From a meeting in the Graduate Student Office.

To start off this post, I thought I’d directly quote from a text conversation I had earlier with a good friend of mine who I’ve known since high school:

Her: “Hey, how’s it going?”

Me: “Crazy at the moment. On my way home from class now. There’s too much to do and not enough time to do it in this program. Plus I haven’t had time to process what I’m learning and come back into center about why I’m doing this. And that’s in the face of everything they’re telling us about how few people are able to end up working after they graduate. It’s crazy!”

Welcome to life after just the second week of classes.  And in talking with the other Creative Producing students, I know I’m not the only one feeling this way.

So what are we to do? It seems like with every step we take in the program, we’re met with either one message or the other: it’s either, “People who have dreams of making movies can make it happen,” or, “Few people ever make it in this business, and those that do are liable to get screwed.”  This is what we hear straight from our professors, in class, nearly every day, and it’s forcing me to question the career path I’ve been carving out for myself.

Students take a short break in our frenetically paced Line Producing I class, one of the sources of our reality check.

I came into this program with a very clear idea of what I wanted to create.  I wanted to make a company that can put out a stream of movies that would be entertaining, uplifting, meaningful, and commercially successful.  I still do.

I know in my heart that I can still create that.  I wouldn’t be here still if I couldn’t.  But the immersion into how the real world works in these first few weeks at Columbia has been staggering for me.  It’s forced me to give up any delusions that I’ve had.  Will I go out there and make a movie that becomes wildly successful and becomes the “golden ticket” of my career?  Maybe.  It’s possible.  Is it likely?  Not likely enough.

I walked into Columbia with one vision, one set of ideas, that fueled my aspirations and that kept me moving forward.  As I’ve exposed that vision to the wisdom of my professors and allowed them to challenge it, I feel like, for the time being, it has been crumbling.

A dizzying whiteboard of what we need to know about story development taken in a Screenwriting I class, which is optional for producers.

Yet I know that that is necessary.  Diving into the movie industry with a false sense of how things work would have inevitably led to failure.

As much as my worldview has been challenged these first few weeks, I know that I will emerge stronger for it.  I’m looking forward to making sense of my journey into the film industry and to coming to know, at an even deeper level, how I will operate as a filmmaker and a storyteller in a grounded, practical, in-the-real-world sense.

But for now, my task is simple: just keep up with the homework!