An ICS Alumnus Bets on Film School as Hollywood Contracts

Coleman Weimer enrolled in the University of Southern California's MFA program in Film and Television Production in the fall of 2023, just as Hollywood's labor market finished cratering. SAG-AFTRA's strike, the longer of that year's two industry-shutting strikes, had ended barely two weeks before Weimer sat down with Students Incorporated that November. The industry he was training to join was already shedding jobs at a pace it still hasn't fully recovered from. An International Community School of Bangkok alumnus, Weimer talked with the show about film school, and what came out was less a curriculum recap than a real-time account of betting a career on an industry mid-contraction.

A Contraction With No Real Bottom Yet

Entertainment employment fell nearly 20% in 2023, and by early 2025 it was still running about 25% below its 2022 peak, according to industry studies reported by Deadline. Shooting days in Los Angeles County dropped 42% in 2024 compared with 2022, and the Writers Guild of America found that television writing jobs fell 42% in the first season after the strikes, with entry-level roles (staff writers, story editors) down 46%. Only about a quarter of the jobs lost during the strikes had come back by early 2025, and the share of industry workers still based in Los Angeles or New York fell from roughly half to about a third over that stretch, according to Marketplace.

The strikes weren't only about pay. Writers and actors were fighting over streaming residuals that hadn't kept pace with the old broadcast-syndication model, and over the first contract language governing studios' use of artificial intelligence to generate scripts or digital replicas of performers. Both unions won real concessions on each front, but the production slowdown that followed didn't reverse once the contracts were signed. The Hollywood Reporter's 2024 reporting on Los Angeles crews carried the headline "The Industry Is Not Back," describing work that still hadn't returned months after the strikes technically ended.

The bleeding has slowed but not stopped. By early 2026, states were locked in an incentive arms race to win productions back: New York now runs an $800 million annual tax-credit program, and California more than doubled its own cap to $750 million last July. Early data shows some of the runaway production returning: California approved 53% more incentive-qualified projects than a year earlier, but the competition is now global as much as interstate. New Zealand just added hundreds of millions of dollars to its own production rebate, and Marvel moved "Avengers: Doomsday" to London's Pinewood Studios rather than shoot it at home. Weimer walked into film school at the exact moment that map started being redrawn.

Buying an Insider's Ticket

If the industry was contracting, Weimer's read was that the way in was still through the door with the strongest name attached to it. USC's cinema program, he said, is "considered an industry-plugged school," one where working filmmakers regularly teach classes and where a screening can turn into drinks with a visiting director, as it did for him the semester a filmmaker from Laos came to speak to his cohort. He described alumni who talk about the network in almost familial terms: "it's kind of a mafia," he said, "and they talk about it that way."

That reputation is not new, and the school leans on it deliberately. USC's own alumni roster includes Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios; visual-effects pioneer John Knoll; and, decades earlier, George Lucas, who Weimer noted "had a really hard time making some of his films" as a student there before making "Star Wars." The pipeline is still actively reinforced: in November 2025, Feige made what USC called a "transformational" endowment gift to the school, and its Film and Television Production division (the one Weimer studies in) was renamed in his honor.

That access comes at a price that has only climbed since Weimer enrolled. USC's cinematic arts tuition for 2025-2026 runs $2,624 per unit; the MFA production track requires a minimum of 52 units, putting tuition alone north of $136,000 before fees, housing, or the cost of making films. Weimer's cohort admits 60 students twice a year, a small gate into a program that treats its size and brand as part of the price.

Weimer treated that price as worth comparison-shopping. He also applied to the American Film Institute's conservatory program and to Chapman University in Orange County, sitting through interviews previewing daily life under each faculty. What settled it, he said, was USC being "right in the heart of L.A." and striking the best balance of the three: rigorous, but not so demanding it came at a student's expense. That geography put him within walking distance of the screenings, Q&As, and after-parties he called the industry's real informal hiring pipeline.

Choosing Craft Over Commerce

For all the industry talk, Weimer said the business side of filmmaking holds little appeal for him. He tried an entrepreneurship class as an undergraduate at George Fox University and dropped it within days. What he traced his real education to, instead, was a poetry class taught by a professor he'd first seen playing banjo onstage. "A metaphor is where you keep the cows in," the professor told his students, a joke about meadows and pastures that took Weimer a moment to land, and that reframed how he thought about editing. "You're writing this image and then this image and then this image," he said of both poems and films. "Essentially, you're creating a series of shots that you're cutting together."

That instinct (chase the image, worry about the money later) runs against how many working directors describe surviving the business. Weimer's networking philosophy leans the same way: introduce yourself honestly to filmmakers whose work you liked, he said, because "real recognize real." It's a low-stakes version of what a contracting industry makes higher-stakes for everyone: with fewer entry points, informal, who-you-actually-know connections matter more as the formal hiring pipeline shrinks.

I'm willing to be scrappy until then.

What "Making It" Actually Pays

Weimer was candid about the math working against a directing career even in a healthy market. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual wage for producers and directors at $83,480 in May 2024, but that figure hides a wide spread: entry-level project work can pay as little as roughly $19,000, while the top tier clears well over $150,000, and most working directors piece together corporate video, advertising, or streaming work between the projects they want to make. Weimer's goalpost was modest by that standard: not fame, but a "livable income making feature films" within ten years, achieved by staying "scrappy" through the years when it doesn't pay.

That matches the labor data from his industry. The jobs that once absorbed young filmmakers between their own projects (staff writing gigs, entry-level crew slots, the below-the-line work that used to be reliably available in Los Angeles) are the same roles that contracted hardest after 2023. A film-school credential from a well-connected program doesn't reverse that math; it's a bet that network and training close the gap enough to survive the years before a career becomes sustainable.

Weimer traced that survival instinct back to Bangkok, not Los Angeles. What he said he missed most about ICS wasn't a class or a teacher but the scale of the place: "everyone knows everyone," in a school small enough that classmates and teachers all knew him by name, a familiarity that vanished the moment he left. Even now, in "one of the mega cities," he said the roots planted at ICS are what he leans on. It's a smaller, more personal version of the same bet his industry is making at the state and national level: specific, well-tended relationships get you through a market that won't make it easy.

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