The Los Angeles communications program is a smash hit by any measure.

by Claudia Montague Wheatley '80

Teaching is a challenging profession, but some disciplines present more challenges than others. Imagine, for example, trying to teach filmmaking when your school is located in an off-the-beaten-track college town in upstate New York, far from the feverish activity of major film centers like Los Angeles.

Gustav "Skip" Landen constantly wrestled with this problem during his 23 years at Ithaca College. "If you're going to learn film, you've got to go where they make films," the former cinema professor says. "It occurred to me that we'd better teach our kids how to get there."

Over the years Landen schmoozed everyone from studio heads to administrative assistants in order to secure student internships within the Hollywood film industry. The result was success stories like that of Michael Nathanson '78, who parlayed a stint computerizing a production company's office into a career that sent him up through the ranks to president and chief operations officer of M-G-M.

But many students couldn't consider an internship because of the high cost of living in a major metropolitan area, coupled with the difficulty of earning enough academic credits to graduate on time after a semester spent off campus. Landen envisioned a place in Los Angeles where dozens of students at a time could live and take courses while getting on-the-job experience.

A semester as an intern in Los Angeles may be very educational, but does it lead to the ultimate prize -- a job? See "Where Are They Now?"

Landen spent the 1979-80 academic year in Hollywood, working on the movie ratings board. He spent his free time networking and overseeing an Emerson College program that was a prototype for the one he had in mind for IC. The Emerson program was a success. Encouraged, Landen returned to South Hill to start lobbying Thomas Bohn, who had just become dean of the School of Communications, for a permanent program in Los Angeles. It would take them more than a decade to get a formal center up and running, but Landen says the dean "has always been a real advocate for the program."

That's because Bohn believes in the value of sending communications students to Los Angeles. "It's a particular and peculiar form of industry that does not occur in any other media market," says Bohn, who is retiring as dean this summer but will be working on some special projects out of the provost's office. "In Boston, New York, or Chicago, you work for a company. In Los Angeles, you work on a production. For example, Mike Royce '86 is a writer for Everybody Loves Raymond. If that show goes off the air, Mike is out of work. If he worked for Ogilvy and Mather and lost a client, he probably wouldn't lose his job. L.A. is a very different culture; you are more defined by the production than by the company you work for."