Colleges offer students a chance to launch Hollywood careers

Peter Schink of Emerson College leads a film editing course in Burbank. Emerson pioneered the LA semester and plans to construct classrooms, dorms, and production facilities in Hollywood. (LIZ O. BAYLEN/LOS ANGELES TIMES)

LOS ANGELES - Forget about Paris and a semester at the Sorbonne. Who needs to study in Florence or struggle with Mandarin in Beijing?

Instead, consider the allure of Burbank. Think about Los Angeles' Wilshire district and the chance to speak like a Hollywood agent.

A growing number of US colleges and universities, mostly from the East Coast and the South, are making something close to that pitch for what are, in effect, study-abroad programs in Los Angeles. And while programs in Italy often emphasize art and those in Britain literature, the focus here is on the entertainment industry and internships that might launch a Hollywood career.

Emerson College in Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Boston University, and Ithaca College in New York are among those that sponsor year-round or summer programs that bring students to Southern California. Others include Columbia College in Chicago, Temple University in Philadelphia, Elon University in North Carolina, and a national consortium of Christian colleges.

The colleges enroll their students in classes on screenwriting, acting, and agentry, and get them into apprenticeships - mostly unpaid - in television, film, music or advertising.

In many cases, the programs are modeled after those for overseas studies. They take out-of-town students to a strange, interesting and potentially rewarding place far from home for education and fun. And like those others, the Los Angeles programs encourage students to mix with the locals, but usually require them to live in university-affiliated housing.

"We joke that we are in a foreign country here," said Bill Linsman, who heads Boston University's six-year-old Los Angeles Internship Program from an office on Wilshire Boulevard. Many of the students are from the East Coast, and Los Angeles' entertainment business "is a foreign culture" to them, he said.

The biggest lesson for the 67 Boston University students enrolled in the program this fall is that show business is serious business, he said.

"When you look at the surface of Hollywood, you see sunglasses and blue jeans and tans and sitting around the pool. But dig deeper and you see it's dollars and cents."

Generally, more than half of the students stay in the area if it is their final semester before graduation, or return later, administrators report. They join what the colleges tout as large networks of alumni already in the entertainment field.

"It really does immerse you immediately into what's going on here and gives you a real sense of how to break into the industry," said Jeff Bibeau, an Ithaca College senior. "It would be silly of me to study four years of communications in upstate New York, cut off from the rest of the world."

A television and radio-studies major from Massachusetts, Bibeau is juggling internships with the "Brothers and Sisters" television series and at a movie production house. He does clerical work, fetches coffee, reads scripts and offers opinions in story meetings.

Los Angeles semesters, which typically cost about the same as a term at the home campus, aside from transportation extras, help students make informed decisions about their futures, explained Stephen Tropiano, director of Ithaca's program, which started in 1994.

Emerson College, the Los Angeles semester pioneer, paid $12 million in April for a Sunset Boulevard parking lot in Hollywood where it plans to construct classrooms, dormitories and production facilities. David Rosen, Emerson's vice president for public affairs, said the campus would show that after 20 years in Los Angeles, "we were there to stay."

Evan Kaufman, a senior from Connecticut in Emerson's program, says the Los Angeles semester is a good way to "dip your toe in the water" of the entertainment industry without the risk of going it alone.

It's possible to work on independent movies in Boston, Kaufman said. "But if you want to write the next `Iron Man,' you have to be here." He might return to Hollywood next year, he said.

And if things don't work out: "Mom and dad's basement awaits."