Do We Still Need Film Schools?

Let’s start with the name: Film school.

Film? Seriously?

It’s right there in the title — already behind the curve.

But let’s park that for now.

If you work in the legacy business long enough, someone will corner you at a wedding or a kid’s soccer game and ask: “Should my kid go to film school?”

The answer was always “Maybe” ten years ago. Now?

Film schools know they have challenges. I hear it from deans, professors, students. I love these places. I’m not here to write their obituary just the opposite I’m rooting for them to thrive. I don’t know how admissions are going these days but if the students who graduate aren’t prepared for the world we are living in that’s going to catch up to them. And fast.

To adapt they might have to change in ways they’re not built for right now.

The old debate — worth it or not — has been running since the first graduating class. Scorsese credits NYU. Paul Thomas Anderson bailed from that school after two days. Same industry, opposite roads.

Full disclosure: I went to film school after eight years writing in Latin America — hundreds of hours of TV and a feature under my belt. I thought I knew something. I learned more than I could have imagined. And loved every minute. It gave me something unique: three years immersed in the work, surrounded by people who spoke the same obsessive language, teachers and students.

I remain committed and connected.

My company sponsors an award every year. I teach a class there. I still call a handful of professors for advice. I screen rough cuts for feedback from my closest classmates. I’ve sold multiple projects to studios and have made three features with fellow alums. For me the ROI has been huge.

But if I were 25 today? Facing an industry reshaped by AI, the creator economy, and collapsing entry-level jobs? Would I get the same return?

The maybe answer hasn’t changed — but what maybe means has.

Ten years ago, maybe meant: it depends on you. Are you a go-getter? Do you learn better on your feet or in a classroom? Do you need time to pivot from a previous career?

Today, maybe means: it depends if the school is reinventing itself.

And reinvention isn’t optional.

What Film School Was

In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the big studios controlled everything — production, distribution, and exhibition. The agencies grew alongside them, formalizing how talent was discovered, developed, and deployed. Their business model was clear: control the pipeline of actors, writers, and directors into the studio system, and you control the leverage.

When that tightly controlled apprenticeship system began to crack after the 1948 Paramount antitrust ruling and fully collapsed in the 1960s with the rise of independent productions, agency power grew. With talent no longer under contracts with the studios, they could package which gave them enormous leverage.

Film schools (which started booming in the 60’s) were, in many ways, the academic mirror of agencies:

• Agencies scouted raw talent and plugged it into the studio machine.

• Film schools trained raw talent and plugged it into the studio machine.

Both relied on the same assumption: that “breaking in” meant entering the Hollywood system. Agencies cultivated relationships with studios; film schools cultivated feeder networks into those same studios.

By the late ’60s and early ’70s, this overlap was visible in the careers of the first “film school brats” — Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese — who were signed by agencies straight out of school and ushered into the system just as agencies were becoming the true power brokers.

Today both systems confront the same existential challenge: in the creator economy, agencies and film schools alike are often bypassed. The old leverage — access to Hollywood — doesn’t hold the same weight when you can build an audience without ever stepping foot on a studio lot.

Los Angeles is an industry town. Film schools didn’t just mint the next George Lucas — they quietly staffed the whole machine. USC, UCLA, NYU, AFI, Columbia, Emerson, Chapman, CalArts, Loyola, Wesleyan (and many more) have long been pipelines into Hollywood. Their alumni win Oscars and Emmys, run studios and agencies, and fill every corner of the business.

Collectively, they haven’t just trained storytellers — they’ve built the infrastructure the industry runs on. If those structures crumble, the pipelines crumble with them.

The Two Earthquakes

Everyone knows what’s happened to our business. Still, if you just thawed out from an Austin Powers–style cryogenic deep freeze, here are the two forces shaking the ground under us:

• The creator economy — bringing direct-to-consumer storytelling

• AI — evolving so fast that anyone pretending to know its limits is guessing.

Even the most prepared professors can’t keep up — a syllabus designed over a year can be obsolete in a single semester once new models drop. Students sometimes find themselves ahead of faculty.

Together, these forces have blown up the old order.

Legacy media is contracting, creators are building empires from their bedrooms, and AI is threading through every stage of production. The pathways film schools once fed are disappearing.

Less content gets made, which means fewer jobs.

The feeder system that once trained new generations — writers’ rooms, kids’ TV, low-budget indies, even studio apprenticeships and agency mailrooms — has been gutted.

The talent hasn’t disappeared, it’s just moved. It’s flowing into the creator economy, which is already becoming the training ground for the next wave of filmmakers (to the degree that want to make film and TV in the traditional structure). We already see this in how studios are scouting and making deals.

And if film schools want to matter, they have to treat that shift as central, not peripheral.

How Schools Are Responding (or Not)

Many top schools are signaling they’re future-ready — new buildings, shiny equipment, virtual production stages. Across the country, they’re also standing up splashy AI centers and new courses. But too often it feels like an arms race over tools, not a reinvention of pedagogy: upgrades not a reinvention of the playbook.

And for all the tech talk, it feels like almost no one is talking loudly about the creator economy.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what film schools are offering and my company’s robust intern program gives me a windows into the top schools they come from.

Maybe I’m missing what’s happening behind closed doors amongst deans and faculty. Maybe there’s a future-facing plan in the works.

But here’s the challenge: if were not seeing it today, its too late. Tomorrow will be different.

Hacking the Classroom: Alt-Ed

There are more ways than ever to learn the craft. YouTube and TikTok aren’t just entertainment — they’re giant, free classrooms and distribution platforms rolled into one. The same tools MrBeast uses to engineer 100-million-view videos are available to anyone with a phone and Wi-Fi.

And the formal alternatives for creators to sharpen their skill set are also multiplying:

• Content Academy teaches short-form content, personal branding, and monetization.

• Creator Now calls itself a “YouTuber film school,” with Yes Theory, Zach King, and Ryan Trahan teaching growth.

• Curious Refuge integrates AI into filmmaking — recently acquired by Promise to build an AI talent pipeline.

• Nas Academy offers AI-driven courses on content, marketing, and entrepreneurship.

• Creator Film School covers planning, shooting, editing, and audience growth.

And a personal favorite—

• Creator Camp builds “internet-first” filmmakers through education retreats and its own film festival.

These models don’t ask for three years of your life. They work like the creator economy itself — iterative, fast-moving, and built for constant reinvention. Education becomes something you tap into when you need it, not a place you disappear into.

The Argument for a Reimagined School

I got a lot from film school, as I’ve said.

The biggest gift it gave me was TIME.

Time to slow down, think deeply, and actually learn.

In a world of infinite content and AI tools that level the playing field, what separates you isn’t access to software, it’s two things: how well you tell a story, and how well you connect it to an audience. That’s where a reimagined “film school” could still matter.

Because if AI can give you anything, then taste, craft and point of view are the only things that keep you from being a copy of a copy. That’s why I’ve followed Darren Aronofsky’s move into AI with his project Primordial Soup. Since Pi right out of AFI, he’s been provocative, daring, sometimes controversial — but always a student of cinema. His work draws on Kubrick, Fellini, Polanski, Tarkovsky — a lineage of images and ideas that shaped him. And that matters.

Ask AI to make a Darren Aronofsky film, and it will remix what he’s already done. Ask Aronofsky to use AI, and he’ll build on what he’s learned to make something new.

But shaping a point of view isn’t enough. You also have to know how to move it through the world — distribution, audience, community. The creator economy drives the attention that fuels content, and connecting your work to the people who need to see it is as essential as making it.

So maybe film school still applies — if maybe means buying time to go deeper. If maybe means letting the future be inspired by the past. If maybe means learning not just how to tell a story, but how to carry it into the world.

In that sense, maybe it’s exactly what you need.

How I’d Build a Film School Today (and Not Call It That)

This is an AND conversation.

Film schools of today should be both the best of what they already are AND the best of where it’s all going.

Tradition and evolution need to sit side by side — not as rivals, but as partners.

There are three legs to this stool:

Leg One: Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals

In a world of infinite content, the fundamentals of storytelling haven’t changed — and they won’t.

Screenwriting. Directing. Acting. Editing, Producing.

Every student should make raw stories with the simplest of tools. Strip it down until story is all that’s left. This is how you build bones that last.

Leg Two: Fundamentals, Fundamentals, Fundamentals… of the Creator Economy

If the old fundamentals are about story, the new fundamentals are about scale, connection and entrepreneurial savvy. This has to be foundational and constantly evolving, because the platforms will never stop shifting under our feet.

Core skills:

• Concept creation and the language of the internet.

• Audience connection and community-building.

• Data listening without becoming a slave to metrics.

• Distribution and platform literacy.

• Entrepreneurial thinking: every creator is also a studio head now.

A friend recently suggested another core requirement — every student (together or separately) should launch their own channel. They should develop a voice and POV. They don’t have to be on camera — there are a thousand ways to do it. But they must build audience, they must engage, and yes — they should be graded on it. Because even if they don’t become creators, they will depend on this system for everything they do.

Leg Three: AI: Non-Negotiable

I don’t care if you want to be the next Sean Baker, Mike Leigh, or Satyajit Ray — AI literacy is mandatory. Even the most humanist filmmakers will need AI in their pipeline, whether or not it shows up in the final product. Costs will only come down through AI workflows. This isn’t optional — it’s survival.

Industry recruiters already say they’re less interested in raw talent than in fluency with the tools shaping tomorrow’s workflows. Which is why education around AI can’t be an elective or a side seminar — it has to be consistent, foundational, part of the core curriculum.

For those who want to go further and create directly with the tools, they should — and for the best storytellers, that’s where things will get really interesting. Every school should have an in-house AI lead: someone tracking changes week by week, experimenting in real time, and building pipelines that students can test, break, and learn from.

Modularity and Industry Integration

For the creator and AI legs of this stool, don’t force semester-long courses when the industry moves in much faster intervals. Modularity is the model: week-long intensives, three-day seminars, one-day conferences.

Bring in the best working professionals—but don’t expect them to commit to a full semester. And it can’t be scattershot. The pieces need logic, flow, and connection, all plugged back into foundational storytelling.

And schools can’t just teach about the creator economy; they need to plug into it. That means real partnerships with platforms, internships with creator-led studios, and pipelines into the new economy as robust as Hollywood’s old internship model once was.

Start Creator Residencies. Bring in a YouTuber, podcaster, or streamer to make content with students for their actual channel — and don’t claim ownership. Too many universities insist on owning classroom work; this should be applied learning. Creators get leverage, students get hands-on experience, and the content goes out to real audiences in real time. (Anyone remember UT Austin’s Burnt Orange from 15 years ago? A production company tied to the school that produced and funded features with students in the crew. The model didn’t last, but the spirit was interesting.)

Choose Your Track(s)

Once the fundamentals are in place — Storytelling, Creator Economy, AI, Modularity — students can choose their path: features, TV, digital-first content, podcasts, gaming, or emerging formats our little can’t even fathom yet. The goal isn’t locking into one medium, but learning to move fluidly across them.

Maybe thats too broad for one school. Or maybe its worth contemplating.

And Yes… Stop Calling It Film School

Does it make me a little sad? Absolutely. It carries real meaning to me. But you know what would make me sadder? Watching these institutions disappear.

“Film school” feels like a relic of a single medium. Some programs already call themselves Film & TV schools, but even that misses the point. The future is plural — film, TV, streaming, podcasts, games, creator-led channels, whatever comes next.

Call it Story Lab. Call it Future Media. Call it Narrative Arts. Call it Creator School (because everyone who tells stories is a creator — not all are filmmakers).

Maybe USC gets a pass with Cinematic Arts but its not a bullseye either.

Find something that captures both the now and what’s to come.

The Agility Imperative

Hollywood struggles now because it can’t adapt quickly. The same risk exists for education. Future schools have to stay light on their feet, evolving as fast as the tools do.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been socializing all these ideas with friends and colleagues, and I posted a series of musings on Substack Notes that sparked thoughtful pushback.

The most common critiques went like this:

1. Do “fundamentals” even register anymore, with film itself feeling more niche and less central than it once was?

It’s true — film no longer sits at the center of culture. But fundamentals aren’t nostalgia; they’re transferable. Structure, visual language, emotional rhythm — those skills migrate across film, TV, TikTok, podcasts, even formats we haven’t named yet. Think of it like muscles: Google Translate can speak for you, but if you never learn or practice the language yourself, the muscles atrophy. Keep using them, and you develop instincts and opportunities that tools alone can’t provide.

2. Don’t creators already thrive without traditional craft, making schools irrelevant?

Of course some creators break out without craft. As have many filmmakers. But not all are equal. For every overnight success, countless others could level up with training. That’s what education does — it gives you a lever. The mistake is assuming there’s only one kind of creator or one path. Schools can elevate. And there is elevated creator content, just as there is elevated TV and film.

And TV and film aren’t disappearing. They’re smaller in scale, with fewer openings, but still part of the portfolio for many creators — and that crossover is already happening. Reducing everything to internet content would be like saying Broadway should have vanished when movie houses were born. It didn’t. Broadway still exists — and makes more money today, adjusted for inflation, than in the pre-cinema era. Playwrights still study. The craft of TV and film still matters — and it will moving forward.

3. Won’t the future of entertainment look nothing like today’s?

Doug Shapiro points out our skeuomorphic instincts: we assume AI will just make better TV and film instead of inventing entirely new forms that look nothing like it. And Colin and Samir, on their podcast, echo the concern that content could soon be AI-personalized on a one-to-one ratio.

And yes — that’s already starting to happen. But it won’t be everything we make or consume. Our job is to create work that transcends, that pulls people out of those isolated loops and back into shared experience. We can throw up our hands, or we can master the craft and claim the space for stories that still connect us. And we’ll need to keep evolving as the technology and audience does — there’s no other way to prepare for what’s coming that to keep moving forward.

Film school has always been a “maybe.” It asks for time and money, and the return was never guaranteed.

In today’s world of shrinking opportunities and new entry points, the “yes” side of that maybe is harder to argue. But if these schools adapt, they can still matter — not as temples of nostalgia, but as engines for what comes next.

Because things won’t collapse into one future—they’ll splinter. And in that splintering, a significant piece will still evolve from and benefit from cinematic language. Which means there’s still room—and a need.

Just don’t call them film schools.

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