![]() I had pushed off taking Lit Hum till senior year and by the time I did I was a total know-it-all. Professor Shapiro was so brilliant but also so funny - a great lesson that the smartest points are often made with the sharpest wit. I loved movies and loved obsessing over them but not till I studied Orson Welles and Polanski (maybe that’s why I thought East Campus was so creepy?!) with Professor Insdorf did I start to think that working in movies was something I could actually do for the rest of my life. You could hear the wind howl in the air shaft almost all the time - I hope they’ve fixed that! But, still, I was so psyched to be at the school and I had already gotten all the partying out of my system, and had that transcript to recover from, so I think I spent as few hours as possible in my dorm room and the rest in the library.įilm classes with Annette Insdorf, English classes with James Shapiro ’77 and Lit Hum because of David Denby’65, JRN’66. It was sparsely occupied and I remember it being very eerie and weird to walk down these cold, brand-new haunted condo hallways. What do you remember about your first-year living situation?Įast Campus was fairly new when I transferred in and was considered the boondocks. That still is one of the most emotionally yo-yo-ing days I have had, but I remember such an enormous bounce in my step as I walked back across the quad and up the steps of Low Library to my dorm. They acknowledged I had an odd transcript and was a non-traditional transfer, but they liked my essays and each person wanted to tell me which was their favorite. But I went to Admissions the next day and they just wanted to meet me. They talked to someone at Vanderbilt, I thought. Miraculously, I was admitted and so it was with enormous pride that I moved my stuff into East Campus (with a silent “Hmph!” to the alum who said I would never get in) and then panic and dread when I heard that voicemail. I enrolled in the local branch of the University of Connecticut and started writing essays and “think pieces” (so ridiculous to use that phrase as a 19-year-old) for anyone who would publish them.Īt the end of the semester, I applied again but this time included a stack of the essays with a letter to the admissions group explaining what I had been doing with my time. ![]() But I was convinced it was the right school for me and I resolved that I would get in no matter what. Columbia may not be the right school for everyone.” Well, he was right and I did not get in. ![]() Sadly, though, I had a checkered transcript with lots of footnotes, and I remember the older alum who interviewed me saying, after hearing of my academic travails, “Well, I’m sure you will find a school that fits.” I asked him how he knew I wasn’t getting in to Columbia and he said, “I think you have to be honest with yourself. I came back to my childhood home in Connecticut sure about only one thing: I wanted to go to Columbia. I started at Vanderbilt but left after a desultory freshman year and spent the next year traveling through Europe without much of a plan and working on an archaeological dig in the Sinai desert. I had a non-traditional prelude to starting at Columbia and was admitted, I felt, by the skin of my teeth - which was only reinforced by a blinking light on my ROLM phone with a voicemail from the Admissions Office, asking me to stop by as soon as I could. What were you like when you arrived at Columbia? Additionally, he is a board member of the School of the Arts, and the Women in Film and Sundance Institute’s ReFrame Project Ambassador. Feig lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children and is a founding board member of LA’s Promise, a not-for-profit devoted to helping students and families in that city’s neediest neighborhoods, as well as a founding board member of The Systemic Change Project, a group dedicated to promoting gender balance in the entertainment industry. Films originated, supervised or produced by him include Academy Award winners La La Land and The Hurt Locker, The Hunger Games series, the Divergent series, the Twilight saga, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Mr. Erik Feig ’92 is the co-president of Lionsgate Motion Picture Group.
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