLA, where students often spend small fortunes to make esoteric short films, the pinnacle of which is the thesis film.

The Thesis Film in the Era of the Microbudget

The thesis film is often an extremely expensive endeavor, ranging anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000. UCLA’s biggest thesis grant is the Bridges Larson Production production grant, which offers $25,000 to one lucky candidate with an extensive (i.e. undergraduate) theater background. I once read that at AFI there is a limit of $100,000 for a thesis film budget; I have already heard of two films here at UCLA that, albeit unintentionally, hit the six-figure mark.

This begs the question of how micro-budgets, now an accepted fact in the film industry, are figured into a film-school education;  at UCLA, generally speaking, they aren’t. NYU has a well known Columbus/Vague production grant of $100,000 that only NYU graduates can compete for. With production costs what they are now, what was intended as seed money for a feature can now actually become the feature itself. UCLA has nothing comparable to the Columbus/Vague grant, although realistically UCLA does cost about $100,000 less than NYU, depending on how much you spend on your films, and provided you are not an international student.

In light of these developments the thesis film has become a smaller piece of the film-directing career puzzle. Many years ago students attended film schools because the high cost of equipment made them the only viable means of making films. In those days the thesis film, shot on 16 or 35mm, was the largest project most filmmakers could conceivably produce as a means of enticing studios, investors and producers into considering feature projects.

The 2007 edition of Film School Confidential, the only remotely up to date guide on film school education, has a section about life after film school. In it they discuss the reality of the low-budget feature as a stepping stone to the paid feature. They recommend shopping around your thesis to festivals to get to know programmers for your first DV (now HDV or RED) feature;

“Wait, what?” we hear you ask. “Feature? What feature?” This would be your self-financed feature shot on DV. We’re sorry to have to break this to you, but it’s the way the film world has reshaped itself in the digital-video era. You’re going to have to make a feature on your own before anyone else will give you money to make one.

Later in the book they discuss the process of putting your first independent feature together.

So with this new step, where does the thesis film leave you in terms of a career? Film School Confidential would argue, as have a number of other filmmakers, that it gets you some prestige, maybe some meetings, and contacts with programmers for when you return with your microbudget feature. The thesis film will always be an important part of film school, particularly as a culmination of everything learned while in school. For the vast majority of student filmmakers, it will not produce any (monetarily) meaningful directing work, and simply guide them to the next step of making the micro to low-budget feature shot on digital.

For certain people with specific expensive genre and aesthetic sensibilities, the expensive thesis film will still make sense, but for the majority of future independents, the microbudget, festival-ready film will be the next step in their filmmaking career. Therefore ideally the thesis film, and any student film for that matter, should be kept as cheap as possible. Instead of the 18 to 30 minute unprogrammable opuses we are currently seeing, the future of the thesis film is the reasonably cheap 10 minute and under short film.

One of my favorite examples of this is The Most Beautiful Man in the World by Alicia Duffy. The film was her thesis at The National Film and Television School. It premiered at Cannes and is a powerful, visual and brief short. She recently returned to Cannes with her first feature, All Good Children, which I’m very excited to see.

The Film School of the Future

The film school of the future will prepare filmmakers to write, direct and produce a no-budget feature. Ideally every student in that school would leave school with a fully developed, budgeted, scheduled and cast microbudget film in addition to a number of polished feature scripts and strong short. A major advantage of film school is the network of passionate and talented students you meet. These people make the ideal candidates to rotate through each others’ micro-budget films when they leave school.

Mr. Moneybags, Student Film Financier

In America, with little government subsidy of the arts and declining support of education in general, a student’s first feature film is not going to come from subsidies like in Europe. It will also not come from a person a friend here likes to call “Mr. Moneybags;” a mythological, monopoly-man figure who appears at film festivals to offer student filmmakers a million dollars to make their first features.

As young filmmakers we will first have to prove our talents through inexpensive means of getting our stories on the screen. Film school is a place to start learning the discipline of filmmaking, and that includes budgeting. Even with a half-billion dollar budget money remains an issue. We might as well learn to control them while they’re in the thousands.

Samuel Goldwyn, Producer

The Samuel Goldwyn Writing Awards is one of the most prestigious writing competitions in America, only available to University of California students.

From the Website:

Some of the more famous winners include: Francis Ford Coppola, Eric Roth, Pamela Gray, Allison Anders, Colin Higgins, Carroll Ballad, Scott Rosenberg, Carolyn See and Jonathan Kellerman.

In 2009 we received 151 scripts from eight University of California campuses.

The first prize is $15,000, second $7,500, third $4,000, with two honorable mentions of $2,000 and $1,000.

All full-length dramatic writing in script form is eligible–equivalent of a feature length screenplay, three-act stage play, or a one hour (minimum) teleplay.

If you’re a UC student, this is a serious opportunity. This award has gotten people agents and sales in the past, and is up there with the Nicchols Fellowship in terms of respect.

Finalists are notified in September. Good luck!

Dear Jason,
I wish I had found your blog way before. I’m a Bangladeshi-American filmmaker. I was born in Germany though. I have applied to UCLA as well and my position is 22. I’m really confused about my situation. After reading your blog, I’m more hopeful about it now. I have also applied to three other schools. My plan for next three months depend on these decisions.

My wife and I live in Oklahoma. She needs to tell her school whether she will teach next year or not. At this moment I don’t even know whether I’m getting into any of these schools or not. Based on your experience, do you think I should think of heading towards LA now?

Take Care. Thanks for your help.

Sincerely,

Dear Bijon,

Is your position number 22 as a director? I remember finding it confusing when I was applying as well. The school takes 18 directors, so if 4 people don’t decide to come, then you are in!

I know that in my year there were 3 people admitted off of the wait list. I totally understand the difficulty in planning. I remember the limbo period between decisions.

I think heading towards LA is dependent on a number of things. There is a possibility you will get into UCLA, but I wouldn’t depend on that. Do you have a film background? If so you may be able to find work on the technical side (gripping, assistant camera, assistant directing) for a year here. This would also lower your tuition by $10,000 if you got in next year, because you could become a california resident.

On the downside LA is very expensive depending on where you live, in graduate student housing where I am it’s $1069 a month.

It’s a difficult decision, and one I had to make last notice when I found out in July I was getting in. It depends on your skills, goals and situation.

The only other thing I can say for the wait is find writing classes and take them. Read a lot of books and write a feature script. I think that could be tremendously helpful when you come. The store section of my blog has the many, many books I have found helpful in learning about screenwriting.

Good luck! I hope this helps.

Jason