Film School

Charges that Cinekyd film school founder Robert J. Clark Jr. spanked and corrupted children grew yesterday as police filed more than a dozen accusations. An expanded affidavit recorded with the Hatboro court of District Justice Paul N. Leo outlined complaints against Clark from 17 people. Former students, their parents, and even social workers who said they had treated people traumatized by Clark's alleged behavior were included. One of them - a man who said he was a Cinekyd student in the mid-1970s - said Clark had sexually molested him 20 times.

When it came to choosing a film school, Chaim Bianco did some comparison shopping. The $18,040 fee for New York University's graduate division caused a mild case of sticker shock. Tuition for Temple University's radio-TV-film master's program came to an economical $5,000. "I figured if I had that extra $13,000, I could have just gone out and bought myself a movie camera," deadpans the Wilkes-Barre native, who chose Temple. Three years after making that decision, Bianco is quite happy, thank you very much.

In 1981, at the age of 21, Jennifer Fox dropped out of film school at New York University to make her first documentary, Beirut: The Last Home Movie. For three months, she dodged shells and sniper fire, suffered cutoffs of water and electricity and visited the front lines in that once-beautiful city, where members of militias lobbed mortars and rockets into rival strongholds. Although her risk-taking resulted in an artistic success and helped the Philadelphia native to understand herself, the trip to Beirut is the last time she will ever risk her life for a film, she says.

AUSTIN, Texas - The prevailing image of Sam Beam, who makes music as Iron & Wine, is of an abundantly bearded man alone on stage with a guitar, whispering songs to take your breath away. That's how Beam made his entrance back in 2002 with his hushed debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle . And it's not too far off the tableau before us on a gorgeous March afternoon at the South by Southwest music festival, as shadows play upon the songwriter, and he stands under the outstretched arms of an enormous oak on the idyllic grounds of the Hotel Saint Cecilia.

The invitation intrigued me. It was for lunch with a group of law students working this summer at Philadelphia law firms. Why would young legal eagles - future masters and mistresses of the universe - want to break bread with a mere journalist, who'd rather wear sandals than dress for success? Not that lawyers and journalists don't have much in common - a love of debate, of language, of minding everyone's business but our own. Still, it's a long way from the Daily News to the carpeted legal realms where my hosts are toiling this summer.

Even as a child, "Heart and Souls" director Ron Underwood knew he was different. "When I was little, the other kids would watch war movies, or whatever, and I would be watching these Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies. I was really a strange kid. I really liked romantic comedies. " He not only liked them, he wanted to make them. He attended film school at the University of Southern California, and spent many years making education films before cracking the big time with "Tremors" and then "City Slickers," successes that led to his chance to make the romantic comedy "Heart & Souls.

And he fell in love, and he got turned out and he dropped everything he was doing in the summer of 1995 to write a movie about it - a welcome cleanser for his soul. OK. "Turned out" is, as Chris Cherot puts it, a bit "harsh. " The turning out, he insists was "mutual. " But he was, nonetheless, deeply affected - so much so that this NYU film school dropout/self-described homeless guy put finger to laptop and created "Hav Plenty," his personal paean to buppie love gone awry.

Billy Zane wants to do musicals. The star of "The Phantom" is so well known for his sexy roles in erotic thrillers that he's practically his own genre at TLA Video. But his ambition is to be more of a Gene Kelly type. Raised on the musical spectacles of MGM, Zane can sing and dance, and wants the chance to show that off on celluloid. "That degree of high entertainment and audience feel-good ma-terial inspired me," Zane says. The Chicago native grew up with parents who encouraged his theatrical ambition.

Conceived by the parodists who improvised This Is Spinal Tap, a spoof of heavy-metal musicians and the record industry, The Big Picture is a paradox - an unkinder but gentler satire of the movie biz. While The Big Picture's funniest sight gags might draw a blank from those who don't recognize that a double bill of Jerry Lewis' Hardly Working and Roman Polanski's Tess is hilarious, it's a must-see for film students and industry wannabes. Though it is an insider's look at Hollywood, The Big Picture is not for insiders only.

LOS ANGELES - Hollywood has always been madly in love with its boy wonders. Everyone knows the stories behind how Orson Welles made "Citizen Kane" at 26 and how Steven Spielberg directed "Duel," his breakthrough TV movie, at 24. But in reality, when it comes to Hollywood success, there have always been the tortoises as well as the hares. The tortoises just don't end up being splashed on the covers of magazines as often. A textbook case for the tortoise school of success is Jay Roach, director of the comedy "Dinner for Schmucks.

AUSTIN, Texas - The prevailing image of Sam Beam, who makes music as Iron & Wine, is of an abundantly bearded man alone on stage with a guitar, whispering songs to take your breath away. That's how Beam made his entrance back in 2002 with his hushed debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle . And it's not too far off the tableau before us on a gorgeous March afternoon at the South by Southwest music festival, as shadows play upon the songwriter, and he stands under the outstretched arms of an enormous oak on the idyllic grounds of the Hotel Saint Cecilia.

BUCKET LIST ITEM achieved: Shake the hand of the man who wrote the best TV episode ever. The man turns out to be David Chase, so you think this is another genuflection from some "Sopranos" groupie. Not so. Chase, in his younger days, also wrote for "The Rockford Files," another great show, though less exalted. Turns out Chase, as I sort of suspected, authored my favorite episode. PI Jim Rockford gets stuck with a hippie client on the run from a fraudulent New Age cult. She frustrates the detective by answering questions with far-out non-sequiturs: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

CAPTURING the speed of Joe Frazier's fists was a piece of cake for filmmaker Michael K. Bucher. His award-winning documentaries and films included the first Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali fight, in March 1971, at Madison Square Garden. His ability to capture the speed and drama of sporting events, including auto racing in Daytona, Fla. ("Winning on My Mind") was hailed by contemporaries and by publications like Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver . His documentaries and films, including several full-length movies, won six Golden Globe Awards.

PHILADELPHIA NATIVE Rel Dowdell had a fairy-tale baptism in the world of independent film. While at film school at Boston University, Dowdell pitched his idea for a student short film to Esther Rolle, expanded that to a feature called "Train Ride," released it on DVD and saw it heralded as one of the top 10 titles of the year for 2000. That's the good news. The bad news: Dowdell had exhausted his lifetime supply of good news. He was about to discover firsthand just how hard it is to make and distribute a truly independent movie.

Before Philadelphia's invited movers and shakers even arrived at the red-carpet premiere of Changing the Game, Rel Dowdell's urban tale of corruption and redemption, moviegoers were instructed to leave their smartphones in their cars or turn them over to security before entering the Van Pelt Auditorium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. After all, it took Dowdell seven long years to birth his baby, and to miraculously land a nationwide distribution...

"DIE HARD" goes condo in "The Raid: Redemption," a frenzied Indonesian action movie whose action credentials are through the roof. Here's the brutally simple premise: A team of heavily armored cops enters the ground floor of an apartment high-rise owned and occupied by a crime kingpin protected by several floors of armed thugs. It's an action movie in three acts - automatic weapons, blades, then fists. The higher the cops go, the more elemental the combat. In truth, though, most of the officers don't go very high.

BEFORE Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim were famous for being funny, they were Temple film geeks, watching David Lynch movies and David Byrne videos. "At that point in our lives, the idea of comedy was not something that seemed possible; in fact, it wasn't even a cool thing to think about. We were in bands, or doing film installations. It wasn't like we were ever part of a sketch group," said Heidecker, whose decidedly weird first comedy, "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie" opens tomorrow.

Members of the Stetson Shutterbugs stepped outside their middle school in Kensington and began sizing up the late afternoon sunlight slanting down on bustling Allegheny Avenue. "Take a look at the way the light is now," teacher Anthony Rocco told the students in his photography club. "You get some really strong shadows. " Clutching donated cameras, the young teens set off down B Street to take pictures of the neighborhood to share with their "photo buddies" in a tiny town in Colombia.

Hello there In 2002, Rebecca, who hails from Abington, and Mike, who grew up near New Orleans, shared a Northwestern University freshman poetry class. "Once we started talking, it felt like we could just talk forever," said Rebecca, who majored in theater and English. Rebecca tried for more conversational opportunities with frequent visits to a friend who lived across the hall from Mike and carefully timed trips to the dining hall. After a year discussing books, movies, and current events, Mike, a film major, asked Rebecca to attend a student play.

LOS ANGELES - It's noon on a warm July day, and filmmaker Will Gluck is worried that he's become a cliche. The 39-year-old writer-director behind the new romantic comedy "Friends With Benefits," starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis, is wondering whether he should have hung a framed poster for the 1948 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie "State of the Union" in his sparsely furnished new office at Sony Pictures. The poster, a gift from Kunis, is a bit of a gag, Gluck said - the actress knows how much the boyish-looking New York native detests Hollywood-types who display old movie posters in their offices.