The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA are still striking, leaving a wildly popular USC film elective with significantly less star power as celebrity guests sit out on lectures.
Theatrical Film Symposium, a class taught by film critic Leonard Maltin in the School of Cinematic Arts, has been “USC’s most popular elective for over 50 years,” according to the school’s website.
In addition to being open to students of all ages and majors, the course’s campus-wide success can be attributed to its impressive line up of guest speakers, including Joe & Anthony Russo, Guillermo del Toro, Taika Waititi, J.J. Abrams, Chloe Grace Moretz, Sylvester Stallone and Judd Apatow. However, actors and writers who are members of the Writer’s Guild or SAG-AFTRA won’t be able to visit and promote their upcoming projects without crossing the picket line.
Per the rules of the ongoing double-strike of the two labor unions, members are not allowed to promote upcoming projects and are specifically prohibited from attending panels, premieres and screenings, including ones at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
Alex Ago, the director of programming and special projects at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, said he doesn’t think the strike will “actually affect the class at all,” as he aims to book guests for cinema classes across a wide variety of professions, including production designers, costume designers, animators and more.
“We have so many great people that we can hear from in the production of a movie that the focus on these other professions shouldn’t be as big of a hindrance as it might seem,” Ago said. “The bigger problem, unfortunately, is that because the studios feel that they really need the actors to help promote their films, they’ve been changing the release dates of some of their bigger films to 2024.”
Some students have a different perspective about the actors and writers’ absence.
“As a student not in the film school, I loved hearing from actors and writers, especially the USC grads, because they were able to give current students advice about breaking into the industry and give us the insight we would not hear in the class setting otherwise,” said Amber Birdwell, a senior studying global geodesign who took the class in her junior year. “The current students are missing out on valuable career advice because the guests are not attending.”
Negotiations between strikers and studios have not yet led to a compromise after 118 days of the writers’ strike and 46 days of the coinciding actors’ strike. For now, guests for this semester’s symposium will be limited to directors outside of the unions and behind-the-scenes members of the film industry.