Editor’s note: We’re publishing a series of op-ed articles from students in The Writing Program at USC. Every student in the class taught by Stephanie Bower and Dr. John Murray was required to make a short documentary about education by profiling a local school and/or program. Following the film project, the students wrote op-ed articles in response to their experiences and tackled some of the issues they discovered while making the shorts. We will be posting a new op-ed daily for the next two weeks.

by Eugene Yoon

The concept behind my final project was simple: film a five-minute documentary about a Los Angeles inner-city public school.  Going into it, I had just wrapped-up my ninth documentary under the USC film school and had familiarized myself with the process of conceiving an idea onto the big screen.  But I would soon discover that this particular project about inner-city life required a different set of credentials that had nothing to do with previous editing experience or storyboarding.  It would be the first time that I couldn’t hide behind accolades, film festival awards, or a respectable resume.  These students had become accustomed to “qualified” people telling them how their lives looked from an outsider’s perspective.  They were childhood products of government “solutions,” and had been told that their lives could be better if it were gentrified, chartered, and didn’t have a Child Left Behind.  Now, they were to become future subjects in my filmic case study.  However on the very first day I stepped onto the set of West Adams, a charter high school in downtown Los Angeles, I quickly learned that this potential cast of sophomores was going to be difficult. They knew from years of firsthand experience how to detect those people who wanted to control their story.  They knew that Capitol Hill had paved the way for aspiring students like me, who never lived a day in the inner city, to qualify my perspective behind a bachelors degree. But instead of commenting on their lives as a politician with a pen, I was a director with a camera.  And I would soon find out that unlike most politicians, I was not about to get away with it.

During the first week of production, a 13-year-old student stopped me during an interview and made a blunt statement about my directing skills: I was a good director because I pretended to care about the students and hid my real agenda, which was to produce a film that would help me pass my class.  Instinctively, I denied the allegations and blurted the first thing that came to my mind, which was something along the lines of, “No, I really do care.  If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have a story.”  When I realized that I was trying to minimize the damage by giving her the most politically correct answer, I grudgingly had to accept that I had a bit of politician in me.  My “charismatic” actions though subconscious were sugarcoating my personal agenda, which was to get an “A” in my class. I was no different than any other congressperson who expressed “concern” about inner-city education when the time was right, voting season.  This unexpected epiphany made me realize that I, as well as the majority of Washington, did not have the right experience to represent these students.  Getting on the dean’s list did not automatically qualify me as an honest filmmaker.  PhDs in political science did not qualify them as honorable policymakers. Without putting the students as the first and utmost priority, I could not promise them an accurate story just as politicians could not promise them change.

In light of my newly learned lesson, I eliminated the source that was inhibiting the progression of the documentary and erased myself from the picture.  The following day, I sat in the shadows at the back corner of the classroom without my Sony XLR.  At the front of the room there was a question written on the whiteboard: “What do you want to do with your future?”  A half-hour later, the class had written 34 compelling screenplays.  A 13-year old girl had written a horror about witnessing three drive-by shootings and wished that her family had more money so they could move.  A 14-year old boy had written a tragic drama about how he thought he was too stupid to go to college and felt that his parents needed the money more than he did.   There was also an inspirational bio-pic about a future police officer who wanted to be the first in his family to graduate high school and break the pattern of gangs and unplanned pregnancy that his older siblings had set.  And there was the story about Stephanie, the blunt 13-year-old who stopped me in my tracks, who hated stereotypes and joined the school football team to prove her point.

With two weeks remaining, I’m still in the process of figuring out how this story will play out.  But, with the recent breakthrough, I’m pretty confident that this will be one of my better films, if not the best, because I’ve learned how to stop telling stories for other people.  Instead, I’ve learned how to be an exceptional director and let those who are best qualified-–the true storytellers–-to tell their own narratives.