Any field is a big variable at this rather tepid juncture of history, when everything ever promised to us in this life has been reduced to a massive question mark.

Hence, the answer is simple. You must follow your passion, end of story. Back in the "good old days" when I was in film school, there were no guarantees. Zero.

And today there's even less. I don't know 'bout you but I'm not a huge fan of odds lodged at "less than zero."

So for Pete's sake, follow your passion only. If you CAN afford it and have limited expectations, of course going to film school is great fun and hugely informative. Hell, I had a great time. Greeted the day with a big coffee, sauntered over to the UWM screening rooms for perhaps "Touch of Evil" or "Do the Right Thing," read a little theory, crank out a paper or two, drink heavily - -

Whoops, did I say that??? Umm... moving on..

However, I would contest that if your drive is MAKE MOVIES, then pretty much avoid film school, save your tuition sheckles, and pump all those coins into your first short and/or feature.

Just graduated last October and it has been a battle trying to land a real job in the industry... I somehow NETWORKED my way into an entry level position at a medium sized studio.

All I can say is that it is a fucking war out there. You literally have no room to negotiate pay because there are a thousand other people trying to claw their way in.

But now I finally have a steady paycheck and can afford to bankroll my writing.

@Jeffrey: You are speaking my language in "follow your passion." If you have one shot at life (the possibility of reincarnation aside), why not pursue that which excites you on a deeply personal level? And in this case, I am one to talk, seeing as I left the safe field of academics to pursue music, then stand-up comedy, then screenwriting, and now whatever combination of things I do.

@Chris: You are where you need to be, inside the Belly of the Beast! If you're smart, which I'm pretty sure you are considering the fact you landed a gig at a studio, as those positions are insanely competitive, you will pay attention to everything, develop your network, and be proactive in terms of your creative energy. Continued good luck and please stay in touch as move up the system!

I'm out here in LA, interning at a small prodco, learning the language of telephone communication, "leaving word," and so on. My roommate is a classmate of mine, a close friend and a trusted note-giver. So that's my segue into the best part of film school: your peers. I have a small but ultra-trusted network of people who I know won't b.s. me about my work, who will pick me up when I'm down (and vice versa.) It's just a little community in a world that is hard to find a community in, and so, right now, having just moved out to LA and having just barely cracked open "the biz," that's what i feel is the best part of film school: my peers.

@Alex: Don't ever underestimate the value of your peers, both now as part of your creative and support community, and in the future. Perhaps a good idea to read this Business of Screenwriting post: Always be nice to the assistants. Because some day, they will be in a position to hire you!

You're young and in L.A.! Soak it all in - at least the good stuff. See every movie, read every book, go to every seminar / presentation, and talk endlessly about the creative things that matter to your and your peers, digging into why they work.

Good luck!

@Scott - I speak your language only because I have been trained to do so on this fine patch of internet land you keep sir!

That and a little life experience too... goes a long way.

:D

Hope you are having a fine 4th holiday my friend!

I recently graduated with a degree in film from the University of Michigan, with a sub-concentration in screenwriting, but it is the reality of articles like these that have me back in school pursuing a degree in engineering. I don't regret "giving up the dream", just as I don't regret the prospect of putting food on the table.

I took the one-year intensive hands-on route, but also have a business degree.

Both helped me land my current position which isn't necessarily with a major studio, but with a production company involved in entertainment. Small, but I'm working on my craft so I think I did well.

It's not easy either way. I made some good friends, ended up on some indie film sets in NYC and then took the steady paycheck when the winter months killed my finances.

As long as you're realistic, you'll be fine. Some people expected that they'll be big time directors the second they walked out of school. Others complained about entitlement for having busted their asses on student shorts. Those people aren't doing anything film related anymore.

It's about patience. It's always about patience. The rest is on you.

I'm no longer in my teens... twenties... or thirties for that matter.

Think I'm at the point in my life where I don't care anymore.

Time to follow my passion. Which I am.

The white picket fence and the Golden Retriever living in "2.5 Kidland" is done and life is no longer about making my high school reunion friends proud of me due to "expectations."

Those days are over... thank God.

Some of you out there may not understand that right now but some day... you will.

The pressure is off and it's all about the writing.

I'm proud to be alive and doing what I love to do... working my oh-not-so-fruitful job that allows me the time to punch out stories...

Because a lot of folks can't.

I also think that time gives wisdom... we've been there... and the stories reflect that.

If I die penniless it will be with a big grin on my lifeless face...

And a stack of stories that were my own.

Damn that was morbid!

Happy 4th everyone!

Here's my story: I went to college to pursue an environmental science degree. Six years after graduating and going through a sort of "quarter-life crisis," I realized my true ambition in life was to be a screenwriter. I moved to L.A. three months ago and have been working as a production assistant for "American Dad" for the last month. I think this is the sort of industry where anyone really can make it - no film degree required. It just takes some perseverance...and a whole lot of luck. And I wish you all tons of it!

www.rickygervaisismyhero.com

I'm studying what's considered one of the best best screenwriting courses in Australia, and though some of the teaching is amazing, the rest is tepid and sub-par. I'm left to devour screenwriting books and blog posts such as yours, absorb everything I can in the Twitter-based screenwriting chats, read articles, and converse endlessly with peers about business and craft.
I do not feel they are training us to be the best professionals they can, and many of my classmates share my disappointment.

I have a dream of going to USC, to have the holes in my education plugged, to network, to meet people who are more passionate and dedicated than those I'm surrounded with, but the amount of money it costs to be a foreign student at USC is heartbreaking. No rich parents? Fuggetaboudit!

I'd love to have my knowledge rounded so I could come back home to Melbourne and use what I've learned in the industry (which is mostly television, whereas I want to work in film). There's a box office crisis going on here as Australian films, one after the other, flop (for many valid reasons). There is a revolution going on, a push for genre films, not artsy junkie films (which we're known for), and it's had a very shaky start. Budgets here are microscopic compared to the U.S., our audience is much smaller, and the obstacles are many. But most writers here seem to struggle with structuring and manifesting strong feature scripts. God knows I barely learned anything in the Film class - how is anyone who hasn't studied going to have a better chance?

Ingrid, I have to say, one of my all time favorite movies comes from your neck of the woods, a rambunctiously quirky flick called "Love Serenade" from a gal named Shirley Barrett.

Seriously, this movie is, tonally, for my tastes, PERFECTION.

Sadly, I believe Ms. Barrett kinda' fell off the face of the Earth afterwords (there were rumors that a stuntman was killed during the making of this thing which caused numerable headaches for the already-struggling Australian film biz - - insurance, liability, etc.).

In any event, I for one hope you make it big. There's something rather wonderful about the point-of-view down there by youze folks - - a somewhat skewed (yet very true) sense of how the world works. I love it!

While I would love to go to film school I am instead writing and networking with my cinematic community here in Salt Lake.

At the moment I'm actually taking a ten week course on screenwriting from local filmmaker Richard Dutcher. He's a graduate of film school and has made a living at film for fifteen years.

Mr. Dutcher has said repeatedly it would've been better for him to volunteer on film sets and just dig into making something than to have attended formal training.

So that's my plan. Work.

@Steve: The beauty of screenwriting - and even to a certain degree filmmaking - is we can do it as an avocation while we work other gigs.

@Carlos: Patience, yes. And if I may add another "p" word: Persistence. Brings to mind that great Dennis Foley quote: "Hollywood is the only town where you cannot fail. You can only quit trying."

@Courtney: I haven't 'preached' on this for awhile - time to do a few posts on it - but I believe the best way to approach screenwriting as an avocation is to make sure you enjoy the process and end result (i.e., stories). Since the odds against success are significant, the value of what you experience in the writing and what you learn about yourself (and life) needs to be self-evident to you.

@delaynamichelle: Keep doing what you're doing. You've already made it across a huge hurdle in getting one sizable foot inside Hollywood's door.

@Ingrid: One of the biggest benefits of a USC education is your classmates, a major source for networking. But in terms of what you learn, I'm convinced you can get that elsewhere. Read scripts, watch movies, write pages. That's a start. By immersing yourself in the world of cinema, you can get to where you need to be sans the cost and time of a film school education. That approach requires discipline, commitment and focus, but it is doable. Good luck!

@Nick: Making movies and being involved in all aspects of filmmaking -- writing, pre-production, production, post -- is a great way to learn the craft. Besides in this era when content is king, you never know what can happen when you create a film.

@Jeffrey -- I like your post. It's not looking just at film, but at careers and the future as a whole. I think you hit the nail on the head.

My personal experience. I attended USC as an ENGINEERING student and took all film classes.

I dropped out. Did some art school -- I was inking comic books for DC at the time -- ended up going to Chapman and finishing a film degree.

After graduating I got an internship at a management company and then was offered a position on FX's THE RICHES which needed to be done for school credit so I enrolled in UCLA's extension program so that I could work there. Yes, I paid a couple hundred dollars to work on set. Did not make one dime (except I ate a ton of set food).

But I got to see an actual television show being made, sit in on the writer's room, listen to the producer's call, have Nathan Fillion accidentally walk through our offices, and wound up being Eddie Izzard's onset assitant for a week or so.

So film school --

I think can be a HUGE waste of money. I'm not sure what you are gaining from a $120,000 dollar education that you wouldn't gain from making a $120,000 dollar movie. Or 4 $30,000 dollar movies. The hardest part is probably convincing your parents this is the case.

Most of what I learned in film school, I learned in the library, on set of friends shoots, and actually doing things.

NONE of these required a classroom environment.

I'd probably say the Audio classes were the one area where I learned a lot that I probably wouldn't have had I not gone to film school.

I frequently pitched ideas for classes that I wished Chapman had.

I wanted a class that taught students how to shoot traditional SFX. When I brought it up, they said, we have a computer class. I wanted to slap the dean in the face for that comment.

On a tangent: A lot of the techniques used in CGI were conceived of nearly a hundred years ago. Compositing isn't new! It's just much, much easier than it has ever been. But it is my firm belief that a foundation in the fundamentals of practical effects will sell

Look at The Lord of The Rings trilogy as an example. Jackson is a master of practical effects. Or look at the first Jurassic Park and how much better it holds up against the newer ones. Or John Carpenter's 1982, The THING.

But I digress --

I largely believe that most film schools are scams, in that the price of admission is not reflective of the job you are going to get.

I also largely believe that most film makers who see school as the route to go, would have a better shot breaking into the film business if they went to LAW school instead.

My post my come off as bitter, and really I am not. I enjoyed my time at film school -- I just have a hard time justifying the dollar expenditure vs. what a degree in film means (which is nothing).

James, if it's any indication, when people ask me what I went to college for, I usually tell them "english," which was my minor.

I'm pretty sheepish about my film major because I don't relish flaunting the $80,000 in student loans spent watching "Un Chien Andalou" ad naueum.

Ah, yes, Jeffrey! "Un Chien Andalou" and the Odessa steps sequence! (I didn't even go to film school. I studied broadcast production, because I had a free ride to Loyola, New Orleans, and I thought I'd be able to easily jump from broadcast to film -they're both entertainment, right? Wrong! The jump has been a ten year process, but now I digress - I recently took a number of film classes at City College of San Francisco, a cheap, excellent resource, and we were Chien'd and Odessa'd out the wazoo.)

I have a friend here in LA who just graduated from one of the top film schools, and was a bit of a star student, having received one of the few small, merit-based scholarships they give. But he's now deeply in debt, tired of being poor, and working at the Apple store for $13 a hour. He knows people who want to work with him and takes meetings with smaller scale producers, but - and this is a really insidious trend - they want him to work for free. He advised me not to go to film school, but to take classes via UCLA Extension. I told him I already had, and he replied, without missing a beat, "Then take more!"

BTW, James's law school idea isn't a bad one. The older I get, the more I realize a law degree is a sort of universal career key. (Which I think is a sad but telling statement about our society today.) People just seem to want someone with a law background around. Higher end police/homeland security work, the big federal jobs, politics, entertainment... all can be cracked with a foundation in law. Entertainment law is a way in. So is doing production accounting, if you have a head for numbers.

Given the flow of comments in this thread, I would be remiss if I didn't mention this: Script magazine's overview on screenwriting education in which they sandwich Screenwriting Master Class between NYU and USC. Nice company. Only had our virtual doors open for six months and we're already getting noticed.

What Tom Benedek and I are attempting to do is carve a middle path between formal educational institutions and the pack of screenwriting gurus out there: Provide a comprehensive, coherent approach to screenwriting that gives writers all the essential knowledge they need to be able to write a professional quality screenplay, and structured, supportive workshop environments in which to craft a script, whether a public class offering with other writers or a private one-on-one arrangement with Tom or myself.

The content of the Core and Craft courses is solid academically, and the practices in our Prep and Pages workshop classes are grounded in five decades of experience Tom and I have working in Hollywood. For someone who is serious about screenwriting, we think what we are offering is a seriously good value.

I'll tell you this, if you had your classes around when I was looking at film courses to take, I would have used that money on you instead of school.

Of course, it's easier to say that now.

I think film is like any other college major, it's 75% networking and 25% skills/talent.

Can you break into the film industry without any formal education? Of Course.

Does film school help/increase your chances of getting into the biz? I think so, I mean it can't hurt right? lol

I think the main reason top notch schools such as NYU or USC charge so much is because you are paying for the NETWORK of people associated with those schools.

It's the same reason people respect the Cannes or Sundance Film Festival over other lesser known festivals, the newtork of people behind it...

@Earl: "I think the main reason top notch schools such as NYU or USC charge so much is because you are paying for the NETWORK of people associated with those schools."

I'm sure the schools themselves would prefer to students to think that it's the formal education / content they learn that is worth the big bucks, but they certainly aren't hesitant in pointing out illustrious alums and suggest that your peer group could achieve the same results.

People like to work with people they know, so it only makes sense that a certain form of network nepotism will take place in Hollywood. So yes, Earl, I suspect you are right.