SCA Commencement

School Graduates 520 for 2008

Featuring two main speakers and returning to the Shrine Auditorium after a year’s absence, the School of Cinematic Arts honored 520 undergraduate and graduate majors last Friday afternoon before a large crowd of family and friends. 

Dean Daley welcomed the students and their families and told the graduates that they “are all here because in one way or another, you love the tradition and the art of cinema writ large.”  She urged them to “always strive to create something original and honest, to fight for ideas you believe in, and tell the truth as you see it.” 

In his remarks, Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger noted that film “is art and commerce rolled together and it combines tremendous individual achievements with real collaboration...What an interesting concept:  teamwork and individual achievement existing in one place.” 

Iger introduced this year’s Mary Pickford award recipient, producer Brian Grazer as a man who is insatiably curious, passionate and a risk taker who follows his instinct and not tradition.  Grazer challenged the graduates to learn what they like, why they like it and how they like it to be the keys to success.  He spoke about his early years in which he cold-called notable scientists, historians and people in the news to meet and learn more about them and their work, because ultimately he was in the “feelings business...in the business of communicating and connecting to people’s hearts first, and their minds second.”   He noted that every film he has made was because of a feeling, often when challenging himself by “disrupting his comfort zone.”

Associated Person:

Elizabeth M. Daley