Backlot
Top 25 Film
SchoolsTHE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 96 AUGUST 14, 2019
the board as chair) and in gender
diversity: Next year’s graduating
class will be 55 percent female.
TUITION $61,425 to $63,575
ALUMNI Patty Jenkins,
David Lynch, Ed Zwick,
Sam Esmail, Mimi Leder5
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
Columbia’s MFA pro-
gram — it doesn’t offer an
undergrad degree — has always
focused on three things: Story,
story and story. But recently,
the uptown Ivy League institu-
tion has been putting more
emphasis on the production
side of filmmaking, adding new
cameras and lenses to its sprawl-
ing two-year-old production
center north of the university.
Says screenwriter and faculty
member Hilary Brougher, “We’re
really proud that we produce
people who will make blockbust-
ers and people who will make
films that win at film festivals.”
Those in the former category
include Simon Kinberg, while in
the latter there’s Rob Richert (’13),
whose Sundance film The Last
Black Man in San Francisco opened
June 7 and has grossed a stellar
$4 million-plus to date. BrougherALUMNI Ava DuVernay, Alex Gibney,
Marielle Heller, David Koepp,
Frank Marshall4
AFI
LOS ANGELES
This time last year, the
American Film Institute was
introducing a new dean, producer
Richard Gladstein, after a faculty
revolt pushed filmmaker Jan
Schuette from the job. This year,
AFI is at it again, introducing
another new dean, Susan Ruskin,
formerly of University of North
Carolina School of Arts’ film
department (see No. 11). Despite
these leadership shifts, the
institution remains a first-rate
program, with a stellar faculty
(this year, Black List founder
Franklin Leonard joined the ranks,
teaching a new class on the his-
tory and future of the Hollywood
franchise) and a pragmatic,
hands-on approach to learn-
ing filmmaking. “It was perfect
for me,” says Ari Aster (cla ss of
2010), director of Midsommar and
Hereditary. “AFI prizes practice
over theory.” The school could
do better with minority scholar-
ships, but it has made strides
in recruiting female leaders
(Kathleen Kennedy just joinednew mandatory class in diversity,
but progress in that area already
can be seen on USC’s Exposition
Park campus. Producer Melissa
Rosenberg (Marvel’s Jessica Jones)
says that when she graduated
from the producing program
in 1990, she was one of only
four women in a class of 25. The
incoming producing-class ratio
is 17 females to seven males. Still,
Rosenberg returns to school
two or three times a year to give
female students encouragement.
“I like to let them know that, yes,
it is possible.”
TUITION $57,256 (undergrad);
$35,214 to $51,622 (graduate)
ALUMNI Robert Zemeckis,
Doug Liman, Tim Story,
John Singleton, Shonda Rhimes
2
NYU
NEW YORK
This fall, NYU is going
Hollywood, opening its first per-
manent L.A. campus — a hub of
classrooms and dorms near the
La Brea Tar Pits — which should
heat up its long-simmering
rivalry with USC. But part of the
allure of this renowned 54-year-
old auteur factory has always
been its hipster home base —
Greenwich Village — which tends
to attract more indie-minded
artists. “Of course, NYU might
not have the [facilities of] USC,
because we don’t make those
big-budget Zemeckis films,”
Spike Lee (class of ’82) snarkily
told THR during a roundtable
before winning his first Oscar
this year. “We just [have] Martin
Scorsese.” But now, N Y U, where
Lee serves as artistic director of
the Graduate Film Program, will
soon open the doors on facilities
that indeed rival USC’s; a perfor-
mance center is being included
at the 181 Mercer St. building
(projected to be complete in 2021)
that will be the largest structure
on NYU’s campus.
TUITION $55,928 (undergrad);
$60,766 (graduate)
ALUMNI Alec Baldwin,
Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller,
Dee Rees, Rachel Bloom3
UCLA
LOS ANGELES
Terri Schwartz’s ter m
as dean is coming to an end, and
UCLA hasn’t yet announced if
she’s being renewed. But a recent
$20 million donation from the
Mitchell trusts (the same fund
that gave $20 million to USC)
counts in her favor. Half the
money will go to scholarships,
the other half to fund the UCLA
Film & Television Archive, the
largest university-based media
library in the world. And the
school continues to churn out
class after class of top-notch
screenwriters, most recently Pose
creator Steven Canals (’15) and
Gaia Violo (’15), whose student
project Absentia became an
Amazon series. Add up the world-
wide box office grosses for films
that UCLA grads had a hand in
making during the past year — A
Star Is Born, The Lego Movie 2 and
Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse,
to name a few — and you’re talk-
ing nearly $6 billion. But beyond
all that, Love & Basketball direc-
tor Gina Prince-Bythewood (cla ss
of ’91) offers another reason for
attending: “I was never afraid
to try. It was an incredibly safe
space to fail.”
TUITION $16,246 (undergrad,
in-state); $46,000 (undergrad,
out-of-state); $29,520 (gradu-
ate, in-state); $41,765 (graduate
out-of-state)15 TOP INTERNATIONAL FILM SCHOOLS
From Mexico City to Munich, these institutions have bolstered their
programs in the past year with new faculty, degrees and partnershipsHONG KONG ACADEMY
FOR PERFORMING ARTS
SCHOOL OF FILM AND
TELEVISION
The school is celebrating
its 35th anniversary this
year and also saw the
appointment of a new
deputy director, Gillian
Choa, who was
previously the dean of
Hong Kong’s School of
Theatre and
Entertainment Arts.AUSTRALIAN FILM,
TELEVISION AND RADIO
SCHOOL
Building on its close
relationship with the
Australian industry,
AFTRS has introduced a
new master of arts
screen course that is
open to both interna-
tional and local studentsand covers 10 disci-
plines, including
animation, directing and
screenwriting.BEIJING FILM ACADEMY
BFA now has an under-
graduate film production
program taught entirely
in English. A new sum-
mer camp program
co-hosted with the New
York Film Academy will
help emerging film-
making voices forge
international ties.CENTRO DE CAPACITACIÓN
CINEMATOGRÁFICA
When the Mexico City
school was founded in
1975, Oscar-nominated
director Luis Buñuel
was named honorary
president, and for more
than four decades theschool has consistently
produced important tal-
ent, including The Wolf
of Wall Street cinema-
tographer Rodrigo Prieto
and Oscar-nominated
production designer
Felipe Fernández del
Paso (Frida).CENTRO SPERIMENTALE
DI CINEMATOGRAFIA
Italy’s National School
of Cinema offers
courses across all film
disciplines for anyone
fluent in Italian. The
CSC also partners
with the National Film
Library to restore classic
Italian films.ECAM
The Madrid film school,
founded in 1995, prides
itself on building bridgesTHE THR RANKINGS: HOW IT’S DONE
For starters, the magazine consults with a variety of educators, industry
professionals, grads, current students and other experts to hear what insid-
ers are saying. Then a team of reporters fans out and digs in at campuses
across the country to discover what’s new since last year’s rankings. All that
reporting is then triangulated with other factors — student awards, alum
achievement, killer (or not) facilities — to determine the final rankings.