As guests entered the backyard of producer Brian Grazer and his wife’s Santa Monica home Thursday evening, they made steps toward a changed Hollywood landscape. Actors, producers, board directors, high school students and the director of nonprofit Hear of Los Angeles celebrated a uniquely inclusive body within the film field.
The event, which was the first-ever fundraiser for the Ghetto Film School in Los Angeles, raised critical funds for the organization’s local programming. Press coverage of the festivities helped to promote awareness of the school’s mission and efforts.
Founded in the Bronx in 2000, the Ghetto Film School is an award-winning nonprofit organization aimed at educating, developing and celebrating an emerging generation of American storytellers. The program holds an eye to greater diversity in the entertainment industry. The goal is to create a pipeline for unique and creative young talent (ages 14 to 18) into the film industry through two distinct mentorship tracks.
The Ghetto Film School holds the rigorous Fellows Program, a pre-professional curriculum in narrative filmmaking education. Industry professionals immerse high school students in New York City and Los Angeles enrolled in the Fellows Program in cinematic storytelling over more than 1,000 hours of hands-on training and instruction.
Students also receive early career support from a network of professionals in both the creative and media industries. GFS’s Digital Bodega is a full-service production company run by program alumni, one that generates income to directly support the school’s activities.
At GFS L.A. we really focus on film, TV production, theory and history,
said Alvy Johnson, program coordinator for Ghetto Film School L.A. We try and build a comprehensive set of skills from the ground up. Some of the kids don’t know much about film walking in.
The original GFS site is based in New York City’s South Bronx, where the organization simultaneously runs a public high school named The Cinema School with support from the NYC Department of Education. In 2014, the Ghetto Film School established its Los Angeles branch with a grant from 21st Century Fox, which will as of recently make an additional grant to cover the program’s core funding until 2020. The school finds supplementary financial support from public sources such as the city or the National Education Association as well as private donors.
Ghetto Film School L.A. serves nearly 75 students in a building on Wilshire Boulevard in MacArthur Park. Those chosen for enrollment at GFS dedicate weekends and afterschool hours to a 30-month-long college-level program involving table reads with professional actors and critique from veterans of the field.
More than 1,500 individuals engage in Ghetto Film School programs annually free of charge, according to the GFS website.
The program’s principle goal is not to make money; it is to provide a critical exposure and opportunity for youth in low-income neighborhoods that may otherwise be overlooked film industry. For many of the students, GFS is their first experience in a hands-on, pre-professional mentorship environment.
I feel what GFS is doing to help diversity in the film industry is just letting more people of color get their feet inside the door, and also for women too,
said Layquawn Windley, 16, a current student-fellow at GFS L.A. If we can bring this diversity into film, we can get new ideas and tell more stories that haven’t been heard before in the movie industry.
The Ghetto Film School is also about paying it forward.
Like many of the celebrities and film professionals who spoke at the fundraisers, GFS’s first-ever chief operating officer, Kisha Cameron Dingle, vividly remembers her entry into the industry. According to Johnson, Dingle grew up in Brooklyn and enrolled in Future Filmmakers Workshop at NYU as a young teen. From that experience, she was later able to work as an intern at Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule.
By providing students with resources and strong network of allies in the professional world, the Ghetto Film School propels a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, races and experiences into the Hollywood conference room. The end result is a better product, more representative of the multicolored reality that globalization has put forth.
We can create pathways,
said Johnson, Someone cracks open the door and it’s up to [the student] to walk through it.