UCLA
Nebraska director Alexander Payne earned his MFA from UCLA in 1990. The school's Department of Film, Television and Digital Media accepts just 0.75 percent of applicants.
Nebraska director Alexander Payne earned his MFA from UCLA in 1990. The school's Department of Film, Television and Digital Media accepts just 0.75 percent of applicants.
Noah director Darren Aronofsky received his MFA in directing from AFI in 1992. An impressive 81 percent of the film school's graduates currently work in the industry.
Actor Delroy Lindo, who has been nominated for Tony and SAG awards, graduated from SFSU before appearing in films such as Gone in 60 Seconds. The school's grads have earned Oscar nominations for 15 consecutive years.
Comedian and actor Denis Leary, known for co-creating and starring in FX drama Rescue Me, graduated from Emerson in 1979. The school opened the new Emerson Los Angeles building on Sunset Boulevard this year, allowing it to double its student body.
Francis Lawrence, who is directing the final three films in the Hunger Games franchise, earned his bachelor's degree in film production from Loyola, which boasts a 12-to-1 student-teacher ratio.
Frozen co-director Jennifer Lee earned her MFA in film from Columbia in 2005. The school recently launched its new Digital Storytelling Lab.
Joan Chen, who starred in The Last Emperor and directed the 2000 Richard Gere romance Autumn in New York, studied filmmaking at Cal State Northridge, which offers classes on nearby studio lots.
Joss Whedon graduated from Wesleyan in 1987 before creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then directing The Avengers. The school was recently awarded a $2 million challenge grant by the Mellon Foundation.
Judd Apatow, the director of such comedies as Knocked Up, is an alum of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which opened the new Michelle and Kevin Douglas IMAX Theatre and Immersive Lab in June.
12 Years a Slave actress Kelsey Scott is an alum of FSU, which boasts a low student-teacher ratio and a new digital arts and animation program.
HBO Films president Len Amato graduated from the Chicago institution, which claims to be the largest U.S. film school, with about 1,800 BA, BFA and MFA students.
A teenaged Tim Burton was among the school's first students. Visiting teachers include Brad Bird, Agnes Varda and, this fall, James Franco.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan attended NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, whose alums received 10 Oscar noms this past season, more than any other school.
Falling Skies actor Will Patton attended the 20-year-old school in Winston-Salem. The institution looks like a Hollywood studio backlot and has fielded a small studio's worth of talent, including Mary-Louise Parker and Danny McBride, directors Jeff Nichols and David Gordon Green, writer Travis Beacham and Summer Shelton, Sundance's first Bingham Ray producing fellow.
Breaking Bad's Anna Gunn is an alum of Northwestern, which is moving into nonfiction with the creation of an MFA program in documentary filmmaking.
How does one get to Hollywood? Start in Orange County: The 1,500 students at Chapman's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts nabbed 607 high-powered internships during the 2013-14 school year. Notable alumni include Comedy Central development executive Adam Londy, and Cynthia Pascoe, executive director of global promotions for 20th Century Fox.
More than 64 percent of graduates from the Denver school work in the movie industry, including a dozen students and alumni who worked on Kevin Connolly's upcoming feature Dear Eleanor. Notable alumni include postproduction technician Aaron Kroger (The Avengers).
BU alum Joe Roth (right), with Anne Hathaway and Mia Wasikowska. BU starts its students out with a solid liberal-arts background at its Massachusetts home campus and also sends 200 film pilgrims a year to Los Angeles to study in a high-rise across the street from SAG headquarters.
UT's Department of Radio-Television-Film is the only non-California public university with a "Semester in L.A." program, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary as well as its 1,000th student in 2015. Back in Austin, UT has instituted a new 3D production program and, thanks to a $50 million 2013 gift from the Moody Foundation, now calls itself the Moody College of Communication. UT had an extra reason to break out the champagne this year: The best actor Oscar victory of alum Matthew McConaughey.
Producer Amanda Pflieger (Animals) is among the notable alumni of DePaul's School of Cinema and Interactive Media. Headquartered in Chicago's Loop, it "is a very sexy film school," says Trainspotting writer Irvine Welsh, who starts teaching there this fall.
Most of the 1,200 students at Ringling in Sarasota, Fla., study illustration, computer design or game design. They are sought by as many as 70 recruiters a year from Disney to Yahoo, helping them live up to the school's motto, "Shattering the myth of the starving artist." Says spokeswoman Christine Lange: "We're working on a graphic novel project with Luke Wilson, a web series with Dylan McDermott, brand-identity work with Anna Paquin's and Stephen Moyer's production company CASM and exploratory graphic translation of a script with Richard Dreyfuss." Notable alumni include writer-director Jason Letkiewicz
SCAD alums Nickson Fong and Steve LaVietes won Sci-Tech Awards from the Academy in 2012 for their work in computer graphics; another 24 SCADsters worked on Life of Pi, and SCAD grad Jason Brown, a grandson of James Brown, worked on the music legend's biopic Get on Up. SCAD also sponsors the 16-year-old Savannah Film Festival, which attracts such guests as Alexander Payne, Jeremy Irons and Alec Baldwin. Its Atlanta program has added an MA and MFA in film and TV.
RISD's Film/Animation/Video Department is artsy enough to call movies "time-based media" yet pop enough to produce alum Seth MacFarlane. To help students find their voice, the Providence-based school offers instruction in media ranging from hand-drawn and digital animation to live-action filmmaking and what it calls "open-media forms."
Notable Stanford alumni include documentarians Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk. Visiting giants of the form, such as Frederick Wiseman and Les Blank, have given master classes. In 2015, the program will move to the new McMurtry Building in the $227 million Stanford Arts District.
Producer Thom Oliphant (center) is among Syracuse's notable alumni. "We're not isolated in an ivory tower of theory," says new Syracuse chancellor Kent Syverud. "Most students have immersion experiences outside Syracuse: We have boots on the ground in New York, D.C., Florence, Paris, Madrid, Dubai, Chile — and Hollywood." During "Sorkin Week," for example, film students as well as students from Syracuse's drama school (No. 13 on THR's Top 25 Drama Schools list) spend a week with The Newsroom creator Aaron Sorkin at SU Los Angeles.