Wednesday, June 29, 2005

For future reference

Not so long ago I caught the opening night screenings at the annual film festival for UCLA’s school of Theater, Film, and Television. Catherine Hardwicke, purported alumna of UCLA’s film school and director of the recently released Lords of Dogtown, was slated as the awards presenter.

Hardwicke’s performance inspired me to share some handy tips for anyone finding themselves in a similar situation of emceeing an awards ceremony:

1. If you arrive hours late, such that the awards presentation is moved to the intermission (and then you still arrive late), don’t out yourself as a dropout of the program. Maybe it was just me, but her opener of “Gosh, well, yeah, I really enjoyed my time here at UCLA, even though I left before I got the degree,” didn’t really seem to motivate the young directors and producers in the audience to reach for the stars.

2. If you arrive late (see #1 above), use the time you’re stuck in traffic on the 405 to think about what you might say once you reach the podium. After outing oneself as a dropout, following up with “Uh, so, like am I supposed to say something that will inspire you or sumthin?” isn’t the strongest approach one might take.

3. Okay, let’s say you weren’t late because you were stuck in traffic, but because your wheatgrass shots at Jamba Juice took forever and your Kabbalah meeting went over. In this case you might not get the chance to exercise tip 2 of using the freeway time to prepare something coherent. Getting off to a rough start, you make the previous faux pas. Stay calm, all is not lost quite yet. As long as you do not, under any circumstances, embark on a long diatribe about how “maybe if you work hard and go out there and take some advice and work with the best person you can possibly work with – even if it’s getting their coffee – maybe after you work hard and do that stuff for a while, one day some of you will get lucky and have the chance to work on some good stuff. I mean, like I know you’re gonna be sayin, ‘Gee I have 2 degrees and I’m not doing anything big.’ But you know, like maybe at first if you work hard and do some grunt work, and after that maybe some of your will succeed. So good luck and congratulations.”

I leave you with these guidelines so that your own addresses to graduates of prestigious film schools may leave your audience, more, rather than less, likely to see your work than before you began speaking.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i have wondered about guest speakers and presenters and why some are chosen. why do grade schools have athletes speak about the importance of education when they dont use the education in their normal life. why would politicians who have never worked a real day in their life inspire college graduates to do so?

10:20 AM  

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