I write about TV and host Ankler Agenda with Elaine Low. I reported on agents’ concerns about a market chill amid the war for Warner Bros., covered the hot adult animation market and wrote about sports doc fatigue. Something you want to hear about on Ankler Agenda — Warner Bros. tea, what’s next in the creator economy, box office 2026? Email me at elaine@theankler.com, and your mailbag question might be featured on a holiday episode!
Hollywood can’t agree on what it’s becoming — only that it’s changing fast.
In just the past week, Netflix and Paramount plunged into a bruising tug-of-war over Warner Bros. that will permanently reshape the studio business (I got top agents’ take on a potential deal, and Lesley Goldberg spoke to C-suite studio execs about their concerns), while Disney quietly signed a $1 billion pact with OpenAI that opens the door for AI-generated videos starring Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Lilo and Stitch, Marvel heroes, and Star Wars icons. Even the people running the industry can’t say with confidence what the job landscape will look like a year from now.
Now imagine trying to teach it.
Across the country, film schools and drama programs are scrambling to prepare students for an entertainment business that no longer runs on pilots, or even horizontal screens. In a world where TV shows are watched entirely on phones, and AI threatens to become as integral a part of the movie-making process as knowing how to light a set or operate a camera, cinematic arts and drama schools aren’t always equipped to move nimbly.
“There’s an innate tension between academia and innovation,” says Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “The entertainment industry changes at the speed of light. Universities do not.”
That tension is now turning into a full-blown identity crisis at some of the nation’s top film and drama schools — one that has professors rewriting syllabi on the fly, students (and parents) questioning what they’re paying for, and schools quietly asking a troubling question:
Are we training artists for a Hollywood that no longer exists?
For today I spoke to Galloway, University of Cincinnati acting and voice professor D’Arcy Smith, who is going all in on teaching microdrama acting, and University of Southern California Prof. Tomm Polos, who’s bringing creator-economy ideas and tactics to drama students.
What you’ll find out:
Three blunt rules from a top film-school dean for building a career when the old paths no longer exist
How acting for microdramas is radically different from traditional acting and what acting inside a 9:16 frame actually changes about performance (some videos to watch are below)
How Polos’ creator-economy tactics are being folded into drama programs and why “waiting for the phone to ring” is no longer an option
The algorithm lessons professors are quietly teaching behind the scenes (and what TikTok and Instagram reward right now)
How USC is pushing artists past the “ick” of monetization, reframing it as survival, not selling out
As traditional studio career ladders collapse, what educators now tell students to rely on instead
How AI, virtual production and global storytelling are reshaping what “job-ready” even means in Hollywood
Microdrama Method: Go-for-It Acting
Academia isn’t known for moving fast. Curricula can take a long time to filter through a university’s approval process and become part of the core academic offering. “This is a cause of great worry to me, because the entertainment industry changes at the speed of light,” says Chapman’s Galloway. “Just look at the rise of virtual production, the transformation of AI, the introduction of new formats like microdramas. Students need to prepare for those, because that’s going to be the best avenue for employment.”
When the University of Cincinnati’s Smith spent time in Los Angeles this past spring with a group of recent graduates, they told him they were “auditioning like crazy for these verticals, these microdramas.” As Natalie Jarvey and I have been reporting this year, vertical dramas, first popularized in Asia, have surged in the U.S. and are increasingly drawing the attention and resources of legacy Hollywood. At the time, Smith wasn’t familiar with the format — until his former students played a few for him on their phones.
Related:
Smith, who serves as director of the Digital Performance Lab at the university’s College-Conservatory of Music, recalls thinking, “‘Oh, these are good.’ Like, the cliffhangers, they caught me.” Running the length of a feature film in total, a typical vertical drama has about 60-75 episodes of 60-90 seconds each, with every plot-packed installment constructed to hook you into the next. “The more and more I watched them, and the more that I talked with these recent grads,” Smith says, “I realized we needed to begin to train our actors for that world.”
Upon returning to Cincinnati, he started developing a new class that would train undergrad thesps to act within the confines of a vertical 9:16 frame and hold their own with the best of the billionaires and werewolves on ReelShort and DramaBox. The University of Cincinnati’s BFA program appears to be among the first to offer a course in microdrama or vertical performance. Local acting schools in L.A., like Cynthia Bain’s Young Actors Studio (which counts Hailee Steinfeld as an alum), also offer microdrama labs.
“The storylines are a little bit more exaggerated, and [performers] have to hit and capture the attention, the conflict, so fast, because they’d only have 90 seconds,” says Smith. “There isn’t the time for building up into a three-minute scene of the conflict or get to the meat of the scene. They have to go for it and commit to it much faster.”
Regarding the vertical field for these series, “The biggest thing with the frame being changed is, is what happens with the body and how we use our bodies — full body language is so much more important,” says Smith. “I also teach and direct motion capture. It’s a bit like that, where we need the face and voice to be more film-like, but the body needs to be fully involved in the scene, physically a bit like theatre.”
You can laugh at the idea of young people (and their parents) paying good money (for Ohio residents, CCM tuition and fees come to about $15,500 per year; for non-residents, it’s about twice that) to learn how to act in projects that have names like Tricked Into Having My Ex-Husband’s Baby and The Lost Heir: A Christmas Reckoning, but entertainment has been tweaking formats and catering to ever-shortening attention spans ever since people started telling stories. And as apps like TikTok grab a greater share of people’s viewing time, everyone who wants to reach an audience needs to adjust.
Still, Smith’s students were initially “cautious” of the new class.
“To be honest, they were a little like, ‘Is this a real thing?’ And then as time went along,” they caught on, he recounts. “They could see how challenging it is, actually, because we shoot very quickly. We shoot six episodes in nine hours. It’s close to three to four, sometimes five pages an hour.”
The most recent series his students filmed is Diary of a High School Demon Hunter, which has six episodes; a previous series, The Disappearance, had eight. True to the microdrama form, their in-class vertical projects are produced in just weeks — with production timelines way shorter than for their short films, which can take around three months to be completed.
Smith hopes to start offering microdrama directing and writing classes at some point as well. He wants to empower his students to start making their own creative projects and demystify the production process.
“If you’re an actor who’s been trained to stay home and wait for the phone to ring, I think it’s very scary” to build a career amidst such rapid change, Smith says. “But if you’re the kind of person who’s interested in making your own content, I think it’s very exciting.”
Pulling from the Creator Playbook
For those who embrace the DIY path — making your own content, getting your skills noticed — understanding the algorithmic whims of TikTok and Instagram is crucial. It’s why Smith monitors the analytics of his students’ work on the apps, to see “what the algorithm likes and what it doesn’t like,” he says.
And it’s why Tomm Polos, USC’s Rodric David Chair in Creator Arts (and the official hype man for the Dodgers), teaches several classes on the creator economy.
“You’d be doing your students a disservice if you weren’t preparing them for the work that’s out there,” Polos tells me. “It’s not to say the work of theater and high drama isn’t imperative. It’s probably more important than ever, but if we want our students to get work, they have to be prepared for the modern creator economy.”
That means a course called Creator as Entrepreneur, which Polos says guides students on monetizing storytelling content and “combining their artistry with their ability to make a living in whatever story they want to tell.” Then there’s The History of Content Creation, which the USC site describes as helping students to “discover how storytellers and story-sellers have always been influencers in the realms of entertainment, activism and commerce.”
Part of USC’s drama school curriculum, these courses are designed to serve drama students. But Polos says he sees all sorts sign up for creator classes, including dental students, pharmacy students and those studying real estate and business.
“When you scroll through TikTok, you scroll through Instagram, you’ll see chiropractors and dentists and dermatologists and whatever, right?” says Polos. “They’re all focusing on connecting with audiences. The more current term these days is branding, but these are all just updated terms for connection. People get the ick when they hear the word ‘monetization’ — that’s just another word for selling tickets. It’s another word for fannies in seats.”
When Polos began offering the entrepreneurial content creator class through USC about four years ago, there were doubts about whether it would find enough students. It immediately attracted more than 40, then expanded to multiple sections and has now evolved into the creator arts program that Polos chairs. His classes are 50 percent performers, 50 percent pharmacists and chiropractors and other business-minded storytellers who want to monetize video content. There are about 200 students across those classes.
Embracing AI & Global Perspectives
About 40 miles south at Chapman University’s film school, Galloway has introduced five classes on AI. There are courses that teach students how to use Unreal Engine, a 3D animating tool. The school is also opening a multimillion-dollar virtual production studio, where the screen alone cost $1.2 million.
Related:
“Our job isn’t to teach the students about the world we came from. It is to prepare them for the world they’re entering,” says Galloway, who worked as a journalist covering Hollywood for nearly three decades and authored a biography of Sherry Lansing before stepping up to lead Dodge in 2020. “That world is a world of extraordinary flux, with opportunities to rise and sink, and where all those traditional jobs — being an assistant at CAA, going into development for a producer — like it or not, are collapsing.”
Like Polos, Galloway is focused on fostering entrepreneurial drive in his students. He’s also viewing entertainment as a global medium, one that has seen a decline in American dominance at the international box office.
“So now, instead of teaching film studies classes that just look at Hollywood films, you’ve got to say, ‘What exposure do we give them to Korean dramas? What awareness are we introducing about Bollywood?’ Often that’s classes that already exist that need to be modernized. So there are many things you can do on both a macro and a micro level — but again, it’s not easy to do so, because people don’t like change anywhere, least of all in a university setting.”
3 Ways to Get (and Stay) Ahead
Galloway’s tough-love advice to the next generation of Hollywood aspirants also applies to all workers in entertainment now who are figuring out how and where to set their path.
I. Don’t count on a traditional company ladder.
“The first thing is, stop thinking about creating a career that is entirely dependent on other people, where I’m an assistant, then I’m a creative executive, then I’m a director and a VP,” he says. “Start thinking of what you can build on your own with the people you know, the skills you have.”
II. Prepare yourself for a global industry and audience.
“You can be much more useful if you can navigate between China and Korea and Hollywood than if your thinking is entirely parochial. Sumner Redstone once said, ‘Content is king.’ That will always be the truth. So the more that you’re aware of history and trends and good ideas” — especially the ones emerging from markets outside the U.S. — “the more easily you’ll be able to get things off the ground.”
III. Learn the latest technology, and think critically about its uses.
“If you can master some of these tools, you’re going to be useful. If you have content ideas that are original and well developed, you’re going to sell them at some point. If you could leap ahead of your bosses, you could be essential to them.”
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