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Rave Reviews
Go behind the camera with Frank Patterson, Baylor grad and dean of one of America’s major film schools
By Lisa Asher
Photograph by FSU Photo Lab / Bill Lax
When you think of the movie business, a few notable cities come to
mind—Los Angeles, New York, even Sundance, Utah. But don’t forget
Tallahassee, Florida. It might be a secret to the movie-going public,
but industry insiders know that Florida State University’s College of
Motion Picture, Television, and Recording Arts—located in Tallahassee
and led by a Baylor graduate—has become the training ground for some of
the best and brightest behind-the-scenes folks.
Graduates of the Film School, as it’s most commonly known, include the coproducer of Dreamgirls; the writer of
 Disney’s Chicken Little; and the creator of The Soloist,
a Robert Downey Jr. film opening in April. Alumni have garnered five
Academy Awards in the last four years and twenty-four Emmys in
seventeen years.
But the ultimate man-behind-the-scenes is the Film School’s dean since
2003, Frank Patterson ’85, MA ’87, who was singled out by the Hollywood Reporter
in 2008 as one of the twelve most influential film school professors in
the United States. In 2007, Florida Governor Charlie Christ honored
Patterson for “inspiring a generation of Florida filmmakers.”
A noted filmmaker and director in his own right, Patterson says he
models his teaching style and, in fact, his whole career on two Baylor
professors who he says helped turn his life around and prepared him for
the upper echelons of the film industry. It’s a heady place to be, but
Patterson, who has a wife and two children, is careful to keep his feet
firmly planted in reality.
BAYLOR LINE: Florida State’s Film
School is known for a more holistic course of study that emphasizes not
just success in the film world, but also in the real world. How do you
teach those kinds of values, and why is that important?
FRANK PATTERSON: When my
freshmen walk through the door, they come in thinking they’re going to
graduate with a three-picture deal and representation at CAA [Creative
Artists Agency]. And when I tell them in that first morning session
that my goal for them when they graduate is to be people who can think
critically, can speak clearly, and can write persuasively and have the
talent and skills to explore the human condition through the lens of
the camera, they kind of drop! It’s like, “Wait a minute, where’s my
three-picture deal?” It is an incredible challenge to make certain that
graduates have the depth and breadth of an education necessary to even
warrant having a place in society as a storyteller.
That’s really what we spend much of our time doing—having students
recognize that being a storyteller is a very special place in a
society. And you have to have lived and looked and observed and felt.
You have to be deep and broad. In our undergraduate program, that’s our
focus—to make sure they have the kind of education that prepares them
to be great citizens, to be open enough to recognize what’s happening
before them, and then to be capable of telling the stories that are
happening in front of them.
Our average undergrad starts at eighteen, and our average grad student
starts at twenty-eight, so these are very different young people. The
graduate students come to the program with life experiences that, of
course, our undergraduate students don’t have. For our graduate
students, we’re looking for people who are ready to jump into a very
competitive career and who have a rich background in their education
and a real dedicated history of creative endeavors.
LINE: Another unusual thing about the Film School is that you teach both the creative and business sides of the movie industry.
PATTERSON: The goal is to help
students tap into their experiences and successfully translate them
into movies for audiences. Generally speaking, our first focus is
story. What are the great narratives that need to be told? The second
focus is how can you create commerce for these narratives? We live in a
free-market society where movies are part of the motion picture
business. It’s not government-sponsored art that we’re talking about
here. We’re talking about you going out into a free-market society and
creating commerce for these stories that you feel you need to tell. We
realized pretty early on that we’d be doing our students a disservice
to not focus on helping them create commerce for their work. It’s tough
because there’s much about the movie business that I personally don’t
like.
LINE: Like what?
PATTERSON: I don’t want to
condemn an industry that I work in. I’m simply saying that we have a
lot we can work on in the industry, and I’m glad to be a part of that.
I really want the right people to use these tools. Stories in our
society are very important, and we often define ourselves, our past,
our current situation, and our hope for the future by the stories we
tell. And I want the right people telling those stories. It’s an
incredibly powerful medium that we’re talking about. I guarantee you
there’s a moment in a movie that you’ll never forget. You probably have
a few of them in movies you’ve seen. If politicians can cause change,
filmmakers can cause people to think. What a wonderful tool. But
wouldn’t it be great if we did a better job of using that tool in the
industry?
LINE: Was your goal to change the film industry when you first came to Baylor?
PATTERSON: You know, I was a
misguided youth. [Laughs] I’m not joking about that. I was a mess. I
flunked out of Baylor, I think, twice. I played in a band, and we
toured around Texas. I’d had it. I was tired of playing in awful
venues, and I knew I needed to go back to school. All my friends were
already graduating. So I met with a guy named Colonel Paul Matthews,
who was the head of a new effort on the part of the university back in
the 1980s to address recidivism. He said to me, “What do you want to
do?” I said, “I love playing the piano. I’ve played the piano all my
life.” And he said, “We have pianos down in Roxy Grove, and I’ll give
you three hours a day to play those pianos if you give me the rest of
your time.” We shook hands and made a deal.
I ended up in the communications department and had the pure blessing
to meet, right when they were starting their new program, Dr. Michael
Korpi and Dr. Corey Carbonara. Korpi believed in me, and Corey believed
in me. They believed that I could tell stories and that I was not
actually the loser I was pretty sure I was. I was at a place in my life
where I needed someone to believe in me, and they did. Those three
people at that time in my life changed my life.
LINE: So did you start making films right after graduation?
PATTERSON: I made movies I
could throw away, and I shot commercials I didn’t care about, but I had
gained all these skills at Baylor. The real lesson at Baylor, which was
about character, came to me about ten years later, when I started
making movies I actually cared about and started thinking about the
industry and its power. That’s when I started getting involved in
education and began writing the movies I cared about. And I began
teaching and working in the industry with the goal of leading for the
greater good.
LINE: Do you still write and direct films?
PATTERSON: Yes, I still have
movies in the system. It’s a dual focus between that and education. I’m
working on a screenplay right now that’s been in my life for a long
time. I stay involved in the industry on terms that I’m comfortable
with. I make movies slowly. I tend to want to tell stories about
characters that seem to overcome incredible circumstances, who maintain
who they are in spite of awful circumstances and tend to rise above
their circumstances. The last movie I directed, which was now years
ago, was a film called Confessions of a Florist.
It was a story of a woman who overcomes incredible odds to essentially
gain her freedom. It was well received critically, and it was the first
piece I think I really felt good about. I tend to gravitate toward
those kinds of peculiar and interesting characters as opposed to
classic everyman characters.
LINE: Do you keep in touch with your Baylor professors?
PATTERSON: Sure do. Dr. Korpi
is just amazing. One of Florida State’s students was picked as the best
cinematographer in the country, and people have no way of knowing this,
but Michael Korpi and Corey Carbonara had as much to do with that as I
did or my faculty here. There was new technology that the industry is
taking on right now that we needed to acquire so that my very talented
kids could get their hands on it and try it. Of course, who do I call?
I call my professors. We have this ongoing conversation about it, and I
end up choosing the technology based on the advice of my own former
professors that ends up being used for this student to win this award.
That’s the legacy that every teacher hopes they leave. It’s almost a
cliché, but that makes it no less true—you succeed when you’re making
an impact two and three and four generations away.
LINE: And you’re now the Korpi for your own students.
PATTERSON: Well, I certainly
hope I am. Korpi is a big inspiration to me, and I’m very close to my
own alums. I’m a phone call away. I have a council of ten alums in Los
Angeles who are some of the who’s who in the industry. Not only are
they industry members who are important for the success of the school,
but they’re also my close friends. I really learned how to form and
keep those relationships from Korpi.
LINE: Is that hard to do, given the number of students you teach every year?
PATTERSON: We receive between
two thousand and four thousand inquiries [about the graduate school]
every year, which we turn into eight hundred to one thousand
applications. We interview about 120 people, and we only accept thirty.
One of the reasons we can only accept thirty is that we pay for their
film productions. I can sit in a classroom and challenge you to create
unique stories. And I can tell you how a camera move influences a
dramatic moment. And I can tell you how light and color and shadow and
texture are important in terms of the tone of a movie. But nothing
brings home the learning like my being on the set with you in the field
when you are under an incredible time crunch, striving to get this one
creative moment on film before you have to wrap up for the day. That’s
really, quite honestly, the secret in the sauce—that one-on-one
instruction in the heat of the battle that really happens because we
pay for that production, where the heightened level of learning happens
with these very bright students standing beside highly accomplished
faculty members.
LINE: Do you have a dream list of projects or people with whom you’d like to work?
PATTERSON: This sounds as
cheesy as it comes, but I have the dream job. I get to identify these
wonderfully talented students and work in a program with colleagues
that I would love to take classes with. I love hanging around with my
faculty. And with the students, we’ve been very fortunate to have
success after success after success. I just have the dream job, and my
goal is just to keep this gig going—to continue to find good students,
to continue to work with really interesting and accomplished
colleagues, and to continue to make movies that are important to me.
Lisa Asher is the associate editor of the Baylor Line.
Click on Critic's Corner for a list of some of Patterson's favorite filmmakers.
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