Two cinema graduates win Academy’s student awards
Two recent graduates of the Division of Cinema have won awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
, Terence Cahalan and Lee M. Rhoads Jr. won their honors in the third Annual Student Film Awards sponsored by the Academy and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Cahalan won in the dramatic film category for his film. The Preparatory. The film is the story of an adolescent boy in a Catholic boarding school.
Rhoads won the Special Jury Award for his film, originally submitted in the documentary category, American Love Affair. The film documents the problems of the old Pacific Electric to retain its right of way to operate the trains that once served as public transportation for Los Angeles.
The competition, which was open to students at colleges and universities throughout the country, attracted 377 entries. There were 10 regional juries that cut the number of nominees down to 48, which were forwarded to the Academy for final judging by the members of the Academy. The 3,200 voting members of the Academy that judged the student
films are the same group that annually pick the winners of the Academy Awards.
Cahalan. who received his MFA in cinema, said work began on the film in spring, 1975 with work continuing through the winter.
“With all of the color processing, it was out of the lab and finished just in time for the deadline at the end of April,” Cahalan said.
The film was described as showing a boy growing up and hardening himself to the realities around him through the experiences he encounters with his fellow students and his teachers.
While it may be showing the growing up of a young boy. he grew up in the film in a redecorated university campus.
“We used the administration building, the men's locker room, Mudd Hall of Philosophy, the Physical Education building. We repainted ar\d decorated the buildings. We washed the paint off after we were done though,” Cahalan said.
•	Although Cahalan said that the film was not strictly autobiographical, he did attend Catholic boarding school for five years.
“It’s influenced by life and things I’ve seen. You do what you feel passionately about, and I’m passionate about the issues and themes in the film.
“The film is not really about Catholic boarding school but about adolescence. I’ve had people from very different backgrounds say they can identify with the film,” he said.
Both Cahalan and Rhoads won $1,000 awards for the winning efforts besides a mounted medallion embossed with the famous Academy symbol, Oscar. (The winners didn’t get actual statuettes of Oscar.) Rhoads actually got $1,001. The man who presented his award, Groucho Marx, kicked in an extra dollar. He said he would have given one writh his picture on it but he didn’t have any $50 bills with him.
Rhoads won for his examination of the old Pacific Electric lines. Clips from the film have been shown on television twice, first on KHJ-TV near the 1974 election and on KNXT earlier this month on election night. Both times there were measures on the ballot about rapid transit.
“I suppose the film will keep being shown as long as rapid transit keeps losing. Public transportation is essential to Los Angeles,” Rhoads said.
“I’m not from LA and when I came here in 1969 (from Virginia), I was amazed at the fact the LA has the worst public transportation. The people of Los Angeles . didn’t seem to recognize the need for alternate systems of public transportation.”
He said the real problems in the film was that it makes the corporations look like villains for the demise of the Pacific Electric, while the real problems were public apathy and lack of foresight.
Part of the film was completed in 1974, but not finished until 1976. Rhoades also received his MFA degree in cinema.
These are the second and third winners for the university in the three years of the awards. The jury award was won last year. UCLA has won two awards, while nine other schools have had one winner.
University of Southern California
Volume LXVIV, Number 4	,	Los	Angeles, California	Friday,	June	25,	1976
STRIVING FOR ACCURACY
Aid award letters may be sent by July 2
By Don La Plante
Editor
The Financial Aid office is striving to finish work on the awards for continuing students and hopes to be able to mail out award letters by July 2, said Clarke Howatt, acting associate director of Student Administrative Services.
While the office is trying to get the letters out as soon as possible, accuracy of the awards is the most important feature, said Howatt.
“We want to be able to send out one letter. Last year students got many letters. We want the one that goes out to be accurate,” he said.
One problem that came up recently that has delayed sending out renewal letters is that the list of California State Scholarship renewals will not be available until today and the office did not want to make renewals without accurate state scholarship information. The state list had been postponed due to internal problems in Sacramento.
The process was also slowed so that all awards could be checked against this year’s awards to make sure that the awards were consistent with policy. In the spring, the Student Administrative Services Commission approved a statement calling for no reduction in university gift aid from the previous year providing need stayed the same
and the student did not become ineligible.
To insure that the policy was followed, each award for next year was checked with this year’s to make sure the awards were consistent. Because of the lack of computer file with all of the students on it, this was done manually by the office staff and staff members from other departments.
So far this process of checking has been accomplished for about 3.000 undergraduate students. However, there are in excess fo 1,000 students for whom this cannot be done because of missing information.
Howatt said that among the missing information was the student’s state of residence, if the student is a new or returning student, or ifthe student was acampus resident or a commuter. All of these factors make a significant difference in the amount of a student’s award.
There are also special awards that must be processed into the computer to get final awards. Among these are the California Opportunity Grant winners, Trustee scholars, President’s scholars and renewable scholarships given by the School of Music, School of Journalism and the Forensics program. These have not yet been entered into the system.
Another problem has come up with the gift aid awards, said Howatt. The university requires that students have a “B” average to continue receiving gift aid. In the confu-
sion of the past two years, some students have been allowed to slip through who were n^>t eligible.
The pol icy does allow for a semester of grace and atthis point freshmen only have fall semester grades on their transcripts.
Later freshmen will be notified if they are on financial aid warning and must bring in either a 3.0 for the semester or cumulative gpa to retain their awards.
Students who have been ineligible for some time and who slipped through the system will have their gift aid discontinued.
Another headache for the office has been that the federal government has reduced its allocation for Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants almost in half.
“Because of this, some students who received the SEOG’s may not receive them next year,” Howatt said.
With James Jones becoming the acting director of Student Administrative Services on July 15, Howatt said heis optimistic things will work out.
“Obviously it will be more difficult for him without the background in details of student administrative services than for someone previously involved in it. But he comes with a good management background. I’m optimistic that it will work out,” Howatt said.
In the meantime the office is working to get the awards out early in July and hopefully, as accurately as possible.
Photo exhibit
begins run at Fisher Gallery
An exhibition showing recreational activities of the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries is open at the Fisher Gallery, 823 Exposition Blvd., until July 25.
The show of more than 100 photographs is entitled “Fastest Shutters in the West: Having Fun.”
At left is a photo entitled “Clowning,” taken at the Del Monte Hotel. The picture is on loan from the California Pictures. Collection of the California State Library.
The exhibition will be open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m. and on weekends from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The gallery is closed on Monday.
More than 3,000 photographs were examined before the ones for the show were selected. The pictures come from the collections of 12 California institutions.
The exhibition is the first of a number of showings planned by the gallery that is related to the bicentennial.
Summer
Trojan