Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts

Filmmaker charts path from rented cameras to Hollywood marquees

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:35:57 +0000

Filmmaker charts path from rented cameras to Hollywood marquees Rachel Sauer Tue, 01/20/2026 - 15:35

Bradley Worrell

On campus on Wednesday for a screening of his movie Roofman, CU ��ý�� alum Derek Cianfrance praises the professors who mentored him and talks about what motivates him today as a filmmaker

From making short films as a teenager to sitting in the director’s chair today for Hollywood marquee films, Derek Cianfrance’s path to professional filmmaker has been anything but conventional.

Long before he directed films such as Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance was a kid growing up in Lakewood, Colorado, who turned birthday parties into movie sets. At age 13, he was shooting short films on a rented video camera—driven by a sense of play that he says still fuels his work today.

In a recent, candid conversation with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Cianfrance reflects on the formative years that shaped his vision, the mentors who guided him at the ��ý�� and the persistence—and rejection—that defined his rise from short home films to Hollywood movies.

CU ��ý�� alumnus Derek Cianfrance directed films such as Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, in addition to his most recent, Roofman.

Question: What’s it like for you to come back to ��ý�� now? And what are your plans while you are here?

Cianfrance: It’s always amazing coming back. ��ý�� shaped me as a filmmaker. I had transformative experiences there—with mentors like Phil Solomon, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Kawin, Don Yannacito and Jim Palmer. Some aren’t around anymore, but they left a mark.

On Wednesday evening, at the Muenzinger Auditorium, I’ll be screening my most recent movie, Roofman, and I’ll probably do an intro and a Q&A.

I’ve been back to ��ý�� many times since leaving college—and some of my most important relationships came from there. Every time I return, I enjoy getting to see the next generation of students and teachers carrying on that tradition.

Question: You started experimenting with film and other media as a teenager?

Cianfrance: Earlier, actually. At age 6, I borrowed my older brother’s tape recorder and used it to make skits, fake movie trailers and to do interviews. At 13, I rented a video camera from my school librarian at Green Mountain High School and made The Bat Movie, which was about this rubber bat that attacks people. The movie was 15 seconds long, four shots, and it was from the point of view of the bat. It was actually kind of funny and ridiculous. …

From then on, I kept making little films. It was play for me—like a sport. Even now, in my 50s, I feel connected to that 6-year-old—it’s still play at its best moments.

And, I have to say, my parents were very supportive. I feel very fortunate. They dealt with me putting a camera in their face, filming birthday parties, turning the birthday party into a set for my movie. If they hadn’t supported that, I don’t know if I would have had the confidence to keep going. My parents were awesome that way.

And I immersed myself in film. I grew up on VHS and Hollywood movies—Martin Scorsese and George Romero. I had a picture of Scorsese over my bed.

Question: Many aspiring filmmakers set their sights on NYU or UCLA. Why did you choose CU ��ý��?

Cianfrance: I wanted to attend UCLA, USC or NYU as well. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with the film school generation back in the 1990s, but those schools were cost-prohibitive. I ended up going to CU because I knew they had a film program and ��ý�� seemed like a great place to be. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was transformative.

At CU, my professors deconstructed cinema. Stan Brakhage showed us films out of focus to study shadow and light, and very quickly I learned I was getting a unique education. It was avant-garde, experimental. I learned aesthetics and formalism differently. Bruce Kawin taught screenplay structure; Jim Palmer taught thematic analysis.

When I showed my student films at festivals, I realized just how unique my education was. NYU students had huge budgets; mine cost $1,000 and was shot on 16mm Bolex. CU taught me to embrace limitations. That has shaped everything I do.

If you go

CU ��ý�� alumnus Derek Cianfrance will be present for a screening of Roofman at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21, and will participate in a Q&A after the film.

What: International Film Series screening of Roofman with writer and director Derek Cianfrance

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 21

Where: Muenzinger Auditorium E050

Admission: $8 students/$10 general admission

Learn more

Question: What year did you graduate?

Cianfrance: Well, I didn’t actually graduate. I spent five semesters at CU. At the time I entered film school, Trey Parker and Matt Stone (later of South Park TV series fame) had just graduated and made Alfred Packer: The Musical. I was watching that from afar, as this young, ambitious film student, and so by the time I was a junior, I decided I was going to make a feature, too.

I dropped out for what I thought at the time would be a semester, raised $40,000, and shot Brother Tied. It took four years to finish, and it went to Sundance in 1998.

I spent a year on the road with that film. I had no money. I was literally living off of hors d’oeuvres from film festivals. I was like Ratzo Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy at the film festivals, just stuffing my pockets with food. The movie went to about 30 festivals and it won a handful of awards.

I got a lot of business cards, and I met a lot of people in the industry while I was doing that. I was writing Blue Valentine at the time, so I started sending out scripts for Blue Valentine—and I got a lot of rejections. Just non-stop rejections, but I just kept working on it.

It was far from an instant success. From when I first started writing Blue Valentine it was 66 drafts and 11 years later that I shot it.

Question: After leaving CU, did you move to Hollywood?

Cianfrance: No, I moved to New York in 1999. I lived on couches, edited tribute videos for TV award shows and worked enough to buy time back to write. That leapfrogging lasted 10 years until I made Blue Valentine.

Derek Cianfrance's (striped jacket) most recent film, Roofman, is about a convicted spree robber who hides out in the roof of a Toys R Us after escaping from prison.

Question: Blue Valentine was praised by critics and received multiple award nominations. Did you feel like you had ‘arrived’ as a director after it debuted?

Cianfrance: I don’t believe in arrival points. It’s a journey. That hasn’t changed for me. That’s why I feel so connected to my 6-year-old inner child—because I’m doing the same process I’ve done forever.

When you experience success, it removes barriers, which can be dangerous. Resistance and rejection are blessings—because they force growth. Blue Valentine took 11 years because I needed that time. By the last draft, I was married with kids, so I could tell the story authentically.

Question: Many people aspire to become a screenwriter or director but success eludes them. What do you believe helped you break through?

Cianfrance: Focusing on the work—not ego. I never cared about seeing my name on a marquee—only the movie’s name. It’s about staying true to your inner voice. Success and failure both come, so keep swinging.

Question: Even today, rejection comes with the territory as a recognized director?

Cianfrance: That’s the life of a filmmaker. You’re just knocking on doors and saying, ‘Do you want to buy this idea that I have?’

No one’s ever asking for those (films). Like, no one was asking for Blue Valentine. No one was asking for Roofman. Those were things where I found myself in a story and then you have to get excited about them.

I always feel like making movies is like the energy source. It’s the sun. When I see an energy source that I’m attracted to, I start orbiting it. And my job is to pay so much attention to it that other people start to pay attention to it as well, because you can’t do it alone.

It’s not like being a painter or a writer. You can write all by yourself, but to be a filmmaker, you need so many people. It costs so much money and there’s so many different elements involved.

That process has not changed at all for me. Roofman, Brother Tied, Blue Valentine—every movie I’ve ever made is pretty much the same. What has happened to me, though, is actors like Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams believed in me—and because they believed in me, with the performances they delivered in Blue Valentine—that meant other actors would then trust me. And so, I think a definition of my work has really been about the quality, the vulnerability and the courage of the performances.

CU ��ý�� alumnus Derek Cianfrance (right) praises the vulnerability and courage of the performances from actors with whom he's worked (including Kirsten Dunst, left, in Roofman).

I don’t want to say I’ve arrived as a director, but that’s been the thing that allowed me to make the films that I’ve been able to make. Without my actors, I’m nothing.

Question: Today, what attracts you to a movie project?

Cianfrance: Family stories. Movies feel voyeuristic—about secrets, flaws and relationships. I’m interested in impossible choices and consequences. My films reflect my life: Blue Valentine came from being a child watching my parents’ marriage; Roofman reflects on being a father.

Question:Can you name a creative decision that you made as a director that scared you at the time but that you’re proud of now?

Cianfrance: Roofman, as a whole. It pushed me out of my comfort zone—I aimed for a tone that was sad and sweet, not just dark. It was terrifying but rewarding.

Question:If you had unlimited resources and no commercial expectations, what kind of movie would you make?

Cianfrance: Honestly, I’ve had that once, with HBO’s I Know This Much Is True. But limitations often create magic. Throwing money at problems isn’t always good.

Question:Are there any film genres you’d still like to explore?

Cianfrance: Horror. That’s how I got into movies—Creepshow was my first VHS obsession. Horror allows limitless experimentations in form. That excites me. You can go anywhere with a horror movie.

Question:If you could give two or three bullet points of advice for today’s CU ��ý�� film students, what would it be?

Cianfrance: Stay close to your friends. Help each other make things—you can’t do it alone. Get comfortable with rejection—it’s 99% of the process, so learn from it without losing your voice. And have a life—movies about movies aren’t enough.

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On campus on Wednesday for a screening of his movie Roofman, CU ��ý�� alum Derek Cianfrance praises the professors who mentored him and talks about what motivates him today as a filmmaker.

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Top photo: Derek Cianfrance (right, baseball cap) on the set of Roofman with actor Channing Tatum (in orange). (All photos courtesy Derek Cianfrance)

Why Skinner Myers isn’t chasing Hollywood glory

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Why Skinner Myers isn’t chasing Hollywood glory Rachel Sauer Wed, 11/19/2025 - 07:30

Cody DeBos

The CU ��ý�� Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts assistant professor is finding success as an independent filmmaker

When Skinner Myers shoots a movie, he doesn’t need a Hollywood backlot, a multi-million-dollar budget or even a month-long shooting schedule. For Myers, a career in film isn’t about glitz and glam. It’s an opportunity to tell stories he’s passionate about while adhering to a moral code.

That dedication to his craft has carried him on a lengthy path full of unexpected twists to who he is today: an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the prestigious Amplifier Fellowship.

“I submitted an original pilot and I got selected. It’s really opened up my network to individuals that I probably could reach as … an indie filmmaker professor,” Myers says of the opportunity. “So, it’s been good. The timing has been really good.”

Skinner Myers, a CU ��ý�� assistant professor of cinema studies and moving image arts, recently received an Amplifier Fellowship from Film Independent.

He’s currently in the middle of two projects, including Tragic Boogie, a pro-wrestling crime drama, and a feature film called Mood Swing Whiskey.

“We shot the latter in March of this year in Los Angeles during CU’s spring break. It’s a slow-cinema, avant-garde horror thriller shot on black-and-white Super 16 film,” he says.

Earlier this year, another of Myers’ films premiered at the Berlin Critics Week film festival and was quickly picked up by a distributor, with a release planned for 2026.

But for Myers, an assistant professor of cinema studies and moving image arts at the ��ý��, these are more than artistic milestones. He sees each one as proof that it’s still possible to make bold, personal work outside the traditional Hollywood system.

Rewriting his own script

Myers didn’t originally set out to be a filmmaker. In fact, he spent much of his early career pursuing gigs on the other side of the camera.

“I was originally an actor, starting at the age of 18,” he says.

He moved to New York City to study acting, performed in off-Broadway plays and started a band. After 9/11, he relocated to Los Angeles in search of commercial work but found the industry disheartening.

“I got quickly disillusioned with the idea of making it as an actor,” Myers recalls.

Rather than ending the story there, Myers decided to pick up the camera for himself. He began experimenting with documentaries, including a self-financed trip to Uganda to shoot a vérité-style doc in the slums of Kampala.

“After that, I applied to film school, which was a big change for me, because this entire time I was an actor, I didn’t know much about filming,” he says.

“I remember one of the teachers who had seen my feature doc during the admissions process asked me, ‘Why do you want to come to film school? You’re already making films.’ At the time I didn’t really understand the question, which I do now, but I wanted connections, so I went anyway,” he adds.

After stints in graduate school, work on the TV series True Detective, and a job teaching film to middle and high schoolers, Myers began producing short films on the side. Eventually, he landed a full-time role at Loyola Marymount University, which allowed him to finance his first feature, The Sleeping Negro, shot in just six days and on a $40,000 budget.

The film went on to play at Slamdance in 2021, receive coverage in the Los Angeles Times, and score a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes after being screened in 20 countries.

Filmmaker Skinner Myers shot his film The Sleeping Negro in just six days and on a $40,000 budget. It went on to play at Slamdance in 2021, receive coverage in the Los Angeles Times and score a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes after being screened in 20 countries. (Photo: Josiah Myers)

“It won lots of awards, and that was when I started to apply for tenure-track positions outside of LA, just because LA was really expensive for my growing family,” Myers said.

His momentum carried him to ��ý�� and gave him the confidence to keep shooting films.

A radical approach to independent cinema

Myers is committed to a filmmaking approach he describes as deeply personal, politically intentional and structurally independent.

“One of the things that makes my approach unique is the lack of resources I’ve had,” he says. “I’ve never had more than six days to make a feature.”

Efficiency—often forced by that lack of resources—is reflected in his poignant, narrative-driving scripts and his low shooting ratio. One thing he splurges on is shooting exclusively on film. These decisions are as much logistical as they are part of his larger philosophy on telling a meaningful story, Myers says.

“I’m also a huge fan of the Black radical cinematic traditions that come before me,” he says, citing the influence of Oscar Micheaux, Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett.

“I want to create films that connect the traditions from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s to today, because I feel like that bridge has not been connected,” he adds. “These are the things I think about as I’m writing, as I’m thinking through visuals, as I’m thinking about characters, making something that is not only equitable to the crew and cast financially, but is unique in its own way.”

His latest project, Tragic Boogie, is a crime thriller set in the world of professional wrestling.

“We just finished the script on that one. I’m really stoked on it because I think it’s something that, for pro wrestling fans, they’ll totally attach to, but it’s still me and still the type of film I want to make,” Myers says.

Thematically, the film explores how bodies, especially those of Black athletes, are commodified and discarded in entertainment industries.

Myers also sees it as a community project.

“Really, my goal is to make the film here in Denver and really try to bring the local community together and have everyone involved, and even have some students involved,” he says.

Amplifying voices from screen to classroom

Earlier this year, Myers received an Amplifier Fellowship from Film Independent, a nonprofit arts organization that supports emerging filmmakers. The program, sponsored by Netflix, is designed to elevate underrepresented voices in film.

“I try to use my work to show students that, ‘Hey, this is totally doable.’ I try to bring in these real-world experiences as they’re happening to me. And I’m very candid and open with my students."

“It’s been great,” Myers says. “Materialistically, I got financial support. But more importantly, I’ve gotten some new mentors in my life who really understand what I’m trying to do.”

“They have a lot more experience than I do. They’re a lot older. And that’s been really nice, getting some of that wisdom and guidance,” he adds.

The fellowship also has given him precious time. It’s a gift he’s using to write, to collaborate and to think about what kind of artist and educator he wants to be as his career continues to develop.

At CU ��ý��, Myers sees filmmaking and teaching as two parts of a whole. He makes a point to include students in real productions and to demystify the business side of the industry by sharing real stories from his own work and that of his colleagues.

“I try to use my work to show students that, ‘Hey, this is totally doable,’” he says. “I try to bring in these real-world experiences as they’re happening to me. And I’m very candid and open with my students.

“I’ve made three features at this point. I’ve gone through the distribution process (and) the festival process,” he says. “That way, they can see, all right, there’s a way to balance some type of life where you make money and your artistic life.”

Staying true to the story

As for what’s next, Myers is passionate about continuing to create projects that don’t always fit into a press kit.

“I’m not trying to make a Hollywood film; that doesn’t interest me,” he says.

He also encourages young filmmakers to choose their medium with purpose and not to be afraid of change.

“There are a lot of artistic mediums out there other than film,” he says. “So, really know why you need to use that medium to say what you want to say and not something else.”

And if that calling ever changes?

“It’s OK to not do this forever,” he says. “Maybe you say what you want to say in five films. It’s OK to say, ‘OK, I’m going to do something else in my life.’ That’s totally OK.”

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The CU ��ý�� Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts assistant professor is finding success as an independent filmmaker.

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Top image: Skinner Myers in his film The Sleeping Negro (Photo: Josiah Myers)

It was a very good year (for movies)

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 20:51:36 +0000

It was a very good year (for movies) Rachel Sauer Wed, 11/12/2025 - 13:51

Rachel Sauer

The films of 1975, currently featured in CU ��ý��’s International Film Series, reflected the times and the culture in ways that hadn’t been seen before, says film scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz

It wasn’t all bad news in 1975. On July 5, Arthur Ashe became the first Black man to win Wimbledon, and several months later, on Oct. 11, Saturday Night Live debuted, the same day that Bruce Springsteen earned his first Top 40 hit with "Born to Run."

But then…

It was also the year that Saigon fell, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, two assassination attempts were made on Gerald Ford and U.S. unemployment peaked at 9.2%. Jimmy Hoffa was reported missing, and Patty Hearst was captured in San Francisco.

“Between the political context and the historical context and technological developments 50 years ago, it created this environment for a lot of exceptional filmmaking,” notes Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, a CU ��ý�� professor of cinema studies and moving image arts.

The times felt raw and upside-down, so filmmakers responded by making indelible, groundbreaking art.

Of course there have been other momentous years for films now considered classics, but perhaps none so densely populated as 1975: Jaws, Nashville and Dog Day Afternoon. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Shampoo, The Stepford Wives and 3 Days of the Condor.

“Between the political context and the historical context and technological developments 50 years ago, it created this environment for a lot of exceptional filmmaking,” says Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, a ��ý�� professor of cinema studies and moving image arts.

A new era

Some might argue, Acevedo-Muñoz says, that the films of 1975 had their genesis in November 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “It’s seen as this breaking point in American history that leads to a decade of cynicism and that ends with the fall of the Nixon administration. From ’63 to ’75, a number of historical events—from Kennedy to Johnson to the Tet Offensive, My Lai, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, the end of Vietnam, the end of Nixon—we haven’t had, I don’t think, that amount of public and social turbulence in such a compact amount of time since then.”

The filmmakers who began creating during this time—including Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and others now considered legends—were not only embedded in and products of the times but represented the first generation to study the history and craft of filmmaking and cinema at university, Acevedo-Muñoz says.

Further, they came of artistic age during a time that wrote the epitaph for Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the producer was king and the studio system ruled everything from actors’ contracts to production and distribution deals with movie houses. This new generation of filmmakers ushered in the era of the director and the so-called American New Wave, because they were not only studying filmmaking, but were strongly influenced by international films and filmmakers.

This was the time that also saw the end of the Hays Code—Hollywood’s self-imposed morality guidelines that some say creatively cowed the industry from 1934 to 1968—and the “rise of the rating system that we know, which allowed for more frank representations of sex and violence,” Acevedo-Muñoz says.

See the films of 1975

The International Film Series is ��ý��'s first arthouse series and has been locally programmed since 1941. Its main venue is Muenzinger Auditorium, with a secondary venue in the Visual Arts Complex Auditorium.

This semester, CU ��ý��'s International Film Series has highlighted notable films from 1975 among the other films on its full schedule and will feature two more before the winter break: Barry Lyndon Sunday, Nov. 16, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show Thursday, Dec. 4.

Learn more

“So, there’s this context of general pissed offness, there’s the generation gap of the ‘60s, we’re getting our asses whupped by guerillas in Vietnam, we’ve seen a U.S. presidency collapse, and there’s this sense of, ‘Let’s be pissed off and make movies that rattle cages.’”

‘Nothing to compare it to’

For Acevedo-Muñoz, one of the great examples of this evolution is Robert Altman’s Nashville, which he considers the best movie of the ‘70s because “there’s nothing to compare it to. It’s sui generis. This movie was in production in 1974, and it’s about a presidential primary with a third-party candidate who’s challenging the establishment. And then it’s got this massive scope of 24 principal characters and five days of continuous action and this music that goes from magnificent to abject—I think some of the advertising for Nashville said it’s ‘the damndest thing you ever saw’—and it ends with the assassination of a celebrity by a nut with a gun.”

The films of 1975 not only mirrored the political and social upheaval of the times but represented a certain creative daring and willingness to explore previously taboo topics. The Rocky Horror Picture Show—which wasn’t an American movie but made its way to Hollywood via Australia, the West End and Broadway—made the case that “everybody’s queer and it’s perfectly fine and even monsters are not really monsters, it’s the normal people who come off as squares and weird," Acevedo-Muñoz says. "It’s one of the reasons why Rocky Horror has never really gone away, and if anything has become more and more of an anthem for all things marginalized and all things kicked off center by The Man and a sign of rebellion.”

The events and themes in Dog Day Afternoon, including robbing a bank to help pay for a character’s gender-affirming surgery, had never really been seen in a major Hollywood production before, said CU ��ý�� film scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

And the events and themes in Dog Day Afternoon, such as robbing a bank to help pay for a character’s gender-affirming surgery, had never really been seen in a major Hollywood production before, Acevedo-Muñoz says.

“Sidney Lumet directed it, and he was bringing to the discussion topics that would have been unthinkable a decade before, starting with a trans character,” Acevedo-Muñoz says. “And he was highlighting the frustration and the anger of the times, and we see that evolve into the street crowd that starts being curious about what’s happening in the bank and then ends up cheering for Al Pacino’s and John Cazale’s characters and applauding as they drive away to the airport.

“That anger from a criminal element previously would have been completely marginalized, not just in the decade and a half before, but also in the censorship system that predated the current rating system, where the bad guys could never be sympathetic. They could be charming, which Hitchcock did in the ‘40s, but they couldn’t be sympathetic. But here everybody’s heartbroken when Al Pacino’s character gets caught. The crowd outside of the bank are you and me in the movie theater, and the bank is a symbol of The Man, of the establishment, of capitalism. It’s a beautiful and, in so many ways, a beautifully shocking movie.”

Irreverence and creativity

The filmmakers of 1975 also saw the introduction of the Steadicam, a revolutionary camera stabilizer mount invented by Garrett Brown that entered the market that year. The technology allowed for greater movement and mobility in shooting and was notably used in filming Rocky the following year.

Even if filmmakers weren’t using the Steadicam, the growing preference for dynamic shots with more movement was still evident in many of the films of 1975, Acevedo-Muñoz says. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is noted for its gritty, almost handmade quality. “Suddenly movies didn’t have to be so pretty anymore, and they could do things like lens flare, they could play with grain in ways we hadn’t seen before.”

He adds that it wasn’t all gritty political and social commentary in 1975. Shampoo, for example, could best be described as a sexy romp—women and men having fun in a hair salon, legendary actors at their height of beauty, a loving farewell to the hippie era.

The films of 1975 are bookended by other exceptional films released in the previous and following years but symbolize the core of a decade when everything seemed to change, Acevedo-Muñoz says, adding that subsequent eras have seen the events of the times reflected in their films, but not in the way that they were in 1975.

“Take September 11,” he says. “It was a traumatic event, and what did it lead to? It led to more Marvel movies, it led to vision after vision after vision of New York being destroyed and a group of good ol’ Americans dressed in red, white and blue kicking alien ass. We’re now getting a couple of good movies that appear to address January 6—Civil War is the best, I think—but we’re not seeing a wave of it and we’re not seeing a concentration as we did, not coincidentally, a year and a half after the collapse of the Nixon administration. (The year 1975) was exciting because anger brings irreverence and also creativity.”

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Players roll the dice on the healing power of collaborative fantasy

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:22:42 +0000

Players roll the dice on the healing power of collaborative fantasy Rachel Sauer Fri, 11/07/2025 - 15:22

Cody DeBos

At the D&D table, says CU ��ý�� humanities scholar and gaming podcast host Andrew Gilbert, everyone has a voice

You can often find Andrew Gilbert behind a cardboard dungeon master’s screen, scheming up new ways to derail the carefully laid plans of the other players at his Dungeons & Dragons table. The game has been part of his life for decades, and as D&D gains a larger foothold in the mainstream, it has also become a powerful avenue for friends to connect, laugh and heal.

“It’s such a fascinating way to connect people through story. But it’s a story with limitations and rules,” says Gilbert, a teaching assistant professor of humanities, game studies and media at the ��ý�� Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts.

In September, Wizards of the Coast studios released Heroes of the Borderlands, the game’s most expansive beginner-friendly box set yet. It arrives with the goal of helping a new generation of players roll their first d20s.

Andrew Gilbert is a CU ��ý�� teaching assistant professor of humanities, game studies and media in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts.

Gilbert and a group of friends have been doing so together since 2018, broadcasting play sessions from their campaigns online via the Goats & Dragons and Helpful Goat Presents podcasts.

“When we created the show, we knew we wanted to play games in a way that centered player experiences and collaborative storytelling,” he says.

The group’s campaign is now approaching the end of a years-long adventure, which has included guests like The Lord of the Rings actor Dominic Monaghan along the way.

The hobby has brought them closer together and created no shortage of memorable moments. But that’s just one facet of Gilbert’s connection to Dungeons & Dragons.

After years of rolling dice and telling stories, he’s come to see the game as something far bigger than fantasy. But why does D&D, a game first published in the 1970s, still captivate us today? How can a tabletop game rooted in imagination compete with video games, AI content, and near-constant digital simulation?

Gilbert has a few ideas.

Still captivating after 50 years

At its heart, D&D is a storytelling engine. Unlike books or movies with fixed narratives, tabletop roleplaying games ask players to improvise solutions, make moral decisions, and stay in character. Players sit around a table (or communicate virtually) and collaborate to tell a story where no one knows how it will end.

“It’s a fascinating form of media where, to a certain extent, the audience are the creators of the media at the same time,” he says. “There’s something wild and magical and fun about giving up control of a story to the group and to chance itself with die rolls.”

Gilbert first encountered D&D through a cousin who taught him to play when he was just 7 years old.

“I was hooked right away,” he recalls.

Years later, as both a scholar of games and a long-time player, Gilbert is fascinated by the emotional and social experiences D&D fosters. No longer seen as just an escapist fantasy game, D&D has become a catalyst for community building.

“There are social and emotional dynamics happening in every game,” he says.

That community is what makes Dungeons & Dragons so special, says CU ��ý�� scholar Andrew Gilbert; whether players are battling monsters in an imagined fantasy world or conquering their own internal demons, the table becomes a shared space where anything can happen. (Illustration: Wizards of the Coast)

At the same time, D&D is incredibly accessible for newcomers. Today, with an updated rule set and a plethora of digital tools to simplify the experience, that’s truer than ever, Gilbert says.

“Literally, you can know nothing about Dungeons & Dragons, and I can teach you how to play by just doing it. All you have to do is tell me what your character wants to do, and then someone who knows the rules can say, ‘Great, roll this dice, add this number to it.’ You really don’t even need to know the rules before you start playing,” he says.

He believes that’s a big reason why the game has endured for half a century and is still growing.

“A lot of us were worried the growth we saw in 2015 and 2016 was a fad that would sort of fade. But then we got the pandemic, and a lot of people started playing as a way to connect with friends when there was nothing to do but play games at home. And, of course, you have a ton of content creators making content about the game professionally,” he says.

“It’s just a perfect storm of factors that have shot the popularity of D&D through the roof.”

Healing through character

Sometimes, though, the game is about more than enjoyment or even storytelling. For many, D&D and games like it have become tools for healing from past traumas or building crucial social skills in a safe environment, Gilbert says.

“There are so many stories about people using the game to work through trauma, including some really cool research about games and PTSD specifically. You can just not be you for a little bit,” he says. “I’m not always a proponent of pure escapism, but it releases a tension. Whether you’re remembering your character doing something or remembering something that actually happened, your brain goes through the exact same process.”

He adds, “With D&D, you can create all these beneficial, healthy memories of not being the victim of some trauma but the one who solves the problem.”

"There’s so much good. The act of collaboration, of creation, of working through issues in the game. It’s something we talk about in my class a lot. These things are hard to navigate, but it’s incredibly helpful to learn how to navigate them."

Gilbert also acknowledges how roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons can be deeply meaningful to people who don’t always find social interaction intuitive.

“The idea of how to just construct scenes and conversations is really, really helpful for individuals on the autism spectrum,” he says.

Part of that comes from the game’s structure. Unlike everyday conversation, which can be unpredictable and overwhelming, D&D provides a clear set of rules and roles.

“There’s an element of learning how to pass the microphone, which on a very basic level is just good practice for conversation,” Gilbert says.

Indeed, research suggests that D&D and similar games can be used therapeutically to build communication skills, reduce stress, and foster a sense of community among people who may struggle to connect.

That community, Gilbert says, is what makes the game so special. Whether players are battling monsters in an imagined fantasy world or conquering their own internal demons, the table becomes a shared space where anything can happen.

“There’s so much good. The act of collaboration, of creation, of working through issues in the game. It’s something we talk about in my class a lot. These things are hard to navigate, but it’s incredibly helpful to learn how to navigate them,” he says.

As new players crack open Heroes of the Borderlands or learn the game from a friend, they become part of a decades-long tradition that values creativity and connection in a world that is too often devoid of these qualities, Gilbert says, adding, “We keep finding new amazing things about this game, and it’s only getting better. The possibilities are just limitless.”

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At the D&D table, says CU ��ý�� humanities scholar and gaming podcast host Andrew Gilbert, everyone has a voice.

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Lights! Camera! Action! Cherry Yogurt!

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:04:09 +0000

Lights! Camera! Action! Cherry Yogurt! Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/06/2025 - 17:04

Bradley Worrell

Aspiring filmmaker and CU ��ý�� senior Francesca Hiatt’s short film, Cherry Yogurt, relies on subtlety to touch on grief and support, viewed through children’s eyes

Sitting alone on a wooden pew in a quiet church, a 7-year-old boy stirs cherry yogurt in a cup with his spoon. He seems distraught.

Entering the ornate church, a young girl approaches the boy. She asks if he has been crying. He tells her he has a headache, and he points to a pill mixed in the yogurt that he says is for the pain.

Nearby, behind closed doors, adult voices murmur. At one point, a woman can be heard crying softly.

Francesca Hiatt, a CU ��ý�� film major, received an Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES) Tier 1 micro grant to make her short film, Cherry Yogurt, which began as an assignment in a screenwriting class.

The scene marks the opening of Cherry Yogurt, a short film written, directed and produced by Francesca Hiatt, a ��ý�� film major. With her short film, Hiatt didn’t set out to create a neatly packaged story. Instead, in just less than seven minutes, she constructed what might be considered an emotional memory, loosely defined and quietly observed.

The idea: kids watching the world

Hiatt began Cherry Yogurt as a script for a screenwriting class in November. However, the kernel of the idea had been forming long before that.

“I like to write films about adult themes put into children’s perspective,” she says. “I work with kids a lot, and I’m the oldest sibling of four. Just seeing what adult scenarios look like through their eyes always intrigued me, so that’s typically what I write about.”

That approach became the foundation for Cherry Yogurt. In the film, the adult world remains mostly off-screen. It’s hinted at—through murmured conversations off camera. The children in the film aren’t unaware, but they don’t fully comprehend, either. That gap in understanding is central to the short film, Hiatt says.

“Subtlety is really important in this piece. Any time you’re writing from the personal perspective of children, you paint the world how they view it,” she explains.

One thing that is clear to the boy and girl is how slowed down time feels as they wait for the adults to emerge from behind closed doors, as children and adults experience time differently, Hiatt notes.

“Maybe it’s only an hour long, but if you’re a child kept waiting it feels like it’s four hours long,” she says.

Making the film was a family affair

As intimate as the short film’s story is, the production of Cherry Yogurt was even more so. Hiatt cast her younger brother, Victor, in the lead role. Her mother, an actress, also played a part, as did her father, despite not being an actor.

“My whole family are actors. My dad is not an actor—but I made him do it anyway,” she says with a laugh. “It was a family effort for sure.”

Get your spoon and enjoy some Cherry Yogurt.

Watch Cherry Yogurt

In that respect, making the short film felt very familiar, as Hiatt previously directed her siblings in several short homemade movies.

“Back in the COVID days, I was making movies with my siblings in our basement. Honestly, they were not great, but they were very funny to me and I learned a lot from making them,” she says. Later, at CU ��ý��, Hiatt participated in a number of student filmmaking projects, some of which she had a supporting role in and some that she spearheaded.

“I had previously done a couple of other films at CU ��ý��, but Cherry Yogurt was the first film that I made from inception and writing the script all of the way to completion,” she says.

Filming took place over one hectic day, following a prep day that involved doing camera tests for lighting at the ornate Denver church. “It was insane. We only had eight hours to shoot because of a time limit on making use of the location, so we had to just get one solid take and move on,” Hiatt explains.

Despite the rush, Hiatt says the results were effective. She credits her cast—especially the two child actors—for bringing an authentic spirit to the film.

Student filmmaker Francesca Hiatt cast her younger brother, Victor (seated, wearing red hoodie), in the lead role of her short film Cherry Yogurt, which she filmed in one hectic day at a Denver church. (Photo: Francesca Hiatt)

“Flubbing a line is a totally different universe when they’re 7 years old and just laughing,” she says, explaining that laughter and innocence are exactly the point.

The crew and the gear came together

While the film’s cast was largely made up of family members, the crew came from Hiatt’s close circle of collaborators at CU ��ý��.

“It’s a group of four of us,” she says, referring to her fellow film students. “We’ve worked on every single one of each other’s films since the first day.”

Hiatt also tapped into Denver’s professional film community, recruiting a professional director of photography with whom she had previously worked. In turn, he brought a few seasoned crew members to elevate the film’s production value, she says.

All of this was made possible by a CU ��ý�� Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES) Tier 1 micro grant for $2,000. The funding was awarded to Hiatt’s Action! Film Club, which she created to provide middle school students opportunities to be part of film projects.

“The grant was huge,” Hiatt says. “I honestly don’t think the film would have been made without it.”

The PACES funding covered the location fee, catering for a 20-person shoot and, crucially, a rented gimbal—a stabilizing camera rig that made handheld shots smoother and more professional looking. The grant funding also paid for all of the costumes and props.

The cherry yogurt of it all

The film’s title, Cherry Yogurt, seems whimsical—almost trivial—at first glance. That, too, was intentional.

“It was something youthful and it was a symbolic item throughout the film,” Hiatt says. “You hear ‘cherry yogurt’ and you think of something bright, but it doesn’t hint at how heavy the other parts of the theme are.”

Francesca Hiatt credits her cast—especially the two child actors (above, in a scene from the film)—for bringing an authentic spirit to the film. (Photo: Francesca Hiatt)

Some scenes leave questions unanswered. Is the boy distraught solely because of a headache or are there other reasons? Is the pill in the yogurt simply intended for pain relief or possibly for something else? In a later scene, the girl, wearing several friendship bracelets, gives one to the boy, saying they offer protection. But protection from what, exactly?

Hiatt kept those elements intentionally ambiguous.

As for what the adults are meeting about behind closed doors, Hiatt says she originally specified in the script that they were attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In the final version of the film, the nature of the meeting is left unspecified, but Hiatt says it is made clear through the hushed tones of the adults that it’s something serious.

Post-production offers time for reflection

Final editing of the film wrapped in August, more than a year after Hiatt first wrote the script.

“It’s crazy how long it takes to make even a short film,” she says. “After finding the (PACES) grant funding, I started all of the pre-production work, which includes establishing the timelines, location scouting, producer work, getting a crew together and securing the cast. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of work getting people to respond, and I was doing all of this on top of being a full-time student and working full-time, so it was definitely a big project.”

Even during post-production, Hiatt says she kept learning.

“I look back and think, ‘Wow, I already know so much more now than when I shot this,’” she says. “I’m lucky to have opportunities to learn quickly and it’s hard for my art to keep up with how much I learn—even on a daily basis.”

Hiatt recently screened Cherry Yogurt for cast and crew members. Meanwhile, she has submitted the short to a handful of film festivals in hopes of attracting a larger audience for the production. The short film can be viewed here.

Exit, stage left

Hiatt is graduating a year early and will walk with the class of 2026 in May. She has worked with several Denver and ��ý�� film production companies already and sees herself continuing freelance video work while aiming for her long-term goal: destination Los Angeles.

However, Hollywood is just one possible path to what is most important to Hiatt: “The big goal for me is to get a job that I’m passionate about—something that makes me happy, drives me creatively and where I can make money. Something that makes me excited to go to work every day.”

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Aspiring filmmaker and CU ��ý�� senior Francesca Hiatt’s short film, Cherry Yogurt, relies on subtlety to touch on grief and support, viewed through children’s eyes.

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We still need a bigger boat

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 17:02:38 +0000

We still need a bigger boat Rachel Sauer Tue, 06/17/2025 - 11:02

Rachel Sauer

Fifty years after Jaws made swimmers flee the ocean, CU ��ý�� cinema scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz explains how the 1975 summer hit endures as a classic

On June 19, 1975, it wasn’t such a terrible thing to feel something brush your leg while frolicking in the ocean. It was startling, sure—humans’ relationship with the ocean has long harbored a certain element of fear, says ��ý�� Professor Andrew Martin—but the rational mind could more quickly acknowledge that it was probably seaweed.

That changed the following day, when a film by a young director named Steven Spielberg opened on screens across the United States. On June 20, 1975, to feel something brush your leg in the ocean was to immediately think, “SHARK!”

Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, a CU ��ý�� professor of cinema studies and moving image arts, regularly teaches Jaws in Introduction to Cinema Studies.

Are sharks really as scary as their reputation?

In the 50 years since Jaws made people flee the water for fear of sharks, the film has become widely recognized as a cinematic landmark.

“Jaws is a movie I teach regularly in Introduction to Cinema Studies—yes, it’s that important,” says Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, a CU ��ý�� professor of cinema studies and moving image arts, adding that Jaws also is an important case study for misconceptions, including the evolution and de-evolution, of the term “blockbuster.”

A disaster-horror movie

The cinematic landscape in which Jaws arrived was one of greater daring and a transition away from the focus on producers in the classical Hollywood era to a focus on a new cohort of directors—“mostly men, mostly white,” Acevedo-Muñoz acknowledges—who studied cinema in college and were greatly influenced by the French New Wave.

“With the collapse of the Hollywood studio system, suddenly there’s more opportunity for creativity, for edgy content,” he says. “In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, you have some movies that really were trailblazers in what’s unofficially called the American New Wave. Bonnie and Clyde, 1967, comes to mind—nobody had seen that kind of romanticization of violence and graphic violence before.”

Young directors like Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were more in touch with the counterculture of the time, and old-guard producers, recognizing these young mavericks might be lucrative, green-lit projects like The Godfather, Mean Streets and Jaws, Acevedo-Muñoz says.

“There’s incentive to be risky in that juncture of the ‘60s to the ‘70s,” he notes. “Then to that context you add the economic crisis of the early 1970s, the recession and unemployment, plus the end of the Vietnam War, heads are getting hot and people are angry.

Creating doom in two simple notes

It’s possible for a universe of dread to exist between two notes: duu-DU … duu-DU

Just two notes, played with increasing urgency and speed, let moviegoers know that a shark is coming, and fast.

An element of the genius of John Williams’ Oscar-winning score for the film “Jaws,” released 50 years ago Friday, is how much it conveys in just those iconic two notes.

“Williams layers melodic tension in these notes with an increasing rhythmic motion—he accelerates the speed in which we hear the notes, and he accelerates their frequency,” says Michael Sy Uy, a CU ��ý�� associate professor of musicology and director of the American Music Research Center. “When you combine that with the emotions attached to the fear, anxiety and dread of being attacked by a shark, then we start to feel how this music is living with and entering our ears, and it makes us feel actual anxiety or dread.”

The two notes of duu-DU are separated by the closest interval in Western musical notation that our ears are trained and socialized to hear, he adds—a half step—that, when played in succession, can help listeners feel a sense of melodic tension.

In the case of the “Jaws” soundtrack, it can help listeners feel a deep dread. In fact, some scholars argue that “Jaws” would not be the cinematic landmark it is without John Williams’ score.

“It’s hard to imagine movies today and over the past five decades without their soundtracks,” Uy says. “We make music a part of the storytelling because music can add an extra layer of meaning. It can contradict what is happening in a scene between actors, or it can validate what they’re saying. Music can tell the story even when words don’t.”

Learn more about CU ��ý��'s film and television soundtrack connections in the American Music Research Center's Dave Grusin collection. Grusin is a Grammy-winning composer, contemporary of John Williams and CU ��ý�� alumnus.

“The crises of the 1970s are one of the reasons why we have the flourishing of the disaster film at that time. I would point first to The Poseidon Adventure, which is the best of them all, and The Towering Inferno, Earthquake. And to a certain extent, Jaws is a hybrid of the classic horror monster movie and the 1970s disaster movie.”

The dire economic background of the early 1970s was important to Jaws and other disaster films, Acevedo-Muñoz says, because “a disaster movie, like a horror movie, tells us we are going through a really rough time, but if we all work together and we make a few sacrifices, we’re going to get out of this OK. If we follow the lead of Paul Newman or Steve McQueen or Gene Hackman, we’ll eventually get out of this all right.”

Driving the buzz

Jaws is often called the original summer blockbuster, but relentless repetition of this idea does not make it true, Acevedo-Muñoz says: “There’s no one movie we can point to as the original summer blockbuster.”

In fact, he adds, the term “blockbuster” really refers to the end of a classic Hollywood distribution and exhibition practice called block booking: If theaters wanted to show big-draw feature films, they also had to book smaller, cheaper, shorter films that came to be known as “B movies," which "were made quickly by 'B units' that often reused sets or even costumes from the big movies to cut costs. But scholarship on B movies has argued that because the studios weren’t paying too much attention to those units, some of the B movies were rather edgy and interesting."

Block booking meant that the producers and distributors controlled a lot of what was in exhibition venues, "but there were occasionally movies that may have broken that pattern, and those were in some ways the original blockbusters—as in busting the block of block booking practice," he says.

While Jaws did break box-office records of the time, it’s also noteworthy in cinema history as one of the first miracles of marketing, he says. It was based on a mega-bestselling book by Peter Benchley, one that was optioned for film while still in galleys, and the film marketing piggy-backed on the name recognition of the book.

Further, Jaws was one of the first films to intentionally create buzz as part of the overall publicity and marketing plan, including strategically leaked tidbits from the film’s set on Martha’s Vineyard.

On its June 20, 1975, opening day, Jaws was one of the most prominent films to benefit from a practice called “front loading,” which meant making more prints of the film and showing it in as many theaters as possible, rather than the previous practice of rolling openings from largest to smallest markets.

“The marketing and distribution team of Universal Pictures also decided to take a front-loading approach with Jaws, so that it was playing everywhere,” Acevedo-Muñoz says. “Or almost everywhere. It still took months to get to my hometown, but we knew it was coming, and that anticipation was building.

“So, Jaws is important because it was this consolidation of these different practices of marketing, creating buzz, creating anticipation, creating tie-ins—it put all these things in one place that were practices that had been around before the summer of ’75 but afterwards became the model.”

As for the film’s effect on moviegoers and their summer vacation plans? “I know a lot of people,” Acevedo-Muñoz says, “who refused to go swimming after they saw Jaws.”

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Fifty years after Jaws made swimmers flee the ocean, CU ��ý�� cinema scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz explains how the 1975 summer hit endures as a classic.

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Alum thinks about crime the write way

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:01:33 +0000

Alum thinks about crime the write way Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/20/2025 - 18:01

Doug McPherson

What happens when a freshly minted film studies graduate heads out into the world with no particular plan? How A&S alum Patrick Hoffman went from taxi driver to private investigator to successful author

Back in 1998, Patrick Hoffman had just finished his degree in film studies at the ��ý�� when he decided to head back to his hometown of San Francisco with no real plan in mind for a career.

“I was very green when I came out of college,” says Hoffman. “I didn’t have much street smarts. I’d lived a pretty sheltered life.”

Author Patrick Hoffman, a 1998 CU ��ý�� film studies graduate, located his newest novel, Friends Helping Friends, in Colorado.

He ended up landing a job as a taxi driver at night and working as a private investigator during the day. “Driving cabs at night in San Francisco and investigating murder cases are very quick ways to learn about the seamier side of life.”

Those lessons in the seamy side of life informed his recently released novel Friends Helping Friends, a thriller set in Grand Junction and Denver, Colorado, that sees its main character infiltrating a white-supremacist compound on the Western Slope.

Before writing his newest novel—or any of his previous and acclaimed ones—Hoffman realized that what he was seeing in his jobs as a private investigator and cab driver might make good grist for fiction.

Easier said than done, though. Hoffman would get started, but after a day or two, his motivation would melt away.

The best writing advice Hoffman ever got came from a friend who asked him what he wanted to do with his life. “I told him I wanted to write thrillers. He asked what was stopping me. I told him that whenever I started something I felt great at first … but then on the second or third day, the inspiration would go away, and I’d feel like a complete fraud.”

Hoffman’s friend then told him that the bad feelings were actually a good sign, and that the secret was to just embrace those feelings and keep going. “I literally started my first book the very next day and everything that has followed can be traced directly back to that conversation.”

It all started in film classes

Hoffman adds that his film classes were “where it all started.” Those days, he was thinking about very basic things like story and plot. “But those were important questions, and you really get to wrestle with them when you’re studying something like film. I had great teachers, too: Jerry Aronson, Marian Keane and, of course, the legend Stan Brakhage. I also had wonderful philosophy teachers. Gary Stahl, may he rest in peace, comes to mind. The English and Humanities Departments were wonderful, too.”

Following his friend’s advice, and armed with the basics from his CU ��ý�� classes, Hoffman turned out his first novel, The White Van, set in San Francisco and about a troubled young woman wanted for bank robbery and hunted by a corrupt cop who wants the money more than justice.

CU ��ý�� alumnus Patrick Hoffman drew on his experience as a private investigator to write his new novel, Friends Helping Friends.

Hoffman is adapting that book into a movie. “Hopefully that happens,” he says.

His second novel, Every Man A Menace, was also set in San Francisco. Clean Hands, his third novel, was set in New York City, where he lives now.

And his latest novel, Friends Helping Friends, takes place in Denver and Grand Junction, Colorado. “For this one, it was time to come back home to Colorado,” he says. “There is a certain comfort in it. Also, Denver makes a great setting for a neo-western noir.”

He admits that before his last novel, he was kind of blocked for about eight months, having a hard time coming up with ideas. “One day I literally just started typing. I thought, ‘OK, there’s a woman in Denver, she’s a lawyer and she’s using steroids, and that was the start of the book. I went blindly from there. That’s how I do it, though. The tricky part is getting started.

“For me, writing fiction is 100% about overcoming self-doubt, being able to see something through to the end. The hard part is always starting the book. But then the middle and ends, of course, are hard, too.”

Part of Friends Helping Friends takes place in a white-supremacist compound. To understand that arena, Hoffman says his 20 years working as a private investigator (he still does it) and handling many murder cases helped.

“So, all of that, of course, informs the fiction. But also, I’ll just Google around and look for federal cases.” And he searches public records for indictments. “I love talking to journalists, too. My wife is a journalist, so she gives me introductions to her friends and colleagues, and I force them to answer all my questions.”

Up next for Hoffman is another book—this one set in ��ý��, a place he’s now reminded of regularly when riding the subway in New York.

“It’s been amazing to see Coach Prime make CU trendy. I see people wearing CU Buffalo jerseys and jackets. I’m just like wow! It’s amazing. Go Buffs!”

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Where is today's cool hand Luke?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:08:48 +0000

Where is today's cool hand Luke? Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/24/2025 - 13:08

Rachel Sauer

In honor of what would have been Paul Newman’s 100th birthday, CU ��ý�� film historian Clark Farmer considers whether there still are movie stars

Movies did not invent stars—there were stars of theater, opera and vaudeville well before moving pictures—but movies made them bigger and more brilliant; in some cases, edging close to the incandescence of a supernova.

Consider a star like Paul Newman, who would have turned 100 Jan. 26. Despite being an Oscar winner for The Color of Money in 1987 and a nine-time acting Oscar nominee, he was known perhaps even more for the radiance of his stardom—the ineffable cool, the certain reserve, the style, the beauty, the transcendent charisma that dared viewers to look away.

“There are still actors we like and want to go see, so I’d say there still are movie stars but the idea of them has changed,” says CU ��ý�� film historian Clark Farmer, a teaching assistant professor of cinema studies and moving image arts.

Even now, 17 years after his death in 2008 at age 83, fans still sigh, “They just don’t make stars like that anymore.”

In fact, if you believe the click-bait headlines that show up in newsfeeds every couple of months, the age of the movie star is over. In a 2022 interview with Allure magazine, movie star Jennifer Aniston opined, “There are no more movie stars.” And in Vanity Fair’s 2023 Hollywood issue, star Ana De Armas noted, “The concept of a movie star is someone untouchable you only see onscreen. That mystery is gone.”

Are there really no more movie stars?

“There are still actors we like and want to go see, so I’d say there still are movie stars, but the idea of them has changed,” says ��ý�� film historian Clark Farmer, a teaching assistant professor of cinema studies and moving image arts. “I think that sense of larger-than-life glamor is gone, that sense of amazement at seeing these people on the screen.

“When we think of what could be called the golden age of movie stars, they had this aristocratic sheen to them. They carried themselves so well, they were well-dressed, they were larger than life, the channels where we could see them and learn about them were a lot more limited. Today, we see stars a lot more and they’re maybe a little less shiny and not as special in that way.”

Stars are born

In the earliest days of film, around the turn of the 20th century, there weren’t enough regular film performers to be widely recognized by viewers, Farmer says. People were drawn to the movie theater by the novelty of moving pictures rather than to see particular actors. However, around 1908 and with the advent of nickelodeons, film started taking off as a big business and actors started signing longer-term contracts. This meant that audiences started seeing the same faces over and over again.

By 1909, exhibitors were reporting that audiences would ask for the names of actors and would also write to the nascent film companies asking for photographs. “Back then you didn’t have credits, you only had the title of the film and the name of the production company, so people started attaching names to these stars—for example, Maurice Costello was called Dimples.”

As the movie business grew into an industry, and as actors were named in a film’s credits, movie stars were born. In 1915, Charlie Chaplin conflagrated across screens not just in the United States, but internationally, Farmer says.

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, seen here in a publicity photo for Giant, were two of Hollywood's biggest stars during the studio period. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

“You could say that what was produced in Hollywood was movies, but studios were also actively trying to produce stars—stars were as much a product as the movies,” Farmer says. “There was always this question of could they take someone who had some talent or some looks or skills like dancing or singing, and would they only rise to the level of extra, would they play secondary characters, or would they become stars? Would people see their name and want to come see the movies they were in?

“Stars have this ineffable quality, and studios would have hundreds of people whose job it was just to make stars; there was a whole machinery in place.”

During Hollywood’s studio period, actors would sign contracts with a studio and the studio’s star machinery would get to work: choosing names for the would-be stars, creating fake biographies, planting stories in fan magazines, arranging for dental work and wardrobes and homes and sometimes even relationships.

For as long as it has existed, the creation and existence of movie stars has drawn criticism from those who argue that being a good star is not the same as being a good actor, and that stars who are bigger than the films in which they appear overshadow all the elements of artistry that align in cinema—from screenwriting to cinematography to acting and directing.

“There’s always been a mixture of people who consider film primarily a business and those who consider it primarily art,” Farmer explains. “Film has always been a place for a lot of really creative individuals who weren’t necessarily thinking of the bottom line and wanted to do something more artistic, but they depended on those who thought about it as a business. Those are the people asking, ‘How do you bring people in to see a movie?’ Part of that can be a recognizable genre, it could be a recognizable property—like a familiar book—but then stars are one more hook for an audience member to say, ‘I like Katherine Hepburn, I like her as an actress and as a person, and she’s in this movie so I’ll give it a try.'

“One of the biggest questions in the film industry is, ‘How can we guarantee people will come see our movie?’ And the gamble has been that stardom is part of that equation.”

Evolving stardom

As for the argument that movie stars cheapen the integrity of cinema, “I don’t think they’re bad for film as an art form,” Farmer says. “Audiences have this idea of who this person is as a star or as a performer, which can make storytelling a lot easier. You have this sense of, ‘I know who Humphrey Bogart is and the roles he plays,’ so a lot of the work of creating the character has already been done. You can have a director saying, ‘I want this person in the role because people’s understanding of who this person is will help create the film.’ You can have Frank Capra cast Jimmy Stewart and the work of establishing the character as a lovable nice guy is already done.”

"Faye Dunaway wears a beret in Bonnie and Clyde and beret sales go off the charts. People went to the movies, and they recognized and admired these stars," says CU ��ý�� film historian Clark Farmer. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

As the movie industry evolved away from the studio system, the role of the movie star—and what audiences wanted and expected from stars—also began changing, Farmer says. While there was still room for stars who were good at doing the thing for which they were known—the John Waynes who were excellent at playing the John Wayne character—there also were “chameleon” stars who disappeared into roles and wanted to be known for their talent rather than their hair and makeup.

As film evolved, so did technology and culture, Farmer says. With each year, there were more channels, more outlets, more media to dilute what had been a monoculture of film.

“Before everyone had cable and streaming services and social media, movies were much more of a cultural touchpoint,” Farmer says. “People wanted to dress like Humphrey Bogart or Audrey Hepburn. Faye Dunaway wears a beret in Bonnie and Clyde and beret sales go off the charts. People went to the movies, and they recognized and admired these stars.

“One of the markers of stardom is can an individual actor carry a mediocre film to financial success? Another would be, are there people who have an almost obsessive interest in these stars, to the point of modeling themselves after star? Stars tap into a sort of zeitgeist.”

However, the growth and fragmentation of media have meant that viewers have more avenues to see films and more ways to access stars. Even when A-listers’ social media are clearly curated by an army of publicists and stylists, fans can access them at any time and feel like they know them, Farmer says.

“Movies are just less central to people’s lives than they used to be,” Farmer says. “There are other forms of media that people spend their time on, to the point that younger audiences are as likely to know someone who starred in a movie as someone who’s a social media influencer. But that’s just a different kind of stardom.

“I think the film industry really wants movie stars, but I’m not sure viewers necessarily care all that much. Again, it’s always the question of, if you’re spending millions and millions of dollars on a product and you want a return on that, how can you achieve that without making another superhero movie or another horror movie? The industry wants movie stars and audiences just want to be entertained.”

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In honor of what would have been Paul Newman’s 100th birthday, CU ��ý�� film historian Clark Farmer considers whether there still are movie stars.

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Anything but a bomb, 'Dr. Strangelove' turns 60

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Anything but a bomb, 'Dr. Strangelove' turns 60 Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/27/2024 - 00:00

Bradley Worrell

CU ��ý��’s chair of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts shares insights on Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece ‘doomsday sex comedy’ and why the film is more relevant than ever

In early 1964, U.S. Air Force Gen. Jack D. Ripper ordered his bomber group to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from communist subversion.

Fortunately for the state of U.S.-Soviet relations at the time—and for the planet—the surprise attack was entirely fictional, serving as the plot for the movie Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, director Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy that satirized Cold War tensions while also offering up a heaping dose of sexual innuendo.

In the years since its debut, Dr. Strangelove has joined the pantheon of Kubrick’s great films, which also includes classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and The Shining.

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, chair of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at CU ��ý��, who has been teaching a course on Stanley Kubrick as a filmmaker for more than 20 years.

With this year marking the 60th anniversary of Dr. Strangelove’s debut, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine recently asked Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, chair of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at ��ý��, who has been teaching a course on Stanley Kubrick as a filmmaker for more than 20 years, for insights into the making of the film and why it has retained its cultural relevance. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Kubrick made a number of memorable films. How much time during your course do you devote to Dr. Strangelove?

Acevedo-Muñoz: There’s an advantage in that Stanley Kubrick only finished 13 movies and a normal semester is 14 weeks—and since this isn’t a comparative course, it’s more like the history of a filmmaker’s aesthetics and history of a filmmaker’s concerns—then we’re able to talk about all the movies he did.

And, unlike my Alfred Hitchcock course—Hitchcock completed 52 films, so to curate 14 out of 52, you have to start cutting here, cutting there, and being very jealous about the period that you’re going to cover—with Kubrick, we don’t have that problem. We start the first week of classes by watching his two shorts that we have access to and his first feature film, which is only 67 minutes.

And we talk about all the Kubrick movies all the time. I make reference to some visual moment in his early movies where I say, ‘Look at this here, we’re going to see this again in Dr. Strangelove, and we’re going to see this again in 2001: A Space Odyssey.’

Question: How you would describe Dr. Strangelove, if you had to describe it succinctly for people?

Acevedo-Muñoz: Well, I would make a very simple amendment to how Kubrick described this movie. We refer to it as a doomsday comedy, with the irony implied in that label. But I would add the word ‘sex’ to that label. So, it’s a doomsday sex comedy.

As the observant or the dirty minded will quickly realize, the movie is full of sexual innuendo and most of the punch lines in the movie are some kind of sexual innuendo.

It’s a doomsday comedy, but it’s really a doomsday sex comedy all the way up to and including the very explosive, orgasmic series of nuclear events at the end, with the irony of the lyrics, ‘We’ll meet again. Don’t know where. Don’t know when.’

When we saw the movie as kids, we were laughing at Peter Sellers doing Peter Sellers things—the body comedy, the farcical situations and such. But then seeing the movie again as an adult, there comes a moment where you realize, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I see now all these airplanes penetrating each other. That’s sexual innuendo. And the way Dr. Strangelove’s right arm keeps raising up in salute, that’s sexual innuendo.’

A working title of this movie was, I sh-t you not, The Rise of Dr. Strangelove. I’m not making this up.

Question: Besides the political and satire, what are other aspects of the film that you share with your class?

Acevedo-Muñoz: We spend a lot of time talking about two things in particular: the production design—what the sets look like and what the function of the of the movie sets are—and special effects.

A scene from the war room in Dr. Strangelove (Photo: Columbia Pictures Corporation)

In the case of Dr. Strangelove, when we talk about the production design, we’re talking particularly about the war room. There are stories, which may or may not be apocryphal, of the CIA and intelligence agencies being concerned about how Kubrick and his production designer, a man named Ken Adam, had come up with the set design, because it looked like the real thing.

The same goes for the interior of the bomber, which again, Ken Adam, the production designer, he’d been a Royal Air Force pilot during the war, so he knew what a bomber looked like. But then he had to sort of bring that up to speed 20 years, to the mid-1960s.

It’s really fantastic that Kubrick would put so much emphasis in production design of spaces that nobody has ever seen. Or nobody who isn’t part of a very special, small elite.

Do you know what the interior of the war room looks like? No, nobody does. So, how did Kubrick and Adam come up with this part? It’s one of the truly amazing things.

An important part of the movie is that all the action is contained within these confined spaces that are treated with this deadpan realism. And they have to be functional spaces. In fact, the lights that you see in the war room are actually doing the lighting of the set. That’s extremely rare.

The other thing I mentioned is special effects. Those might look primitive to contemporary audiences, but they are decidedly state of the art. Consider what we see with the B-52 in flight and the explosions.

With Dr. Strangelove, a significant part of the budget went to production design and special effects.

Question: Beyond the production elements, are there other notable or distinguishable elements about this film?

Acevedo-Muñoz: Few people realize that Dr. Strangelove takes places in real time. We have a phone call at the opening of the movie and the doomsday machine goes off at the end of the movie, and in between that we have about 89 minutes of action in which at no point is there a discernible time ellipsis.

Real time is a very hard thing to pull off in cinema. Kubrick was not the first one to do it, but this was his only real-time movie. It is admirable how compact this movie is kept in terms of its narrative structure.

In terms of story structure, that’s a very difficult thing to do, and this is a function of both the writing and editing to maintain a movie in real time. You have to write it that way, and then you have to edit it in a way that these transitions are seamless. It’s a major reason why Dr. Strangelove got an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

I should mention the movie is based on a book, Red Alert, which is dead serious. Kubrick determined that the scenario was so demented that the only way to do the film was to make it a comedy.

Director Stanely Kubrick on the set of Dr. Strangelove in 1963 (Photo: Columbia Pictures Corporation)

To do that, he hired American humorist Terry Southern, who is really the person who shares most of the screenwriting credit with Kubrick. Southern was a humorist and a playwright and a screenwriter, and when Kubrick needed a funny person to come up with this script and make it absurd and yet believable, he came to Terry Southern, so I always emphasize that connection with my students. Coincidentally, Terry Southern’s son, Nile, is a long-time ��ý�� resident.

Question: How was Dr. Strangelove was received by the film critics and by the greater audiences when it debuted in 1964? Have perceptions of the movie changed over time?

Acevedo-Muñoz: The movie was a huge hit, commercially. Some critics may have been baffled by it, but the reviews were largely positive. The movie got four Oscar nominations, which was quite a feat at that time. It was Kubrick’s first nomination for best director, along with best screenplay. The movie was nominated for best picture, and it was nominated for best actor for Peter Sellers, of course.

In the end, Kubrick made some decisions where things could have gone differently. The movie originally was going to end with a big pie fight. They tried the ending and it kind of fell flat. So, he dropped that and gave us that ending that was sort of improvised with the orgasmic series of nuclear explosions. …

Today, Dr. Strangelove is regarded as a classic.

Question: How do you view Dr. Strangelove in relation to Fail Safe, which was released after Dr. Strangelove and which offered a serious take on the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union?

Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz:Fail Safe was perfectly well-received when it came out. It was made by Sidney Lumet, a respected director, and starred Henry Fonda playing the president of the United States. …

The original movie poster for Dr. Strangelove (Photo: Columbia Pictures Corporation)

It’s just that not every movie—even every good movie—is destined to be a classic. We don’t know if a movie is destined to be a classic until some time has gone by. But today, you didn’t call me to talk about Fail Safe, did you? We’re talking about Dr. Strangelove.

And Dr. Strangelove still gets shown on Turner Classic Movies and sometimes in movie theaters, and people still get up off of their asses and go to see it. That staying power is attributable to a lot of different elements, which is why it’s never possible to predict if a movie will become a classic.

Kubrick also made Barry Lyndon, which is the most gorgeous movie ever made. Period. And this was the movie that Kubrick wanted to be remembered for. And do you know what happened? Nobody remembers it. So, you never know.

Question: Do you think Dr. Strangelove was Kubrick’s most political movie?

Acevedo-Muñoz: Kubrick always said he wasn’t a political filmmaker, but you only have to look at his movies to realize that they are, in fact, political movies. … And I should add any movie made in the 1960s with a Cold War setting and the nuclear race as part of its environment is, by definition, political.

The fact that Kubrick and Terry Southern have both the president of the United States and the premier of the Soviet Union come out looking like complete morons is a political statement. And having the military establishment filled with this toxic masculinity is a political statement, which Kubrick went on to do even more transparently in Full Metal Jacket. …

Or look at the Slim Pickens character, Major King Kong, who rides the bomb between his legs like a bull, waving his 10-gallon Stetson hat as his cowboy persona takes over. That’s a political statement.

Question: The Cold War officially ended in the 1990s. Do you think Dr. Strangelove has the same relevance today that it did back in the day?

Acevedo-Muñoz: The cold war is over? We are having more tensions with Russia today than we have had in 30 or 40 years, since the 1980s.

Frankly, as long as there are lunatics with their finger on the nuclear button—and I’m thinking here of Kim Jong Un, I’m thinking of Vladimir Putin and I’m thinking of Donald Trump—this movie will be as relevant as ever, if not more. I have no qualms making a comment like that.

Precisely because it’s comedy, it also has that kind of lasting power. As the great American philosopher Homer Simpson says, ‘It’s funny because it’s true.’

It’s why we take movies seriously—and it’s why we’re celebrating 60 years of Dr. Strangelove. Hopefully at 70 years we’ll be celebrating it as a cautionary tale rather than as a prophecy.

Top image: Peter Sellers playing the titular Dr. Strangelove (Photo: Columbia Pictures Corporation)

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CU ��ý��’s chair of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts shares insights on Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece ‘doomsday sex comedy’ and why the film is more relevant than ever.

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Say hello to my little friend, the gangster movie

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:16:36 +0000

Say hello to my little friend, the gangster movie Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/26/2024 - 13:16

Bradley Worrell

In honor of what would have been Al Capone’s 125th birthday, CU ��ý�� cinema researcher Tiel Lundy explains the enduring popularity of gangsters in film and the American imagination

What is the most quintessentially American genre of film?

Some might argue for the Western, but there also is a case to be made for the gangster film, says Tiel Lundy, associate teaching professor with the ��ý�� Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts. Lundy should know—she’s been teaching a class on the portrayal of gangsters in film for almost 10 years as part of the Libby Hall Residential Academic Program (RAP), recently rebranded as Creative Minds RAP at Libby.

Movies about gangsters date back to the early days of modern motion pictures, and hundreds of them have been made over the years. In fact, following the success of the first recognized gangster film, Little Caesar, in 1931, starring Edward G. Robinson as a small-town mobster rising through the ranks of organized crime, Hollywood made more than 50 gangster movies the following year.

Tiel Lundy, a CU ��ý�� associate teaching professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, teaches a course on the portrayal of gangsters in film.

With this month marking the 125th anniversary of the birth of America’s most famous gangster, Al Capone, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine asked Lundy about the continued popularity of the genre, how it has evolved over the years and what makes for a good gangster movie. Her responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Given how many gangster films have been made, it seems fair to say the genre is popular with Hollywood producers.

Lundy: It is. And I think that, much like the genre of the Western, there’s always a question about gangster movies amongst film scholars: Does it continue to be viable, or has it pretty much reached its terminus? But just when people want to pronounce it dead, it finds its next incarnation.

I have some thoughts as to why it remains a really enduring genre. From its beginnings, the gangster film is an American cinematic invention. Other national cinemas have adopted it and riffed on it, but it is an American genre, and the genre itself really was contemporaneous to the history of gangsters in America, like Al Capone. I think that’s part of what explains its continuing appeal—that it’s rooted in actual history. I also think the gangster, as this mythic figure, is kind of the embodiment of this American identity.

Question: It seems like early gangster films focused on Italian-American or maybe Irish-America mobsters, but later films have broadened to represent greater American diversity.

Lundy: You’re definitely touching on something that is core to the genre. The genre is about American identity. And you can’t extricate race and ethnicity from American identity just because of the sort of unique nature and way this country has come together and continues to evolve. So, early films from the 1930s reflected the immigration patterns of the day. If you look at the late 19th and early 20th century, many of the immigrants were coming from southern Europe, and from Italy in particular.

As our questions about American identity become refined and maybe more focused on second- and third-generation Americans, I think they start to become less concerned with immigration status and ethnicity and really more at the intersection of race and class. I’m thinking now about Boyz n the Hood, for example. That is not the classic rise-and-fall story. That is a story that condemns racism and the failures of democracy and capitalism.

If you look at other films that are slightly more recent, for instance, The Departed, they do look at ethnicity, but I think their focus is really more on capitalism.

Question: Do you have any thoughts on Hollywood’s treatment of perhaps America’s most famous gangster, Al Capone?

Lundy: The obvious two films that we would look to would be the original Scarface, by Howard Hawks, and then the remake from 1983 from director Brian De Palma. And they’re remarkably similar in the way that they depict Capone, or in this case, ‘Tony.’ Tony Camonte is the name of the character in the original movie and Tony Montana is the remake with actor Al Pacino's character.

What I think they share between the two depictions, as well as the actual Al Capone, is that this man who is very aware of his presentation publicly and who really has worked to craft a kind of persona and public image of himself. And that’s my understanding as to part of why Al Capone has lived on in our memory, because he was a very good kind of social promoter—almost like an influencer of his day. The gangster’s identity has everything to do with how the public sees him, so he goes to great lengths to create this kind of mythic, larger-than-life impression in the press and popular culture.

John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz n the Hood condemned racism and the failures of democracy and capitalism. (Photo: Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.)

Question: Movie-wise, it seems like the American gangster has gone through several incarnations over the years.

Lundy: You’re right, there are definitely different iterations. And those iterations are a function of the release date of the film as well as when it’s set. They also are very much impacted by censorship.

If you look at the bulk of what we call the classic cycle of gangster films—those films that come out from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s and early ’50s—the content of those and the depiction of the gangsters was strongly enforced by the Hollywood Production Code.

The writers and directors were always somewhat hamstrung by the demands of the Hayes Office and the Production Code. If you were to try and really abide by the letter of the law, you couldn’t have a gangster that was flouting the law or remained sympathetic … because then you are creating a figure who doesn’t exemplify proper values. But, of course, that also makes for a really boring gangster.

So, the directors were always trying to find a way to kind of thread that needle to create a gangster who was charismatic, and was interesting, and who satisfied audiences’ craving for criminality and ruthlessness—but at the same time, that they could get it past the censors and release their films.

So, up until Bonnie and Clyde from 1967, movies were very much informed by the restrictions of the Production Code. By the time you get to Bonnie and Clyde, you have a different set of parameters, and a little bit more latitude as far as how to depict these gangsters.

Question: Prior to the Production Code, it seems like Hollywood romanticized gangsters a bit, but after the code Hollywood turns its attention to romanticizing law enforcement, correct?

Lundy: During the Great Depression, there was a feeling of disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction with American institutions, and that’s really embedded in gangster films at the time. They (gangsters) are there to challenge those institutions like banks and other institutions that were seen as utter failures that had let people down.

So, in the 1930s the gangster was most certainly romanticized. Those gangsters had qualities that made them more sympathetic to audiences and they had certain vulnerabilities.

Edward G. Robinson starred in Little Caesar, considered the first gangster film. (Photo: Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive)

Once we get into the official Production Code era, after 1934 until about the end of the 1940s, that 15-year or so period is when the Production Code was enforced most vigorously, and as a consequence the gangsters became less romanticized because the code was leaning hard on the studios to make gangsters less sympathetic and make law enforcement more sympathetic.

Question: With the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code, it seems like movie gangsters were predestined to end up dead or in prison by the end of the movie.

Lundy: Exactly. You could have a gangster committing crimes, but ultimately, he had to be punished for them. So, that’s why you have movies like Little Caesar and Scarface and Public Enemy, where the gangster always goes out in a hail of bullets. He’s effectively ‘punished’ by dying. But it’s a very dramatic, spectacular death that satisfied audiences craving for that kind of action and violence and drama.

Question: Besides being focused on gangsters, are there some general unifying themes in this genre of film?

Lundy: What those movies—especially The Godfather and Scarface—have in common is this ongoing central theme about social mobility in America and the kind of tension between the gangster wanting to move up the social ladder and acquire a certain kind of class respectability—but at the same time never wanting to really fulfill that social contract. He wants to get to the top, but he wants to find the shortcut way to get there.

I think that’s common to some extent across American gangster films. They express that tension between wanting to be accepted in the highest levels, maybe even have political capital, but be able to commit crimes with impunity.

I’ve been thinking more about this recently, and I think that explains why this genre continues to remain vital: It’s pretty hard-baked into the American consciousness, that tension between being a renegade and also wanting to do your part so that we can have a functioning society.

Question: With so many gangster films to choose from, how do you narrow down the list of ones you will focus on in class to a manageable level?

Marlon Brando (right) starred as Don Vito Corleone, the titular godfather, in The Godfather. (Photo: Paramount)

Lundy: Basically, that’s what goes into shaping the syllabus. What can we do in about 14 weeks? If this is the only time that a student is going to watch gangster films, what are the ones they absolutely must see? What are the films that express those key turning points in the genre that express the central conflicts and themes?

I always know where the starting point is going to be. It's going to be the first film, Little Caesar. I don’t always know what the last, most recent film is, because I always move chronologically. But there are always going to be some films that that will never go away, like The Godfather. I would be drawn and quartered by my colleagues if I taught a gangster class and left out The Godfather.

Question: Is there anything specific that you think makes for a good gangster film?

Lundy: Beyond the technical effects, I think what the most endearing films have in common is the scope of the story. These are master narratives with sweeping stories that cover decades in a family’s story. I think that, in part, that’s why The Godfather trilogy is such a favorite.

Movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas offer really broad, sweeping narratives. I think why they work so well and are so appealing is that, with that kind of scope, they can really engage in questions about America and American identity that is always going to be core to the gangster genre. It’s always going to be interrogating Americanism and the promises of America.

Maybe my answer is not so much what makes for a ‘good’ gangster film, but what makes for the most enduring and popular gangster films for American audiences.

Top image: scene from Howard Hawks' 1932 film Scarface, starring Paul Muni (center) as Tony Camonte. (Photo: Bettman Archive)

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In honor of what would have been Al Capone’s 125th birthday, CU ��ý�� cinema researcher Tiel Lundy explains the enduring popularity of gangsters in film and the American imagination.

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