UH Setting Strategic Plan in Action to Build a Premier Film Degree Program
Looking to Expand Pre/Post-Production Curriculum
Houston, Texas | January 10, 2020
Lynn Birdwell: We are talking to Temple Northup. Thank you so much for joining us here for the Bird Feed Podcast. Just for everyone, Temple Northup is the the Director of the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston. Temple, tell us how Jack's name came to be the name of this program.
Temple Northup: Jack Valenti was a graduate of the University of Houston, and in the 40s and 50s, he worked in advertising. In the 60s, he worked with Lyndon Johnson. He was in the White House, and then he was appointed around 1966 as the president of the NPA, he created the rating systems that we're using today, and was the head of that for the next 40 years. When he died, the university thought this is a great person who was so influential in the field for decades that we should be named for him.
Lynn Birdwell: So then his daughter, tell me a little bit about her.
Temple Northup: So, his children have certainly carried on his legacy. His daughter, Courtney Valenti, is the President of Development and Production for Warner Brothers Pictures. She certainly has a giant slate. I think they made $6 billion last year, so they're doing well under her [leadership].
Lynn Birdwell: When did you get [to Houston]? I thought you've been here for three years.
Temple Northup: I arrieved in 2011. This was my first university job, just a professor when I got here. A little over three years ago, I was appointed as the director of the school. Over the last three years, that's been my role. I still teach some, but primarily leading the school and to where we want to go.
Lynn Birdwell: Okay. So, the University of Houston has had a film program for a long, long, long time. Tell me where you came from and what you hope to bring to it.
Temple Northup: So, prior to going to graduate school and then ending up here, I worked in Los Angeles. I was out there for many years working in television production, primetime television. I was a writer for a number of different sitcoms. My wife works in film development for Sony. That's my background.
Temple Northup: When I got here, I wanted to carry that experience in, and I wanted to try to really push this program into new frontiers. The City of Houston doesn't have a major film program. We've existed for a long time, but it's relatively small. My vision is that we are, you know, the creative center, training the next generation of storytellers.
Lynn Birdwell: There are a lot of programs in Houston at different schools, and also on campus at U of H, that are all film programs. But, you told me that you wanted this program to be the best in the nation, the best in the world. So how do we achieve that?
Temple Northup: That's a huge question. So, I think there are a lot of different aspects that help us achieve to be the best in the nation. And so obviously, to be the best, it means we need to be training our students with the best equipment. But even more, we need our students to be working with people who are working at the highest levels. There are people like me teaching the students, which is great, but I've, you know, once you go back to teaching, you're out of the industry losing touch with what's going on. And so, I think connecting our students with working professionals like you, like some of the other high level people in Houston, is a huge component of that vision because then they can get training in the real world on actual sets with actual equipment. And when they do that, the second they're graduating from here, they're ready to work on a set professionally, day one. There's no training when they go out. There are no mistakes when they leave the program because they've all been done. They've learned it. And so that's a big part of what I want to do that I don't see really a lot of other people doing is really creating these strong partnerships between our program and the working professionals in Houston and then all over the country, really.
Lynn Birdwell: So, I find that a lot of them leave Houston the minute they get their degree and they go find themselves in New York or LA or Atlanta. But you know, integration here in Houston can happen. One of the issues we have in Houston right now is we don't have any really big production companies who have constant studio systems going with, you know, internships available in every department and you know, shoots going every single day, that sort of thing. So, the students can still fit in to the ongoing shoots that are going on in Houston, whether it's TV shows or films or commercials or whatever, but they need to have that connective access. Right. So you've talked about starting a film club here that would help them have access to some of that. So tell me a little bit about the film club.
Temple Northup: Yeah. So that's something we started about a year ago and we're continuing to build. And so the film club has a few purposes. One, it's trying to bring all of the students who are in our school together because they'll often be disconnected. You know, one might be taking class in the morning and one the afternoon, they miss each other. So we want to create this central hub for all our students to get together. And we've seen just from those connections, amazing things happening. So they've gone off through those connections and they've shot some little short features on their own time, which is great because they're networking. Part of their strongest network is going to be with each other. So, when they go out and once they're graduated and they're working in professional shoots, they're going to have a network that they can call.
Temple Northup: Part of that student clubs vision is just that, networking, but then also connect those students with the working professionals. So, we bring in people to give talks to them on different subjects. That's part of our vision moving forward is creating half day or full day workshops. We can bring in somebody whose expertise is lighting. So, we can just have a day on lighting, a day on financing, a day on anything you can imagine, and bringing those high level people who are out there doing it right now so our students can get that hands on information from people that they wouldn't otherwise have access to. And so, that's really what we're trying to do with the film. Have them working together on their own projects, but then getting that training from people out in the community or even bringing them infrom other places around the country.
Lynn Birdwell: So I feel like in a lot of the schools, there are programs that allow them to dream and like go make a movie and like create their own vision, but there's a whole career paths they can decide on. I'm going to go into the grip electric department and I'm going to work until I can become a gaffer, and I'll be able to do Superbowl commercials and TV shows and movies and make that money and be in the union, or versus being a writer, being a director, being a producer. I think it will be great to see how this, um, allows students to see themselves as crew members in different departments.
Temple Northup: Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the things that I have identified over the years is if you ask a typical student what do they want to be -- I want to be Steven Spielberg. Everybody wants to be the director, big time famous. And that's great. That's great to have that dream. But there are not a lot of Steven Spielberg's, but there are a lot of these other crew positions, and by and large, you don't know what positions even exist. You don't know all the departments. You don't realize that all of those people are not only talented, but are creative and share a really important role in any film. If you're looking at the cinematographers who are setting the look and feel, they're all working collaboratively, down to wardrobe and makeup. They all have such an important part. Students don't often think about, Oh, there are whole career paths that aren't the director that are still really important, often really creative. And so bringing in people who have done those careers so the students can hear from them, I think is another really great way to open their minds to all the different paths that actually exists.
Lynn Birdwell: Because they won't be able to until they know that and they understand how all the different departments work. They can't actually fit into a crew of, you know, 100 or 500, that is for a really big project because they have only been exposed to a two person, five person, or 10 person shoot. Right. Often the people that are at a very high level in the film industry are very well educated. That's another thing that students probably would really benefit from knowing. So, okay. So, you have grants that you've been developing that will allow you to start doing more with this program. Let's talk about that. I know that those are still in the works.
Temple Northup: Yeah. A lot of these dreams and the vision, of course, requires funding of some sort. We're in those early stages of figuring out how can we find it and if we're able to really sustain this. So, a lot of what we've started so far, we've been able to cobble together some funds here and there to bring in a speaker, or to fund some of our smaller student projects. But we want to increase the success of this program. And so, that's what we're looking to do. And hopefully in the next few months, people will start hearing about it, to create those funds so that we can bring in really talented people, for instance, to lead these workshops so we can afford to either fly somebody in or just even bring somebody in locally, and make it so that they're being compensated in some sort of way for their time. And then being able to teach the students, so we need funding for that. We need funding for trying to take our student projects to the next level.
Lynn Birdwell: Because if you do that, you can put them on your website and it's a recruiting tool, right, so they can all be proud of it. They can get an IMDB credit if it's a real thing.
Temple Northup: Yeah. Real films require locations, require all those sort of things. And so right now, our student projects that we do tend to be filmed on campus. Campus is a great resource because it's sort of like a mini lot. We have restaurants, we have convenient stores, so there are locations. But at the end of the day, it's not, you know, it's not a professional shoot. And so that's what we want to do is create the most professional training ground possible so that our students are completely prepared and ready to go. That's where the major grants and fundraising really play an important role.
Temple Northup: So, another really great thing, which we haven't talked about, that it is a benefit for a professional crew, a-list crew, people who do this for a living at a very high level coming in to work with the students, is they get to shop the students that really have promise and really get to start, you know, encouraging them to come out and work with us when they're not in class and weekends. Then they automatically have a place in the professional crew roster when they graduate or before with a great mentor.
Temple Northup: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know as well as anybody that it's all about networking in this industry. And so the more people we bring in and they begin meeting our students, they realize, Oh wow, look at this, this program that's being built here. I need to keep up with them. And the good students, they're good at networking with the people who we bring in, who come to campus. They'll actually send that followup email or message and say, Hey, it was great meeting with you. And that's led to jobs for our students. And you know, you've hired our students, the good ones. Once you find one, you want to keep them. If they're doing their job, those students you're bringing are creating a network, not only with you but with their peers. And so maybe you want to hire one of our students full time and they're gonna say, well, let me introduce you to this other person. Cause now you need another PA, and now we've got this whole network building, and before long we have an entire creative community.
Lynn Birdwell: So in the 80s, we had like this huge film industry, and we can bring that back again with these kinds of programs andsystems of talent and crew and production teams. We have all kinds of stuff going on. There are other departments that specialize in postproduction or special effects or just the editing side. Tell me about that. I know that you have some of that here.
Temple Northup: Yeah. We've got a lot of the post-production. Wwe don't have animation, or a strong animation program. The College of Technology has a digital media program, and so they're much more skilled at things related to certain aspects of post-production. We're primarily editing, but now we've added a color correction course in just in color correction and color grading. We're beginning to build the post production. I think if you look around the country at most film programs, what is missing the most is post-production. It's sort of like everyone just decides that they'll offer an editing class and that's the beginning and the end of post-production.
Lynn Birdwell: Talking about that, it's like there's all these parts of production that don't get considered because everybody just wants a camera and to go.
Temple Northup: Right. Yes. If you look at curriculum, 90% of the curriculum is production, but we all know that 90% of a film is not production. The production is usually the shortest part of any of production, but that's where everybody's trained. And so we are trying to develop a film program which will really cover a lot of that preproduction, especially in everything from contracts to clearance and things like that. We're working with Fleurette Fernando in the School of Art to look at opportunities where we can really create something that looks at the management side of things as well.
Lynn Birdwell: So, are you developing anything new or is this just a build out of the existing program that you have?
Temple Northup: So far, it's just building out what we have. It's a slow and steady march. Hopefully the next step is going to create a bachelor of fine arts. That's my hope. Mydream is it will just allow us a little bit more training of our students. Right now, we're just limited in terms of number of hours they can take. And if we change the degree a little bit, we'll be able to give them more. Then hopefully if that goes as planned in the next few years, then we can also look at adding an MFA in filmmaking. We've been speaking with a lot of people over at the School of Art and just seeing how can we all pull what we're already doing together to build something.
Lynn Birdwell: I think that's what Fleurette was talking about in her interview. Okay. So there's a writing degree that will be new. Yes? Screenwriting?
Temple Northup: It's not new. We are adding courses, so we continue just to add classes. Previously, we had an introduction to writing class, and that was really it. So we've added what we call an advanced screenwriting class. Now we're trying to break that even further apart to have a much more defined path for people who are interested in writing. So, that's also coming down the way.
Lynn Birdwell: Well, good. Thank you very much. I'm so glad you were here. I know that there's a million other things that we can talk about.
Temple Northup: We can talk all day.
Lynn Birdwell: We'll get back together again and do this soon. Thank you very much for being with us.