Interview with Peter Lev

Narrator: 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, 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. 00:31 RM: Greetings. I'm Ron Matlon, professor emeritus from the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies. Our guest today is Dr. Peter Lev, who is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Electronic Media and Film. Welcome, Peter. Glad to have you here. PL: Thanks. Good to be here. 00:46 RM: Let’s start for the very beginning. Where were you born? PL: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. I moved to a suburb, Cleveland Heights, when I was two and grew up in a very homogeneous, close knit community. I brought in my first grade picture, which you might want to look at. It was the fifties. The mothers were stay at home moms. 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. 01:21 RM: And then jumping ahead, what colleges and universities did you attend? PL: Jumping way ahead. RM: Yes. PL: I went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. It's a small liberal arts school. 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 Ph.D. from UCLA. 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. 02:07 RM: And what year were you with both at Middletown and UCLA? PL: So, Wesleyan was 1966-70, and UCLA was ’71 to the spring of 1980. 02:19 RM: That's a long trek from East Coast to West Coast to go to UCLA. What made you decide to go all the way out to the West Coast? PL: 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. Yeah, well, sort of jumping off the edge of the world. I'd never seen a palm tree till I landed in Southern California to begin school at UCLA. 02:55 RM: You decided at some point I assumed that you wanted to have a career in higher education. What made that decision for you? PL: So when I graduated from Wesleyan, I had no idea what I wanted to do. But I knew I loved film and I'd been studying film 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 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, but I was a very good film historian and researcher, so I just followed my nose and eventually I had a great career. 03:53 RM: From UCLA, did you come directly to Towson? PL: I did not. My first job out of graduate school was visiting assistant professor at University of Texas at Dallas. And, well, you know, I liked it there. I liked the university. I didn't like the surrounding community all that much. But I had a difficult situation there, and I'll describe how I got from UTD to Towson. So I was there for two years. I did well. I published three articles. I had a book contract. I was well liked by the faculty. The job was going to change to a full-time position. I thought I was in pretty good shape, but the decision was delayed. Then in July it turned out they hired somebody at associate professor level. So it's July. 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 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 Sheppard Pratt, and I said, I have this job interview at a place called Towson and all I might have said Tow-son, because people who are not from the area do that sometimes. So I have this job interview at Towson State University. 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. 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.It seemed to go over pretty well. I went over to see the dean's office right over here, and then about 5:00 I came back to the department in Van Bokklen Hall and Irene Shipman, the chair, invited me to her office. I sat down. She went to her small refrigerator, got out two beers, handed me a beer, and I sat down and I said, you know, I probably did okay if I'm having a beer with her. And later on, I called that my victory beer. 06:42 RM: And it was called Towson State University at that time? PL: 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, but I thought they were mostly interested in playing golf. I had played golf, but it wasn't really something that I did. So a couple of weeks later, I got job offers from both places and I was very pleased to be able to accept the offer from Towson and declined the offer from Slippery Rock. 07:19 RM: And what was your impression of Towson once you first got here? PL: Oh, well, it was rapidly growing. It was it was a fairly big university trying to be a small university with relatively small classes and faculty knowing each other. The president of the university, Hoke Smith, liked to talk to faculty. So that was kind of refreshing. The students were mostly first time college students, working class, middle class. They mostly lived within an hour of campus. The students were interested in education, but were busy. Uh, most of them work part-time or even full-time. 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. I was part of the department of speech and mass communication. That was what it was called at the time. It was bursting at the seams. Mass communication was new. 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. 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 4 x 4. You were encouraged to teach a fifth course every semester for a little bit of extra 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 one time once told me that mass communication was applied liberal arts. And I don't know if it's true, but you know, it's an interesting way of putting in. In other words, I'm studying something that has some value, but it's also very, very practical and applied. 09:32 RM: How many years were you here teaching? PL: 32 and a half, because I started in January. So sometimes I say 32, sometimes I say 33. 09:45 RM: And over what time period? PL: So I started in January 1983 and finished in June 2015. 9:58 RM: And what kinds of courses where you teaching? PL: I must have taught 25-30 different courses here at Towson. But in saying that, I'm counting special topics, 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. They get a syllabus. They change it slightly every year. 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 scriptwriting for a while. I taught documentary, I taught esthetics 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. Intro to Film when I first came was a kind of production course. I taught several graduate courses. The one that I remember was called Media Interrelationships. And there were occasional forays into other kinds of courses like Honors College, that sort of thing. 11:22 RM: 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? PL: So that that was an interesting moment. Mass communication was very, very big. We had 1200 or 1300 students, we had 20 some faculty. 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 confused, maybe a little depressed. They weren't getting much of a sense of community. And there was another issue, which is that the major was very diffused. It was a little bit of a lot of different things. And I could 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. 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, yeah, they would teach you how to do a commercial or a PSA or a corporate documentary, but their hearts were in film art. And then in-between there were these other areas advertising, journalism, other kinds of things. So, both in terms of curriculum and even culturally, 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 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 of years until it was just too worn out and I threw it away. So by the time I got Towson, my black leather jacket days were over. So anyway, there was a whole lot of difference within the department. And the dean at that time was Maravene Loeschke. She very much wanted to see more links between mass communication and the other fine arts department. And she thought that if we separated out film and television, that would create more connections between this building—we’re in the Fine Arts building right now—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. 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. But on the other hand, television and film were really merging at that point. They were becoming the same thing. Now they're really are the same thing. So there was a pretty important reason to keep those two together in any new configuration. Maravene very much wanted the split between departments, and it seemed that the deciding vote was going to be John Haeger, who was the provost at the time. My impression was that he could have argued either way. We were in a couple of meetings with him and I wasn't sure where he was going to come down on it. But he decided that there should be a new department. Maravene could be very persuasive. And so that probably is what swayed him. 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. 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 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. 16:00 RM: Were you ever an administrator anywhere along the way? PL: 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. 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 a self-study departmental review, which came every several years. This involved analyzing what you've done 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%. But aside from that, no, I was never an administrator. I always wanted to focus on research. You know, in the time that I have left over from teaching, I always wanted to do research. And so that that made it less attractive. 17:17 RM: Good decision. I know you were involved with the Literature Film Association. Why don't you tell us about that? PL: 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 of place it was. And the editor was an English professor named Jim Walsh, 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 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 methodologies. So he decided he was going to start his own association, which he called the Literature Film Association. He had a conference at Salisbury in 1990. 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. So I ended up doing five Literature Film conferences at Towson, and getting very involved in the organization. I had some help, good help at Towson University from my colleagues, Bill Horne and Greg Faller. We were bringing 60 or 80 faculty from other institutions, to Towson from all over the country, a few international scholars. 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 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. He was supposed to speak in a 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. 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. So I explained the situation. She met him in the driveway and she said one word, Towson. He turned around, came to our venue. 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 until about 9:15-9:30. 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 Walsh also got me involved in some other things. There was an international group called the IAMS, 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. And I started going to those conferences. 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 Europeans on media, 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. 21:55 RM: Are there any Literature Film Association records from the conferences here on campus? Are there any of those records over in Cooke Library? PL: Probably not. 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. 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. 22:38 RM: We need to get them here. PL: We can actually inquire about whether people would want to see that here. For a while, we had on campus the Berkshire 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 operated by Marriott. Airport connection was very good. You could walk to downtown Towson for dinner. All that was great. We didn't offer them enough business, I guess because the hotel eventually became student housing. I guess it was a money loser. 23:22 RM: Do you personally have a favorite film of all time? PL: I’m going to give you three. RM: That’s okay. PL: And then I'm going to read you what I wrote in answer to the same question in 1997. Okay. So my three would be: for foreign films, Pierrot le Fou, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, and for American films a conventional choice, Vertigo, 1958, generally considered the best Alfred Hitchcock film, for documentary an unconventional choice, Faces Places, 2017, directed by Agnès Varda and still photographer J.R. That's as narrow as I can get it. Well, let me read you what I said 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. 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. 24:46 RM: Very good. And now you're doing the film club for TURFA. And it's very much appreciated. PL: Yeah, that's been a lot of fun. 24:57 RM: It is. It is. You also were on the College Promotion and Tenure Committee. Tell us something about your experience there. PL: As soon as I became an associate professor, I was elected to be the at-large member of the College Promotion and Tenure Committee. That was interesting because I was by far the most junior person on that committee. And then a couple of years later, Richard Vatz, 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. 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 theater, Ruth Drucker, Joe Briscuso in music. I was impressed by how seriously they took this job, by the care that they took, by their empathy for other faculty members. Joe Briscuso was the chair of the committee for a couple of years. John Manlove was the next chair, and I learned a lot from him. 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&T, for a long time, and again, it's because the material kept changing, The decisions kept changing and it 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. 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 the provost, not about myself, but about other COFAC faculty. And I lost that one, which was not surprising because of the power differential. 27:32 RM: And who were the deans? Was there more than one dean while you were on that committee? PL: Oh, there were a bunch of deans starting with Gilbert Braungardt. Okay. Gilbert Braungardt, Alex Aronovich, Maravene Loeschke, Kit Spicer, Susan Picinich. I worked with all of them. 27:53 RM: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your research. Would you talk to us about it? PL: In my field, it's really book publication, which is the most important component of research as opposed to the sciences where it's refereed articles. So I published five books of film history. Plus there's an anthology about film adaptations of literature co-edited with Jim Walsh. I developed 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. Eventually, I specialized in American films because the audience was bigger. So I’ll go through the books really quickly. 28:47 RM: Please do. PL: So the first one was about a French filmmaker, Claude Lelouch. 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, the number of citations for a scholarly work. So that one had a lot of other people drawing from it. The third one was the American Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions, which sold a lot of copies. And then there was The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959 which was part of the Scribner's History of the American Cinema series, which is still the definitive multi-volume set of American film history. I'm very proud of that one. There was the anthology with Jim Walsh (The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation), and then the last one was Twentieth Century Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, which is about 1934 to 1964, something like that. 29:56 RM: And then we learned recently about some work that you had done or got recognized by the Academy. PL: In 2009, I won a grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for something called the Academy Scholars Program. 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 many more today. So,100 applicants, 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 Wisconsin, places like that. So, here comes Peter Lev from Towson. So it really did give Towson a lot of visibility in my field. And so I had to accept the award and give a short talk at a luncheon, which was at the Beverly Hills Hotel, which a very iconic Hollywood place. And then I think because of that, there were a few other awards. So in 2010, I won the President's Award for Distinguished Service to Towson 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. And so, my books, and particularly this award from the Motion Picture Academy were part of his effort to do that. In 2011, I won the Jim Walsh Award for Career Achievement in Adaptation Studies, which was from the Literature Film Association. I was the third person to win that award, and that's just recognition by peers, which is really nice. And then in 2014, I'd finished my book. 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 are about 120 people there. My family, my friends, UCLA colleagues, film scholars, members of the academy, including the past president, the current president, the future president. Sid Ganis, who was the president of the academy when I won the award in 2009, had worked at 20th Century Fox in New York. So he promised me an interview. 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 high point of my career. 33:09 RM: Wonderful, absolutely wonderful. 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 period? PL: Well, the enrollment grew, but not enormously. I think there were about 15,000 students or 16,000 when I started, and it got up to 22,000 or 23,000. Towson has become much more of a residential campus, which means that there's more of an emphasis on extracurricular activities. And you have to invest in things like a state of the art gym and things like that. There was a kind of old rundown gym at Burdick Hall when I started. The students are more middle class, I think a little more upscale than they 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. 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 faculty members. 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. Towson, 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 people who aren't connected to the university. But, you know, it's just sort of peculiar because the other universities our size or smaller do have this kind of college town environment. Towson is now colonizing downtown Towson, with the kind of housing options that are available. And I think we've matured as more of a research institution. Teaching still comes first, but I think there's a lot more research going on than when I started. 33:47 RM: After you retired, did you do any more teaching? PL: I taught one course as an adjunct a year after I retired. I enjoyed touching base with the students again, 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 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 fall of 2021. I was still worried about COVID, but I hope to rejoin them at some time in the future. And then I'm also coordinating this monthly film group for the Retired Faculty Association (TURFA). It's not teaching, but in terms of the exchange of ideas between small group of people, it sometimes feels that way. 36:59 RM: What were you teaching at Osher? PL: I taught a course on documentary. Taught a course about Cleopatra in the arts, which is an obsession of mine based on the reading, the biography by Stacy Schiff. I taught it first at the Honors College when I was full-time faculty, and the Honors College kids didn't like it so much, but the Osher students loved it, absolutely loved it. Somehow their traditional education, which thinks you ought to learn about people like Julius Caesar and Cleopatra and Mark Antony, is still working for my generation, but maybe not for the 20-year-olds. So film history courses and also this kind of interdisciplinary course about Cleopatra. 37:53 RM: Did you get to choose those topics? PL: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. RM: And you don't have to grade papers. PL: I don't have to grade papers. Although my first Osher class when I was still teaching was actually solicited by Jackie Gratz, who was the head of Osher at that time. She said, I want you to teach a course about Jewish contributions to Hollywood. So I did that. I've actually taught it twice there, and I decided I liked Osher and kept going. 38:26 RM: 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've had in your film classes? PL: 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. The first students I had seem to be very much involved in work as well as school. I think the preparation is different. When we first started, everything was analog. Now you need to know a whole lot about computers to do well in certain aspects of media studies. So, I think Towson students aren't that different. I mean, of course, my last exposure was to the fall of 2016. 39:26 RM: That’s not that long ago. Would you have made any changes in terms of how you were laying out your career? Would you have any changes along the way in terms of what you were doing? PL: The only one I might have changed was maybe get out of graduate school quicker, start a career, start a family quicker. As I said, I really enjoyed being a UCLA graduate students and so I sort of lingered. There was a fellow student of mine in graduate school who went through the Ph.D. program in two and a half years, which was astonishing. That’s because 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. Took me five and a half years after three years in a master's program. 40:23 RM: You’ve hinted at some of this already, but let’s see if we can get a little bit more information on how the pedagogy in film studies has changed over the course of your career. PL: It used to be very hard to see films. You know, you were dependent on what showed up in the theater. You could rent something on 16 mm 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. 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. 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. It used to be very expensive to make a film. You had to buy 16 mm film and processing. Students could spend like a couple thousand dollars on a short film just on the actual film stock. That was the major cost. That disappeared now. It's all digital. Put it on a disc. It just doesn't cost very much. Put it on a hard drive, whatever. So big changes there. Some things haven't changed so much in terms of the production jobs, script writing's about the same. Directing is about the same. Editing is different, much more technical and involved with computers. There are still jobs out there, and students with the same kind of preparation that we were giving them in the 1980s are getting jobs. 42:10 RM: You were involved in some innovations in teaching at Towson. PL: So I want to first just talk about interdisciplinary things. 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. 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. I had them writing scripts, writing a poem that had a graphic dimension like EE Cummings, we did a video, we did some kind of acting exercise, acting play like exercise. We did not do painting or sculpture because I'm terrible at that. We did movement one day, but I invited Jane to lead that. So we were all dancing in a certain way, including me. 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. The honors college students 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 connecting to what I'm going to need as I go forward for a career. I had students in things like computer science and homeland security in that course. They were from all over the university. It was fine, but it was kind of a relief 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 —Gerry Phillips in music and me. That was trying to come to grips with structuralist and poststructuralist theories which proposed that, you could look at the whole of the humanities and the fine arts with one methodology, which was from structural linguistics and Freudian psychology, Marxism, combined all that together. So there are about 15 faculty involved in that. David Bergman, from English, was the first chair of that community. He was a poet who also taught literature, you know, a publishing poet. 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. So there was a minor, but there were probably 10 or 12 students in the minor. Towson students are very practical. And so if you tell them, you have a choice, we can teach you this really complicated way to critique advertising or we can teach you how to do an advertising campaign. They're likely to choose the advertising campaign. So, eventually I drifted away. But the interesting thing about that group to me was just the opportunity to meet people from all over the university, people like John Murungi in philosophy, David Bergman in English, people and from modern languages and so on. People from anthropology. Fairly late in my career, there was initiative started by Luz 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, wasn't a very good course, but at least there was an attempt. SoLuz thought that we could benefit by taking some time to think about methods of teaching even after we were successful. And she brought together one person from each college to try to do that. I enjoyed it and I and we had to come up with some sort of a project. 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 try to get students working with primary sources rather than with just film reviews and things like that. And I remember, for example, going with an independent studies student to the state archives in Annapolis and digging into their censorship files. The state of Maryland was one of the last states to have a censorship office, even after film was declared protected by the First Amendment in the early 1950s. And the head of the state office, Agnes Avara (Mary Avara), had these epic tangles with John Waters in his early days. 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, and she was a great character. She was just tremendously enthusiastic about what she was doing. 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. 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. I hope that this idea had better effect elsewhere. It was good for my teaching, but it didn't necessarily influence other faculty. Luz did this for a couple of years and then it stopped. But she had the provost’s ear for at least a short period of time and was able to do this experiment. 49:24 RM: When you first came to Towson, and here was a group of students interested in film, 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? PL: There are careers in film and in media. Some of them are pretty straightforward. Like you can be a grip, which means setting up lights and things like that, doing technical things. There are local markets. 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 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 has gotten more decentralized so that Atlanta, for example, is a 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, who's working all the time in Atlanta in entry level grip production assistant jobs. He's working for big companies like Marvel, Amazon. So there are still jobs out there. And then, of course, film history is more like a humanities subject. So you can study that and do anything. And, you know, I had students that wanted to do music, and wanted to learn about film and esthetics of film, just as an example. But yeah, you could go to law school or anything. 51:27 RM: But when you first came here, this was basically a teacher's college. Was there any connection between a student interested in film and teaching? PL: It wasn't basically a teachers college, it recently blossomed. It had recently changed, certainly, and gotten much bigger. I don't know exactly when that happened, but it was it was before my time here. So, yeah, the university was always changing and growing and it was an exciting time even though we were busy. 51:59 RM: What kinds of new careers have been developing in film? PL: Certain aspects of film are merging with computer technology in different ways so that, for example, somebody that works in the Office of Technology Services here might also be a video editor. Those skills are very complementary. Still photography and digital video are very compatible. So there’s a kind of merging of careers that's happening. 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. Art department takes the point of view that anything with visual arts as “us” and film departments says well moving images “us” and there's this inbetween area that 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. Animation, there's been a certain amount of sharing between the two departments. Animation is another area that's become very connected to computer science and digital special effects. Wow. 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. You might have 100 or 200 people working on it. What are their backgrounds? Is it computer science or is it art 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 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? 54:11 RM: Suppose an 18, 19 or 20 year old interested in film history calls you up or texts you or contacts you in some way and says, I'm interested in a career where I can really focus on film history. What kind of advice would you give to that person? PL: Well, probably the main way to do that is to go to school and get your get your master's degree and get your Ph.D., which qualifies you to teach, because it's really the teaching that's going to make you a living rather than the writing. The life of a freelance writer is difficult. You know, there are people that make a living that way. About once a year, twice a year, I get a call from somebody who's writing an article about film history, who's probably a journalist rather than a scholar. They want to ask me a few questions, which they'll use in the article. I got a call from somebody in the U.K. about a year ago. He was writing an article for the Daily Telegraph about the film The Longest Day. I think it was it was the anniversary of what have been 1961, so it would have been 2021. And he said, you know, I write for The Daily Telegraph and several other publications on really tight deadlines because you had to make a living. So I think the academic route still exists. 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 school class, but she told me, “I decided what I wanted to do in my life. I want to be like you and do film history.” She was one of the craziest students that I ever taught in 32 years. 56:12 RM: Do we want to say what happened? PL: 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. 56:26 RM: Let’s go back to talking about Towson University but this time in the future. Where do you see this university going in the next 10 to 20 years? PL: 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. 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, hybrid kinds of models for teaching. 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 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 your classes, your faculty. One of this things that scares me very much is that an AI can write a pretty good term paper. And, you know, in my field, I assigned a whole lot of term papers and I read a whole lot of mediocre term papers, and AI can probably do as well. So, I mean, one of the things that I tried to do when I was writing, there were already people that would write a term paper for you for a fee. So I tried to choose topics that would be difficult for them to handle. But I'm not sure that I could do that for an AI. So we have to adjust to that in one way or another. It’s been suggested that we might require handwritten papers so that, you know, AI probably is not good at cursive. Or have people write in a room, write answers to essay questions rather than an emphasis on outside papers. It's a real dilemma because I think writing skills are terribly, terribly important. There's no reason that the pace of technology in terms of pedagogy is going to get any slower. It's changed enormously in the 40 or 50 years of my experience, and it's just going to keep going. 59:14 RM: Well, that's very insightful and I'm glad I'm not teaching. Thank you, Peter. This is 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. PL: Thank you, Ron. It has been a pleasure.