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This interview is being conducted in the Dean's Conference Room in the Center for Fine Arts on the Towson University campus. This is part of a series of interviews comprising the TURFA Oral History Project, conceived and supported by the Towson University Retired Faculty Association,

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with generous support from the Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication. This interview, as well as others in this series, are available in the Towson University Archives.

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Ron Matlon: Greetings. I'm Ron Matlon, professor emeritus from the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies. Our guest today is Doctor Peter Lev, who is professor emeritus from the

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Department of Electronic Media and Film. Welcome, Peter. Glad to have you here. Peter Lev: Thanks.

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Good to be here. Ron Matlon: Let's start from the very beginning. Where were you born? Peter Lev: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. I moved to a suburb, Cleveland Heights, when I was two, and grew up in a very

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homogeneous, close-knit community. I brought in my first grade picture which you might want to look at. It was the 50s. The mothers were stay-at-home moms.

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We walked to school from kindergarten on. We walked home for lunch and you'll notice in the picture that all the girls are wearing skirts or dresses. Ron Matlon: And then jumping ahead,

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what colleges and universities did you attend? Peter Lev: Jumping way ahead, I went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. It's a small liberal arts school.

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The two most famous alumni are Bill Belichick and Lin Manuel Miranda. Two very different people. And then for graduate school I went to UCLA, got my master's degree and PhD from UCLA.

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I liked being a graduate student so much that I stayed there a long time. Housing was cheap, tuition was cheap. Neither would be true today. I got part-time jobs and I did finally graduate.

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Ron Matlon: And what years were you were both at Middletown and UCLA? Peter Lev: Wesleyan was 1966 to '70 and UCLA was '71 to the spring of 1980. Ron Matlon: And that's a long trek from East Coast to West Coast to go to UCLA. What made you decide to go all the way down to the West Coast then?

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Peter Lev: At the time, the best universities to study film were NYU, UCLA, and USC. I knew I didn't want to be in New York, so I opted for UCLA, which I thought was not only less expensive, but also better than USC.

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Yeah, it was sort of jumping off the edge of the world. I'd never seen a palm tree 'til I landed in Southern California to begin school at UCLA.

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Ron Matlon: You decided at some point, I assume, that you wanted to have a career in higher education. And what made that decision for you? Peter Lev: So when I graduated from Wesleyan I had no idea what I wanted to do,

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but I knew I loved film and I'd been studying film for as much as I could. It was just beginning to get into school curriculums, college curriculums. So junior, senior year, I was able to study film a little bit. And I wanted to be a film director and a film critic and a film scholar and to

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teach. And I figured, well, I'll narrow that down if I have to. I could study all of that at UCLA, and then it turned out that I wasn't a particularly strong filmmaker for a variety of reasons,

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but I was a very good film historian and researcher, so I just followed my nose and eventually I had a great career. Ron Matlon: From UCLA, did you come directly to Towson? Peter Lev: I did not.

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My first job out of graduate school was visiting assistant professor at University of Texas at Dallas. And you know, I liked it there. I liked the university.

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I didn't like the surrounding community all that much, but I had a difficult situation there. I'll describe how I got from UTD to Towson. So I was there for two years.

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I did well. I published three articles. I had a book contract. I was well-liked by the faculty.

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The job was going to change to a full- time position. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but the decision was delayed. And then in July it turned out they hired somebody at associate professor level. So it's July.

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I'm married, I have a two-year-old daughter. I don't have a job. Fortunately, film studies was a pretty hot new academic field, so there were a couple of jobs to apply

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for. I got two interviews in October, one was at Towson, and the other was at Slippery Rock, a small college, now university, about an hour north of Pittsburgh. I called up my first cousin who was a psychiatrist on staff at Shepard Pratt,

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and I said I have this job interview at a place called Towson, although I might have said Toe-son because people who are not from the area do that sometimes. So they have this, you know, job interview in a Toe-son State University.

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Is it anywhere near you? Can I stay with you? And he said, I live in Towson and of course you can stay with me.

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So I came here for the interview. I gave a talk about a 40s Hollywood film, The Big Sleep, using some archival, some primary source information. Seemed to go over pretty well.

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Went over to see the Dean's office right over here. And then about 5:00, I came back to the department in Van Bokkelen Hall and Irene Shipman, the chair, invited me to her office. I sat down, she went to her small refrigerator,

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got out two beers, handed me a beer and I sat down and I said, you know, I, I probably did OK if I'm having a beer with her. And later on I called that my victory beer.

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Ron Matlon: And it was called Towson State University at that time? Peter Lev: It was called Towson State University. And then a couple of days later I had an interview at Slippery Rock and it's probably unfair to the faculty who I met,

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but I thought they were mostly interested in playing golf, and I had played golf, but it wasn't really something that I did. So a couple weeks later I got job offers from both places and I was very pleased to be able to accept the offer from Towson and decline the offer

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from Slippery Rock. Ron Matlon: And what was your impression of Towson once you first got here? Peter Lev: It was rapidly growing. It was a fairly big university trying to be a small university with relatively

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small classes and faculty knowing each other. The president of the university, Hoke Smith, like to talk to faculty, so, you know, so that was kind of refreshing. The students were mostly first-time college students, working class,

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middle class. They mostly lived within an hour of campus. The students were interested in education, but were busy. Most of them worked part time or even full time,

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and they were paying for college or for housing or for cars. So you sort of needed to keep in mind that they didn't have unlimited time to put into their education. And I was, you know, part of the Department of Speech and Mass

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Communication. That was what it was called at the time. It was bursting at the seams. Mass Communication was new.

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It had about 800 students. I was the eighth full time faculty member to be hired, so advising was completely a zoo. We did advising in person and it was basically analog.

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Students were tremendously anxious about getting the classes that they needed. The department chair, Irene Shipman, I think probably her main job was just making sure there were classes and the faculty course load was four-four. You were encouraged to teach a fifth course every semester for a little bit of extra

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money because that was the demand. But on the other hand, I think the faculty were really excited because we were developing a new program that students really liked. One of my students once told me that mass communication was

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applied liberal arts. And I don't know if it's true, but, you know, it's an interesting way of putting it. In other words, I'm studying something that has some

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value, but it's also very, very practical and applied. Ron Matlon: How many years were you here teaching? Peter Lev: 32 and a half, because I started in January. Ron Matlon: Oh, yeah.

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Peter Lev: Yeah. So sometimes I say 32, sometimes I say 33. Ron Matlon: And... And over what time period?

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Peter Lev: So, started in January 1983 and finished in June 2015. Ron Matlon: And what kinds of courses were you teaching? Peter Lev: I must have taught 25, 30 different courses here at Towson. But in saying that, I'm counting special topics course,

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each one with a different topic, as one course each. But typically I didn't like to teach the same courses every year. I know a lot of faculty do, you know, they get a syllabus, they change it slightly every year.

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I like to develop new material. History of film I taught my first semester and my last semester and many, many times in between. But that changed constantly because we were always changing the film list. I taught script writing for a while.

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I taught documentary, I taught aesthetics of film. I developed a course called Principles of Film and Media Production, which was always sort of a problem child because it was sort of production but not really hands-on.

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Intro to Film, when I first came, was a kind of production course. Several graduate courses. The one that I remember was called Media Interrelationships, and there were occasional forays into other kinds of courses like Honors

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College, that sort of thing. Ron Matlon: While you were here, around 2000, a new department called the Department of Electronic Media and Film was created. And what's your perspective on the creation of that department?

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Peter Lev: So that was an interesting moment. Mass Communication was very, very big. We had 1,200 or 1,300 students. We had 20-some faculty.

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So my perspective was that mass comm students really weren't getting as much as they could out of their education because it was just too big. I thought that they were...

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I thought that they were confused, maybe a little depressed. They weren't getting much of a sense of community. And there was another issue, which is that that major was very diffused.

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It was a little bit of a lot of different things. And I could even put it on a kind of a spectrum. So there were the public relations faculty and they regarded public relations, correctly, as an aspect of business.

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And all the way over on the other side, there were the film faculty. And they were most interested in film as art. So I mean, they, yeah, they would teach you how to do a commercial or a PSA or a corporate documentary.

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But their hearts were in film as art. And then in between there were, you know, these other areas, advertising, journalism, other kinds of things. So both in terms of curriculum and even culturally,

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there was a big gap between different areas of the department. One of the public relations faculty once referred to the film people as the black leather jacket crowd, which I actually found funny because as an undergraduate, for a couple of years I had

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owned a beaten up black leather jacket which I had bought at the Paris flea market, the main Paris flea market. I wore it for a couple years until it was just too worn out and I threw it away. So by the time I got to Towson, my black

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leather jacket days were over. So anyway, you know, it was a very... There was a whole lot of difference within the department. And the Dean at that time was Maravene Loeschke.

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She very much wanted to see more links between Mass Communication and the other Fine Arts departments, and she thought that if we separated out film and television, that would create much more connections between this building and what... We're in the Fine Arts building right now.

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And what was happening in at least part of Mass Comm. So we had some discussions. They were not always friendly about whether or not we were going to split the department.

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There were good arguments on both sides. Charlie Flippen, who was a journalism professor, thought that there was a synergy between television production and journalism that shouldn't be broken.

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But on the other hand, television and film were really merging at that point. They were becoming the same thing. Now they really are the same thing.

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So there was a, you know, there's a pretty important reason to keep those two together in any new configuration. Maravene very much wanted the split between the departments, and it seemed that the deciding vote was going to be John Haeger,

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who was the Provost at the time. My impression was that he could have argued either way. I didn't, you know... We were in a couple of meetings with him and I wasn't sure where he was going to come

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down on it, but he decided that there should be a new department. Maravene could be very persuasive. And so, you know, that probably is what swayed him.

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And so, at least on campus, Haeger's decision stood. And then I'm sure it had to get approvals all the way up to Annapolis. But when that was over, we had a new department.

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And the first year of the new department we had six majors, but we had plenty of work because all of our students from Mass Comm were completing their degrees. So, you know, there was a two or three year period

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where you could go with the old catalog. So, you know, we had a lot of work but very few majors. But eventually we got up to 200, 300 majors, which meant we had a functioning department.

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Ron Matlon: Were you ever an administrator in either, anywhere along the way? Peter Lev: My answer is no, but I have to qualify it because my last few years at Towson I was something like associate chair for John MacKerron, who was the chair of electronic media and film,

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which meant I got a course release time to help John with some administrative chores that he didn't want to handle, for example, advising, assessment, and there was, what did we call it, a self-study, departmental review, which came every several years, which involved analyzing what you've done

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in the past, making a plan for the future, bringing in two outside examiners, distinguished faculty from other universities, to evaluate the department. So John handed that to me 100%.

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But aside from that, no, I was never an administrator. I always wanted to focus on research. You know, in the time that I had left over from teaching, I always wanted to do research.

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And so that that made it less attractive. Ron Matlon: Good decision. I know you were involved with the Literature Film Association. Why don't you tell us about that?

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Peter Lev: One of the first articles I published in the early 1980s was for a journal called Literature Film Quarterly. It was published at Salisbury State College in Salisbury, Maryland. Of course, I had no idea where that was or what kind

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of place it was. And the editor was a an English professor named Jim Welsh, who was absolutely in love with film. Everything to do with film. Then I came to Maryland, and about 1990 Jim decided that he really

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didn't like the two big associations in his field. He didn't like the Modern Language Association, and he didn't like the Society for Cinema Studies. He thought they were elitist and cliquish and too devoted to pseudoscientific

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methodologies. So he decided he was going to start his own association, which he called the Literature Film Association, and he had a conference at Salisbury in 1990.

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I didn't get to that one, but I got to the one in 1991 and I liked it so well that I offered to coordinate a conference at Towson in 1992. I ended up doing five literature film conferences at Towson and getting very involved in the organization.

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I had some help, good help at Towson University from my colleagues Bill Horn and Greg Fowler. We were bringing 60 or 80 faculty from other institutions to Towson from all over the country, a few international scholars.

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We had money for speakers. We usually made a profit. We didn't charge very much for, you know, we charged $50 or $60 as a conference fee, but we usually made a profit which went

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back partly to the association and partly to my department. One of the guests, probably the most prominent guests we had, was David Simon at the time when he was producer of The Wire and his lecture was a real adventure.

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He was supposed to speak in Van Bokkelen Hall, 7:00 on a Friday night. So 7:00 on Friday, I had an audience, but I had no speaker. 7:15, no speaker.

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The audience was getting restless. I happened to have David's home number, so I called. His wife explained that he had a miserable day doing retakes for the Wire and when he was done he got in his car and headed home to Columbia.

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So I explained the situation. She met him in the driveway and she said one word. Towson. He turned around, came to our venue.

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He got here about 8:30 for a 7:00 lecture. I had put on a tape of the Wire to keep people interested. He arrived with another tape that he wanted us to look at, so he ended up speaking about 9:15,

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9:30. He was absolutely brilliant speaking about race relations as shown in the Wire. Most of the audience had stayed and it turned out to be a great evening. Jim Welsh also got me involved in some other things.

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There was an international group called IAMHIST, the International Association for Media and History, which was mostly European and which met in places like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, various places in the UK.

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And I started going to those conferences and there was also... He actually convinced them to have a conference in Salisbury, Maryland. So we had one in Salisbury and I was co-director of that. But that got me to see perspectives of, you know, Europeans on media

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and film in particular. I made some friends that I'm still in touch with. Jim was really, really good at bringing people together. That was his gift.

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Ron Matlon: Are there any literature film association records from the conferences here on campus? Are there any of those records over in Cook Library? Peter Lev: Probably not.

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I'll tell you what happened to those records. To the best of my recollection, I actually assembled a bunch of stuff and we were going to store it, a kind of archives, at the Salisbury library. But then the librarian who was going to do that retired.

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And so I think all that material is sitting in a box or two at the offices of Literature Film Quarterly, which are in Salisbury. Ron Matlon: We need to get them here. Peter Lev: We can actually inquire about, you know, whether people would want to,

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you know, would want to see that here. For a while we had, on campus, the Burkshire Conference Hotel, and that was a great boon to the Literature Film Association conference. People really loved that hotel, which was owned by the university but

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operated by Marriott. Airport connection was very good. You could walk to downtown Towson for dinner. All that was great.

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But I guess the hotel... We didn't offer them enough business, I guess, because the hotel eventually became student housing. I guess it was a money loser. Ron Matlon: Do you personally have a favorite film of all time?

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Peter Lev: I'm going to give you three. Ron Matlon: That's OK. Peter Lev: And then I'm going to read you what I wrote in answer to the same question, or what I...

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I guess what I said in answer to the same question in 1997. OK. So my 3 would be, for foreign films, "Pierrot Le Fou," directed by Jean Luc Godard, 1965. And for American films, a conventional choice, "Vertigo" 1958,

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generally considered the best Alfred Hitchcock film. For documentary and unconventional choice, "Faces Places" 2017, directed by Agnes Varda and still photographer JR. That's as narrow as I can get it, but let me read you what I said

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in response to an interview in 1997. "It's impossible for film historian Peter Lev to name his favorite film. 'I can name 20,' he laughs.

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Citizen Kane, Pierrot Le Fou, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Avalon, Casablanca and Stealing Beauty are among this critic's top choices." So that was about eight. Ron Matlon: Very good. And now you're doing the film club for TURFA and it's very much

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appreciated. Peter Lev: Yeah. That's been a lot of fun. Ron Matlon: It is.

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It is. You also were on the college promotion and tenure committee. Now, tell us something about your experience there. Peter Lev: As soon as I became an associate professor, I was elected to be the at-large member of the college promotion and tenure

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committee. And that was interesting because I was by far the most junior person on that committee. And then a couple of years later, Richard Vatz,

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who had been representing Speech and Mass Communications, stepped down and I was elected the regular member of that committee. I learned a lot because it gave me good exposure to very senior members of the faculty from the Fine Arts departments.

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There basically weren't any senior faculty in mass communication because it was so new. So I learned from people like John Mitchell, Stan Pollock in art, Dick Gillespie, John Manlove in theatre, Ruth Drucker, Joe Brascuso in music.

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I was impressed by how seriously they took this job, by the care that they took, by their empathy for other faculty members. Joe Brascuso was the chair of the committee for a couple of years. John Manlove was the next chair, and I learned a lot from him.

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And then it was my turn and I was chair of that committee for 12 or 15 years, so a long time, even though I often like to change my responsibilities, I get bored. I stayed on COFAC P and T for a long time, and again,

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it's because the material kept changing, the decisions kept changing and exposed me to all the different faculty in the department. First you have to make a decision on the college level, and then you become an advocate for COFAC faculty as you go up to higher levels.

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It also put me in close contact with a handful of deans. I never had a big argument about promotion and tenure with the dean. I once had a big argument about promotion and tenure with a provost, not about myself but about other COFAC faculty.

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And I lost that one, which was not surprising because of the power differential. Ron Matlon: And who were the deans? Was there more than one dean one while you were on that committee?

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Peter Lev: Oh, there were a bunch of deans, starting with Gilbert Brungard. OK, Gilbert Brungard, Alex Sidorovich, Maravene Loeschke, Kit Spicer, Susan Pacinic. I worked with all of them.

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Ron Matlon: Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about your research. Would you talk to us about it? Peter Lev: In my field it's really book publication which is the most important component of research, as opposed to the sciences where it's

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refereed articles. So I published five books of film history. Plus there's an anthology about film adaptations of literature co-edited with Jim Welsh.

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I think this... I developed a a particular approach to writing film history with lots of case studies plus connective tissue. I wrote about European films. I wrote about American films.

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Eventually I specialized in American films because the audience was bigger. So the... I'll go through the books really quickly. Ron Matlon: Please do. Peter Lev: OK. So the first one was about a French filmmaker, Claude Lelouche.

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The second one was called the Euro- American Cinema, and it's the one of my books that was most quoted. You know, you can look up online, you know, the number of citations for a scholarly work.

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So that one had a lot of other people drawing from it. The third one was the Hollywood films of the 1970s, Conflicting Visions, which sold a lot of copies. And then there was American films in the 1950s,

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which was part of the Scribner's History of the American Cinema series, which is still the definitive multi- volume set of film history, American film history. I'm very proud of that one.

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There's the anthology with Jim Welsh. And then the last one was 20th Century- Fox, the Zanuck-Skouras Years, which is about 1934 to 1964. Ron Matlon: And then we learned recently about some work that you had done or got recognized

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by the Academy. Peter Lev: OK, so in 2009 I won a grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for something called the Academy Scholars Program.

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And that was to support research on the 20th Century-Fox book. It's a very competitive grant. In 2009 there were more than 100 applicants and probably there are many more today. 200... So 100 applicants.

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Two awards. I won that award and this was the ninth year that this grant had been offered. There was one independent scholar, but everybody else was from a research university, from the Ivy League or UCLA or USC or

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Wisconsin, places like that. So that you know, here comes Peter Lev from Towson. So it really did, you know, give Towson a lot of visibility in my field.

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And so I had to accept the award and give a short talk at a luncheon, which is at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is a very iconic Hollywood place. And then, I think because of that, there were a few other awards. So 2010 I won the President's Award for Distinguished Service to Towson

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University and I had a pretty good profile at that time. But I think the award was really to recognize research. I think Bob Caret wanted to raise the visibility of Towson as a research institution.

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My books and particularly this award from from the Motion Picture Academy were part of his effort to do that. In 2011, I won the Jim Welsh Award for career achievement in adaptation studies, which was from the Literature Film

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Association. I was the third person to win that award. And just recognition by peers, which is really nice. And then in 2014, I'd finished my book.

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The book was published in 2013, but in 2014 the Academy sponsored a lecture on my 20th Century-Fox book at the Mary Pickford Theater in Hollywood. There were about 120 people there, my family, my friends, UCLA colleagues, film scholars, members of the Academy, including the past president,

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the current president, the future president, Sid Ganis, who was the president of the Academy when I won the award in 2009, had worked the 20th Century-Fox in New York. So he promised me an interview.

00:32:58.200 - 00:33:11.600

And, you know, that was really helpful for the book. So that was really just a great event. To be able to present in that venue is really the the high point of my career. Ron Matlon: Wonderful, absolutely wonderful.

00:33:12.640 - 00:33:28.320

Coming back to Towson, that 32 or 32 and a half years you were here, I'm sure you saw changes. Can you talk about any of the changes that you saw during that time? Peter Lev: Sure. Well, the enrollment grew, but not enormously.

00:33:28.360 - 00:33:45.480

I think there were about 15,000 students or 16,000 when I started and it got up to 22 or 23. Towson has become much more of a residential campus, which means that there's more of an emphasis on extracurricular activities

00:33:45.480 - 00:34:00.930

and you have to invest in things like a state-of-the-art gym and things like that. There was a kind of old run-down gym at Burdick Hall when I started. The students are more middle class, I think a little more upscale than they

00:34:00.930 - 00:34:10.280

were. And we draw from a much broader area. We certainly draw from the Mid-Atlantic states, a lot of students from New York and New Jersey.

00:34:10.280 - 00:34:32.360

Towson is a pretty good bargain compared to state tuition in some of those places. So those things have changed, but Towson has always tried to maintain this small college atmosphere where the courses are relatively small and where you get to know your, you know, your faculty members.

00:34:32.440 - 00:34:46.160

I think it's diluted quite a bit because a lot of courses are taught by adjuncts. But when you get up to upper level courses, I think you're going to be dealing with more full-time faculty.

00:34:48.080 - 00:35:07.620

Towson the the town has never really become much of a college town. And that always surprised me. I guess maybe because it has other things going for it, like being a county seat, being a kind of central place for Baltimore County and employing lots of

00:35:07.620 - 00:35:26.540

people who aren't connected to the university. But, you know, it's just sort of peculiar because other universities our size or smaller do have this kind of college town environment. I think Towson's now colonizing downtown Towson.

00:35:26.540 - 00:35:45.000

Towson University's colonizing downtown Towson with the the kind of housing options that are available. And I think we've matured as more of a research institution. We, you know, teaching still comes first, but I think there's a lot more research

00:35:45.000 - 00:36:01.760

going on than when I started. Ron Matlon: After you retired, did you do any more teaching? Peter Lev: I taught one course as an adjunct a year after I retired, and I enjoyed touching base with the students again.

00:36:02.200 - 00:36:20.530

But I was surprised at how little support I got as an adjunct It's pretty isolating to be an adjunct teaching at night. And so I didn't go back to that. I have taught several courses at the Osher Institute for seniors, for retired

00:36:20.530 - 00:36:40.060

people, and that was a lot of fun. I sort of parted ways with them when they decided to go back to teaching in person or holding classes in person in probably fall of 2021 and I was still worried about COVID,

00:36:40.060 - 00:36:57.560

but I hope to rejoin them at some time in the future. I'm also coordinating this monthly film group for TURFA. The Retired Faculty Association. It's not teaching, but in terms of the exchange of ideas between small group of people,

00:36:58.000 - 00:37:13.940

it sometimes feels that way. Ron Matlon: What were you teaching at Osher? Peter Lev: I taught a course on documentary, taught a course about Cleopatra in the arts, which is just an obsession of mine based on

00:37:13.940 - 00:37:30.480

reading the biography by Stacy Schiff. I taught it first at the Honors College when I was a full time faculty, and the Honors College kids didn't like it so much, but the Osher students loved it. Absolutely loved it.

00:37:30.480 - 00:37:51.260

Somehow traditional education, which thinks you ought to learn about people like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and Mark Anthony is still working for my generation, but maybe not for the 20-year-olds. So film history courses and also this kind of interdisciplinary

00:37:51.260 - 00:37:58.680

course about Cleopatra. Ron Matlon: Did you get to choose those topics or do they? Peter Lev: Absolutely, absolutely. Ron Matlon: And you don't have to grade papers.

00:37:58.960 - 00:38:13.840

Peter Lev: I don't have to grade papers. Although my first Osher class when I was still teaching was actually, what can we say, solicited by Jackie Gratz, who was the head of Osher at that time.

00:38:14.320 - 00:38:22.840

She said, you know, I want you to teach a course about Jewish contributions to Hollywood. So I did that. I've actually taught it twice there.

00:38:23.240 - 00:38:36.610

And I decided I liked Osher and kept going. Ron Matlon: Let's talk a bit about the students at Towson. Over the course of the 32 years that you've been here, have you seen a change in the nature of the students that you had in your film

00:38:36.610 - 00:38:50.160

classes? Peter Lev: Not an enormous change. I think, as I said, students are getting a little more middle class and maybe have a little more time to put into their education.

00:38:50.160 - 00:39:05.440

The first students I had seemed to be very much involved in work as well as school. I think the preparation is different. When we first started, everything was analog.

00:39:05.440 - 00:39:19.480

Now you need to know a whole lot about computers to do well in certain aspects of media studies. So yeah, I think Towson students aren't that different.

00:39:19.480 - 00:39:31.180

I mean, of course, my last exposure was the the fall of 2016. Ron Matlon: That's not that long ago. Peter Lev: Yeah. Ron Matlon: Would you have made any changes in

00:39:31.180 - 00:39:47.840

terms of how you were laying out your career, would you have made any changes along the way in terms of what you were doing? Peter Lev: I think the only one I might have changed was maybe get out of graduate school quicker, start a career, start a family quicker.

00:39:50.320 - 00:40:04.840

As I said, I really enjoyed being a UCLA graduate student and so I sort of lingered. There was a fellow student of mine in graduate school who went through the PhD program in two and a half years, which was astonishing.

00:40:04.840 - 00:40:15.440

But that's because she, you know, she couldn't afford to do anything else. She was English and she was on a grant from Great Britain and they only gave her two and a half years. So she finished.

00:40:15.840 - 00:40:27.800

Took me five and a half years after three years in a master's program. Ron Matlon: You've hinted at some of this already, but, you know, I see if we can get a little bit more

00:40:27.800 - 00:40:40.590

information on how the pedagogy in film studies has changed over the course of your career. Peter Lev: It used to be very hard to see films. You know, you were dependent on what showed up in

00:40:40.590 - 00:40:51.960

the theater. You could rent something on 16mm film for a class, but you really had to have an incredible memory and you often got things wrong. So VHS was a big help.

00:40:51.960 - 00:41:03.600

DVD was a bigger help. Streaming is a bigger help. It's much easier to see things. You can assign students, you know, go stream this. Go look at it on your own.

00:41:04.360 - 00:41:15.480

Kanopy database has hundreds of films. It's at Cook Library at Towson University, so all that is much easier and on the production side it used to be totally analog.

00:41:15.480 - 00:41:33.800

It used to be very expensive to make a film. You had to buy 16mm film and processing. Students could spend like a couple thousand dollars on a short film, just on on the actual film stock. That was the major cost. That disappeared.

00:41:33.800 - 00:41:43.040

Now it's all digital and put it on a disk. Disk doesn't cost very much. Put it on a hard drive, whatever. So big changes there.

00:41:43.600 - 00:41:58.160

Some things haven't changed so much in terms of the production jobs. Script writing's about the same, directing's about the same, editing is different, much more technical and involved with computers.

00:42:01.720 - 00:42:20.500

There are still jobs out there, you know, students with the same kind of preparation that we were giving them in the 1980s are getting jobs. Ron Matlon: Now, you were involved in some innovations in teaching at Towson. What was that? Peter Lev: So I want to first just talk about interdisciplinary things that, you know,

00:42:20.500 - 00:42:35.160

probably because of my background, I was never entirely comfortable with the way departments silo and they don't talk to each other and they're only involved in their own discipline. So a couple of things that I've done.

00:42:36.320 - 00:42:51.440

When Maravene was dean, there was a new course that was called Creativity in the Fine Arts that was interdisciplinary and it was written by dance professor Jaye Knutson. She gave the first version of that, I gave the second.

00:42:52.560 - 00:43:12.760

I had them writing scripts, writing a poem that had a graphic dimension like E. E. Cummings. We did a video. We did some kind of acting exercise, acting play-like exercise.

00:43:13.200 - 00:43:26.920

We did not do painting or sculpture because I'm terrible at that. And we did movement one day, but I invited Jaye to, you know, to lead that. So we were all dancing in a certain way, including me.

00:43:28.120 - 00:43:44.280

It was a lot of fun. It was also a huge stretch for me, and I only did it once. I mentioned the interdisciplinary course on Cleopatra, which I enjoyed a lot, but which seemed to work better for older students, that the honors college students

00:43:44.280 - 00:43:59.360

that I worked with, they wanted to know two things, one, how do I get a good grade? And two, how is what we're doing, you know, connecting to what I'm going to need as I go forward for a career or whatever.

00:43:59.360 - 00:44:14.060

And we had students in things like computer science and Homeland Security in that course. So they're from all over the university. It was fine, but it was kind of a relief to, you know,

00:44:14.060 - 00:44:34.770

to have a much more excited audience when I got to Osher. There was a committee called the Cultural Studies Steering committee, maybe around 2005, 2010, which brought together lots of people from Liberal Arts, plus a couple from COFAC,

00:44:34.770 - 00:44:56.220

Jerry Phillips in music and me. And that was trying to come to grips with structuralist and poststructuralist theories which proposed that, you know, you could look at the whole of the humanities and the fine arts with one methodology,

00:44:56.220 - 00:45:12.800

which was from structural linguistics and Freudian psychology, Marxism, combine all that together. So there were about fifteen faculty involved in that. David Bergman was from English, was the first chair of that community.

00:45:12.800 - 00:45:30.480

He was a poet who also taught literature, you know, a publishing poet. And this was kind of exciting, except that students didn't buy into it. So we had 15 faculty, and there wasn't enough student interest to form a major.

00:45:30.480 - 00:45:46.700

So there was a minor, but there were probably 10 or 12 students in the minor that, you know, Towson students are very practical. And so if you tell them, you know, you have a choice, we can teach you this really complicated way to critique advertising,

00:45:46.700 - 00:46:02.370

or we can teach you how to do an advertising campaign, they're likely to choose the advertising campaign. So, you know, eventually I drifted away. But the interesting thing about that group to me was just the opportunity to

00:46:02.370 - 00:46:25.720

meet people from all over the university, people like John Murungi in philosophy, David Bergman in English, people from modern languages and so on, people from anthropology. There was also, fairly late in my career, there was initiative started by Luz

00:46:25.720 - 00:46:49.760

Mangurian, who was a biology professor, and she thought that mid-career faculty members should spend some time studying pedagogy, which of course we rarely do. When I was a graduate student, there was a course in pedagogy in my program, which was unusual.

00:46:50.640 - 00:47:04.440

It wasn't a very good course, but at least there was an attempt. So Luz thought that, you know, we could benefit by taking some time to think about methods of teaching even after we were successful.

00:47:04.920 - 00:47:18.400

And she brought together one person from each college to try to do that. I enjoyed it. And we had to come up with some sort of a project.

00:47:19.280 - 00:47:37.960

My project was related to trying to make assignments as applied as possible. So I mean, my work, there aren't a whole lot of people who are studying to be film historians. But what I did was, you know, try to get students working with primary

00:47:37.960 - 00:48:01.500

sources rather than with just film reviews and things like that. And I remember, for example, going with an independent study student to the state archives in Annapolis and digging into their censorship files, that the state of Maryland was one of the last states to have a censorship

00:48:01.500 - 00:48:16.720

office, even after a film was declared protected by the first Amendment in the early 1950s. And the head of the state office, Agnes Avera, had these epic tangles with John Waters in his early days.

00:48:18.160 - 00:48:32.520

So that was fun. There was enough material there for the student project. There wasn't really enough for me to pursue it further. But that was the kind of thing that I was working on with Luz.

00:48:32.520 - 00:48:46.360

And she was a great character. She was just tremendously enthusiastic about what she was doing. And the idea was then that I was going to take that back to my department and there was going to be some sort of a trickle down.

00:48:46.760 - 00:49:04.040

So I took it back to my department, which would have been EMF at that time. And I talked about it, but most of the faculty were involved in production sort of things and so it didn't directly apply. So I hope that this idea had better effect

00:49:04.040 - 00:49:18.160

elsewhere. It was good for my teaching, but it it didn't necessarily influence other faculty. Luz did this for a couple of years and then it stopped.

00:49:18.160 - 00:49:30.640

But she had the provost the year for at least a short period of time and was able to do this experiment. Ron Matlon: When you first came to Towson, and here was a group of students interested in film.

00:49:31.440 - 00:49:38.120

Why? Why were they interested in film? And I'm asking that question from a career standpoint. What careers were they thinking of from the very beginning?

00:49:40.400 - 00:49:54.000

Peter Lev: There are careers in film and in media. You know, some of them pretty straightforward, like you can be a grip, which means setting up lights and things like that, doing technical things.

00:49:55.200 - 00:50:16.650

There are local markets, you know, there's filmmaking in Baltimore, there's video in Baltimore, there are TV stations in Baltimore. Barry Moore, who was the first head of EMF, always wanted to direct our students toward Hollywood, toward Los Angeles, and a lot of our students got pretty good

00:50:16.650 - 00:50:34.990

jobs in Los Angeles. Barry's very proud of Mike Flanagan, who makes horror movies for Netflix and has really made a name for himself. And lately filmmaking's gotten more decentralized so that Atlanta,

00:50:34.990 - 00:50:49.570

for example, is a major, major center of film and media production. I know somebody who's just graduated from Temple University, which is one of our competitors in the Mid-Atlantic,

00:50:49.570 - 00:51:06.920

who's working all the time in Atlanta in entry-level kind of grip production assistant jobs. And he's working for big companies like Marvel, Amazon. So there are still jobs out there.

00:51:06.920 - 00:51:18.890

And then of course, film history is more like a humanity subject. So you can study that and do anything. And, you know, I had students that, you know,

00:51:18.890 - 00:51:30.480

wanted to do music and wanted to learn about film and aesthetics of film, just as an example. But, yeah, you could go to law school or anything. Ron Matlon: But when you first came here, this was basically a teacher's college.

00:51:30.480 - 00:51:39.520

Was there any connection between a student interested in film and teaching? Peter Lev: It wasn't basically a teacher's college. It had recently blossomed. Ron Matlon: OK.

00:51:39.880 - 00:51:51.600

Peter Lev: It had recently changed, you know, certainly, and gotten much bigger. You know, I don't know exactly when that happened, but it was after my time here.

00:51:52.920 - 00:52:02.840

So, yeah, the university was was changing and growing and it was exciting time, even though we were busy. Ron Matlon: What kinds of new careers have been developing in film?

00:52:03.080 - 00:52:23.360

Peter Lev: Certain aspects of film are merging with computer technology in different ways, so that, you know, for example, somebody that works in the office of technology services here might also be a video editor, that those skills are very complimentary.

00:52:24.120 - 00:52:45.480

Still photography and digital video are very compatible. So there's, you know, there's a kind of a merging of careers that's happening. And one of the things that was happening when I was here and probably still going on is kind of territorial dispute between EMF and the art department.

00:52:46.280 - 00:53:00.760

Art department, you know, takes the point of view that visual arts, anything with visual arts is us. And film department says, well, moving image is us. And there's this in between area that

00:53:00.760 - 00:53:17.460

you don't really know who it belongs to. And probably the best response to that is let's do it together, which we've done to some extent, like animation. Animation, there's been a certain amount of sharing

00:53:17.460 - 00:53:26.680

between the two departments. Animation's another area that's become very connected to computer science and digital special effects. Wow.

00:53:27.360 - 00:53:38.360

You know, digital special effects is this huge area. Most of the budget of a number of different films is just the digital special effects. Might have 100 or 200 people working on it.

00:53:38.720 - 00:53:56.890

What are their backgrounds? Is it computer science or is it art or, or is it more conventional animation? So, you know, all this stuff is in between and I think it creates a dilemma for a department like EMF because everything's

00:53:56.890 - 00:54:17.150

changing so rapidly. And how do you adjust your curriculum and how do you create an interaction with related areas that haven't really been part of your department? Ron Matlon: Suppose an 18, 19 or 20-year-old interested in film history calls you up or texts you

00:54:17.150 - 00:54:28.640

or contacts you in some way and says I'm interested... I'm going back to careers. I'm interested in a career where I can really focus on film history. What kind of advice would you give to that person?

00:54:30.760 - 00:54:48.240

Peter Lev: Well, probably the main way to do that is to, you know, go to school and get your master's degree and get your PhD, which qualifies you to teach because it's really the teaching that's going to, you know, make you a living

00:54:48.240 - 00:55:03.950

rather than the writing. The life of a freelance writer is difficult. You know, there are people that, you know, that make a living that way. About once a year, twice a year, I get a call from somebody who's writing

00:55:03.950 - 00:55:15.280

an article about film history, who's probably a journalist rather than a scholar. And, you know, they want to ask me a few questions, which they'll use in the article.

00:55:15.280 - 00:55:32.160

So I got a call from somebody in the UK about a year ago. He was writing an article for the Daily Telegraph about the film The Longest Day. I think it was an anniversary, so it would have been 1961, so it would have been 2021.

00:55:32.760 - 00:55:48.280

And he said, you know, I write for The Daily Telegraph and several other publications on really tight deadlines because he had to to make a living. So yeah, I think, you know, I think the academic route still exists.

00:55:48.840 - 00:56:00.280

It's probably not as hot a field as when I started. I have to tell you that the one student that told me, I think it was a summer class, but she told me, I decided what I want to do in my life.

00:56:00.280 - 00:56:13.920

I... I want to be like you and, you know, do film history. She was one of the craziest students that I ever taught in 32 years. Ron Matlon: Do we want to say what happened?

00:56:16.480 - 00:56:29.840

Peter Lev: Well, I mean, no. The only thing that happened is that she didn't get the grade she wanted on an assignment and her mother came in to talk to me. Ron Matlon: Let's go back to talking about Towson University, but this time in the future,

00:56:29.840 - 00:56:46.720

where do you see this university going in the next 10 to 20 years? Peter Lev: Well, I mean, first of all, I think there's likely to be a fair amount of disturbance, whether it's climate change or political disturbance or a pandemic, like what we're still going through.

00:56:46.720 - 00:57:07.290

So I think the university has to be very flexible and resilient to get through whatever's coming at us. I think we need to take the recent experience of the pandemic and see what works and what doesn't work in terms of distance education,

00:57:07.290 - 00:57:26.070

hybrid kinds of models for teaching. I think teaching for a year, my understanding is that teaching for a year with Zoom was pretty awful and that it didn't really work. But some kind of hybrid education just for flexibility

00:57:26.070 - 00:57:44.960

is probably a good idea. I hope the idea of a residential college still works because you learn so much from your peers, not just from, you know, your classes, your faculty. That the... Of course, one of those things that scares me very

00:57:44.960 - 00:58:01.680

much is that an AI can write a pretty good term paper and in, you know, in my field, I assigned a whole lot of term papers and I read a whole lot of mediocre term papers and the AI can probably do as well.

00:58:02.080 - 00:58:16.320

So I mean, one of the things that I tried to do when I was writing, there were already people that were, you know, would write a term paper for you for a fee. So I tried to choose topics that would be difficult for them to handle,

00:58:16.320 - 00:58:30.300

but I'm not sure that I could do that for an AI. So, you know, we have to adjust to that in one way or another. It's been suggested that we might have handwritten, you know,

00:58:30.300 - 00:58:47.520

require handwritten papers so that, you know, the AI probably is not good at cursive, or have people write, you know, in a room, write answers to essay questions rather than, you know, an emphasis on outside papers.

00:58:48.080 - 00:59:05.920

It's a real dilemma because I think writing skills are terribly, terribly important. I think that, you know, there's no reason that the pace of technology in terms of pedagogy is going to get any slower.

00:59:06.480 - 00:59:18.960

It's changed enormously in the 40 or 50 years of my experience and it's just going to keep going. Ron Matlon: Well, that's very insightful and I'm glad I'm not teaching.

00:59:20.800 - 00:59:29.040

Thank you, Peter, this has been a wonderful interview. It's been good through the years having you as a colleague and I wish you much happiness in the future. Thank you very much.

00:59:29.040 - 00:59:31.080

Peter Lev: Thank you, Ron. Been a pleasure.