We went to Los Angeles and Aggie got a job at the nursing school at USC [University of Southern California]. She was a nurse at the hospital at USC and I got a job... I mean, I was studying film and it just happened that 1965 was the absolute low point in the number of films ever made in the United States.
They had been diminishing ever since the late 1940s and now they had hit a new low and our first day at film school, the head of the camera department came out, Gene Peterson and he looked at us for what seemed like an hour but it was probably two minutes. And he had these cornflower blue eyes and he just kept looking at all of us because there was a wave of people who had come... who decided that film was something they wanted to study. This probably had something to do with Vietnam. It also had to do with the first surge of baby boomers who were now people born in the early 1940s, who were hitting the graduate schools and we...
Baby boomers were the first generation to actually grow up with television. We eventually... Our family did eventually get a television very late but looking at the whole generation, that generation was the first to have television as a pet in the home whereas the previous generation had... Movies had been something that was out there in the movie theatre. So the idea... That’s just, that’s all it is. It seemed to be more approachable. So there was a wave of people, myself included and Matthew, whose families had nothing to do with movies. Later on, I would meet Francis Coppola and George Lucas, who were part of the same wave. John Milius, Caleb Deschanel, we all were at film school together, all part of this wave of people who had no connection with the film business or industry, who were kind of assaulting the ramparts, exactly at the time that motion picture production was descending. And perhaps descending to extinction, which was the opinion of the teachers at the school.
