Mark's Top 5 USC Film School Experiences

Now that da Bears are de-funct, can get back to film school and stuff.

Its funny (not the above joke, of course: that was terrible), but you may have noticed a bit of nostalgia and retrospectiveness permeating the blog recently. Okay, I may have even been crazy enough to be wanting to replay parts of the last three years in my head like a TV show. Well, its been a wild ride and this chapter is coming to a close, so of course I'm going to look back.

And I'm not the only one. The past month has been riddled with phrases like "Can you believe its been three years?", "Man, that was fast" and "Mark, you can't drink beer in class!"

Now, I'm 100% looking forward and focused on building myself a career for the future. Except, well, I'm like 99% looking forward and at least 1% looking back. Maybe 1.5%....

Film school is a pretty crazy, intense time. The stakes are higher than high school or college. A lot of my classmates gave up lucrative careers in something else, moved across the country or the world, and we've all gone into to nice bit of debt. So it has been a real hurricane of events, people and emotions. And it deserves at least a bit of retrospecticus.

So, I've decided--in the grand HIGH FIDELITY tradition--to look back and determine my TOP 5 moments from USC film school.

Now, two "rules": 1) A lot has happened in the last 3 years of me just moving out and living in L.A. and I'm focused on listing things that are specifically tied to my attendance at USC. Granted MOST of my life in L.A. is specifically tied to USC but whatever. Seeing Hurley from LOST at Best Buy doesn't count for that reason. 2) Looking at Top 5 moments, meaning a specific moment in time. There are tons of great things, classes... traditions.. general experiences..., that were awesome but happened over a few weeks or months. So, things like my class at CAA or producing a film were great but I'm trying to lock into very specific moments/events.

As you can see, I take my ridiculous and time-wasting unnecessary lists very seriously.

So that's it. The plan is to roll out my top five moments during the next few months, interspersed with regular bullsh*t posts about traffic, smog and my love/hate relationship with the ridiculous weather here, all while counting down 5-1 and finishing right around graduation. Gotta build suspense, right?

See, I've learned a thing or two at this money pit of an institution!

Hopefully roll out #5 pretty soon and go from there. Its going to be interesting, I don't even know what the top 5 moments would be...or do I?

Or, more importantly, does anybody care?


All these questions will be answered.....in due time.


-MK