June 1, 2024. My teaching buddy Mitch Block slipped away last night. Damn. Ah, time. decades of time.

Mitchell and I started co-teaching a class in Independent Film Business in 1979 and taught together for 30 semesters, Fall, Spring and Summer, for ten years, at USC School of Cinematic Arts and for the last 5 years at Cal Arts as well. Tuesday evenings at USC, Thursday evenings at Cal Arts. 40 classes together in 10 years. Mitch and I had a lot of meals together before all those classes.

Mitch got me started teaching, first inviting me to join him teaching at Art Center College of Design for a semester in 1978. I was an independent filmmaker just finishing my first independent movie and needed a job after spending all of my money on making that movie.

I can’t remember how we met – Mitch was from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia University Business School on the East Coast and he had parachuted into Los Angeles to work on a PhD at UCLA. Mitch played a key role in helping me get my then just finished 16mm documentary THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR qualified for Academy Award consideration when he suggested how to make a low cost 35mm print which was needed at the time for Academy qualification. He was always figuring out solutions which just flowed out all the time.

While I was learning about all of Mitchell’s film distribution ideas – every conversation was filled with brilliant ideas in every direction – we came up with the idea of teaching a class together about grant writing, budgeting, fund raising, and distribution – issues we both had experience with – and our class pitch to USC Cinema fell on deaf ears. While I was an alum, MB was from that other East Coast film school. I instead got invited to co-teach the USC Cinema 290 first production class with Mel Sloan, the teacher I took that class from a few years before. Things changed that semester in Spring 1979 when THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film got the Documentary Short Subject Academy Award and I told my faculty colleagues that Mitch Block and I wanted to teach that business class we pitched before. Summer semester 1979 led to 30 semesters teaching together, only occasionally one or the other of us missing a class. The class poster said the class was “SURVIVAL. What to do for ten years before you become an overnight success.” It was a serious class – thanks Mitch for having that Columbia MBA which had us well grounded, but we also had a lot of fun figuring out how to make the ideas stick.

We covered business forms for making movies: sole proprietorship, partnerships, and corporations. MB had a wonderful list he called The Ten Points of Partnership which had a cluster of much needed questions to answer when getting started working as partners. The first point, simple as it sounded, was “Firm name, identity of the partners”. Mitch would say ‘Let’s call our partnership Block/Shedd Productions” and I would, of course, say “Shedd/Block Productions sounds better.” Then shifting gear, I would suggest, “Mitch, let’s call our company Shlock Productions” combining our last names and Mitch would immediately reply “We should call it BS Productions” which immediately got us squabbling and showed how such a simple question – Firm Name – needs mediating right from the start. I have told that example story so many times in the past 45 years.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, we hosted an all day Saturday class session, with several guest speakers. That day was the first public presentation of the then brand new organization, the IDA/International Documentary Association.

Mitch and I were two young members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the early 1980s, and became voluntary members of the Short Film, Documentary and Student Academy Award nominating committees, serving with a bunch of movie industry elders. Committee elder member Saul Bass took us out to lunch in 1981 when I first joined the Academy and I remembering him telling Mitch and me, about the annual Academy Awards that “Some years you will agree with them and some years you won’t, and in the big picture it all works out.” Some of the committee members were June Foray, Norman Corwin, Ray Eames and later younger members like Frieda Lee Mock, which we were hanging out with every week in the Fall and Winter, screening documentaries and having a mid-evening snack. I recall one year on the Student Academy Award committee, we selected NYU recent Film School graduate Spike Lee’s film Joe BedStuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads as Best Student Film in 1983.

Mitch was a fabulous cook – I remember several multi-course meals coming out of his kitchen, as imaginative and original as his movie making ideas.

While we were teaching, Mitch was running his ever growing distribution company Direct Cinema Ltd. I loved that name Direct Cinema Ltd. Mitch’s private movie joke. Direct Cinema is the British phrase for Cinema Verité, meaning cinema truth, with Mitch’s wonderful twist adding Ltd/Limited at the end, as he was always searching for ways to ask how about how real was/is the documentary form. We showed his NYU film, his fake/real cinema verité documentary NO LIES, every semester in class to put that question front and center with all of the Cinema students flowing through our classes.

We started teaching 3 to 5 years before there were personal computers and the class assignments like budgets were done on calculators and there were many retyped versions of written grant proposals. Then when PCs and Macs showed up, we immediately added their business potentials and usefulness to our class teaching, with spreadsheets and word processors, and in our own film production and distribution companies. Mitch and I were featured together in a 1986 MacWorld Magazine business issue article called BEHIND THE HOLLYWOOD SCENES, about using our brand-new Macs in our businesses and teaching, as the first filmmaker and first film distributor to be using computers to run our independent companies. Photographer George Steinmetz did two wonderful portraits of Mitch and me at work for that article.

I left LA in 1989 when I was given a guest professorship teaching film at the University of New Mexico and Mitch stayed teaching at USC Cinema for decades.

I saw Mitch at several UFVA/University Film and Video Association film teacher conferences in the last 15 years while we were teaching at different places. At one of the Conferences, MB and I were invited to have dinner with the UFVA Board of Directors dinner and 7 of the 8 or 10 Board of Directors were former students of ours from USC Cinema and Cal Arts from decades before, now filmmakers and faculty themselves. [Photo of Mitch and me at UFVA Conference 2016]

Ah Mitch, so glad you got to spend some time living and teaching out of Los Angeles in Eugene Oregon at the University of Oregon in the last few years, along with your world travels spreading your movie making ideas all over the planet. Our teaching, from that first USC Cinema SURVIVAL class, did take each of us to so many places.

Mitch and Joanie were a great team, with a couple of smart cool kids, now adults.

Mitch still owes me some distribution royalties. I am sure I still owe him some things as well. Thanks Mitchell Block, my friend, for all the smart, vigorous times together.

There are more stories to tell about being with Mitch: learning and talking a lot about documentary aesthetics with Mitch and Betsy McLane; meeting Ken Burns when he had just finished his first feature Documentary BROOKLYN BRIDGE and was a young filmmaker sleeping on Mitch’s LA living room couch to save money; meeting the late feature film director Philip Borsos who had just finished his first feature film THE GREY FOX after getting a number of awards for his short film NAILS [which I still use in teaching documentaries] and Philip was sleeping on Mitch’s couch, too; making the documentary together about Ellen Stohl; sharing a roof-top penthouse Beverly Hills office for a year with Mitch and his Direct Cinema, Ltd company while writing the TROPICAL RAINFOREST Imax documentary script [and once riding up the 5 story elevator while there was an earthquake in Los Angeles]; being with Debra in those years; having a bunch of former USC Cinema and Cal Arts students raise production funds for projects they dreamed up in our Independent Film business class and seeing those finished films; laughing and sometimes not laughing while figuring out our way through our Hollywood movie lives; and more to add as I think more about all those times together…. Posted 3June2024