The Story Summit Film Appreciation Series Starts May 2020
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I grew up loving movies. Like many of us, I was never educated in the broad history of world cinema.
When I arrived at California Institute of the Arts, a university visioned by the late Walt Disney, that all changed.
I had the rare opportunity to cultivate a deeper, richer understanding for film through the writer-director, Alexander Mackendrick. He ran a film appreciation program. With Mackendrick, I became exposed to 100 movies, most of them unknown in pop culture’s world.
In my first job as Story Editor at Paramount Pictures, I was astonished that the people who worked inside the system knew nothing about film history and the greats who helped create it.
Outside of a few executives at Paramount , few even knew who Charlie Chaplin was, let alone that his 1921 short, The Kid, revolutionized film and transformed it from a product to an art form. Loss, pathos, and compassion for the human condition had never been portrayed as Chaplin had in his two-reeler, The Kid, about a homeless guy and an orphan who find one another in the nasty, dirty streets of city life.
In this time of social-distancing, I decided to fill the silence by facilitating 3 film…
