As Directors Rise From YouTube, What’s Film School for, Then?

Each generation has its young filmmakers who break down the door to Hollywood in a way that nobody before them had.

“This is a cyclical business in terms of new generations coming up,” says USC School of Cinematic Arts dean Elizabeth Daley. “I mean, if you just go back to the generation when [George] Lucas and that group first started working, they were the young upstarts.”

Lucas, Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were the film-school pack — USC, NYU and UCLA, respectively — and they became the establishment soon enough. In the ’90s it was Tarantino and Soderbergh, busting out of Sundance to become Hollywood’s scrappy outsiders.

The jury is still out on exactly how this younger generation will rise through the ranks — but if this summer has been any indication, it’ll be on the internet. Focus Features’ Obsession, directed by 26-year-old internet native Curry Barker, has grossed $475 million on a budget of less than $1 million. A24 and Chernin Entertainment’s Backrooms grossed $394 million and was directed by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, whose take on the material began on YouTube. Parsons never went to film school, and Barker dropped out of New York Film Academy during his first year. Caveats abound: These are just two examples, both horror but still vastly different (one was a word-of-mouth original, the other well-known internet IP). And yet “there’s a little bit of a gold-rush feel right now,” says a Big Three agent who works with filmmakers and writers. 

More filmmakers will inevitably emerge from YouTube, TikTok and whatever comes next, honing their craft in front of an audience before Hollywood ever comes calling. Any film school dean will tell you that not every prospective student needs a film school education. And the basic tools of the craft have never been more accessible: Videos, books and podcasts can teach much of it, often for free.

So what exactly is the value in a formal education these days, particularly in a costly MFA or BFA program?

“Film school” can have several meanings. Bachelor’s degrees can often be earned with majors in film or media, and deans argue that an undergraduate education — whatever the focus — is inherently valuable no matter what. Then there are the graduate programs, sometimes called conservatories, where the average age is usually around 30 and students are much more geared toward a specific craft. For graduate school in particular, film schools make their case by promising to “speed up” a career.

“Ours is a conservatory,” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “So you come to study one thing: editing, cinematography, sound, producing, production design. And in many of those areas, you absolutely need that knowledge. You could work on a film set and acquire it over 10 years. But if you’re really well taught, you come out fully equipped.”

One cinematographer who skipped film school entirely admits some things were difficult to learn on his own, such as how to prep a lookbook ahead of a shoot.

And the YouTube boom has hardly killed demand for a degree — people are still applying in droves to film school. As the cost of higher education continues to rise, Galloway was surprised when Dodge found itself oversubscribed this year, after a higher-than-expected yield — the percentage of students with accepted admission offers who then choose to enroll.