My name is Macy Levick, and I am a senior graduating from the University of Tampa in May of 2022. I will be graduating with a major in Communication and a minor in Cinema Studies. For my senior portfolio, I decided to select pieces that I feel best represent my time at the university and growth as a student. Besides the fact that these pieces show the range of knowledge that I have acquired in college, I think they also best exemplify the intersection between my major and minor. I have always been fascinated by the entertainment industry and the film industry, therefore minoring in Cinema Studies allowed me to center my curriculum around something that I am both curious and passionate about. Additionally, both pieces in my portfolio relate to women in film. As a woman hoping to work in film, I feel as though these specific pieces show what I can take with me after college and then contribute to the workplace as the film industry is very male dominated.
The first piece that I selected to showcase my writing is a research paper. I conducted this research during the Fall Semester of 2021 for my Women Directors class, which was a 400-level course. My professor Andrew McAlister instructed this course and he really pushed me to challenge myself with this paper considering I had taken a similar course with him where I also conducted research. In addition to being familiar with my writing ability, Professor McAlister is also my academic advisor, so he held me to a higher standard. I appreciated that he graded my paper based on my past work because it forced me to spend more time with my assignments and produce the best quality that I could, not just something that would meet the basic requirements. Because the main learning objective of this class was to learn about women directors, we were required to find a topic within that realm that we felt passionate about and use films and journal articles to use in our research. One of my favorite films is When Harry Met Sally (1989), which happens to be a film that a screenwriting teacher recommended to me during my first semester in college, so I decided to take that idea and pull something meaningful from the film and its director, Nora Ephron. The paper that I wrote is titled “Nora Ephron’s Casting of Meg Ryan: Combatting Gender Roles with Beauty” and through my research I explore the relationship between Meg Ryan in Ephron’s most successful films with the American standard of beauty. This paper is significant to me and my growth as a student because it required me to utilize several things that I’ve learned throughout the course of my college experience. I needed to analyze films, conduct scholarly research, and then form my own conclusions as I had no direction besides my own personal curiosity. My professor wanted us to be very specific with our organizing principle as well so narrowing down a topic and sources was something that I could not have done without the courses leading up to the class.
After completing this essay, I felt accomplished academically and professionally. In terms of the academics, I was proud of the research that I conducted because it required a lot of analysis, writing, critical thinking, and reflection on how I could make the paper as interesting as I possibly could. We were required to present our topic in class, so I wanted to make the research interesting for not only myself but my peers too. I received a 95% on this paper, so I was also proud that my grade reflected the time and effort that I put forth. In terms of my professional goals, while writing this paper I learned about Nora Ephron, who was an award-winning screenwriter and director who made a name for herself in a male dominated field. This was no easy feat for Ephron therefore I was inspired to learn about how she worked her way up in Hollywood while maintaining her own style. While being a director is not necessarily a goal of mine, I do hope to work in a major studio one day and possibly produce. Now that I have learned about Ephron and Meg Ryan’s role as a celebrity who fits the American standard of beauty, I will be more educated when I hopefully work in the film industry one day. Also, if I am ever given the opportunity to advocate for more women directors, I will be able to do so and have supportive research to back up my claims.
As for my second piece, I chose to include a script that I wrote in my 400-level screenwriting course. This course was taught by Professor Taylor Curry, who has years of experience in the screen writing field. Because I learned about the basics of screenwriting in the prerequisites for this course, the only task I had in this course was to write a full feature-length script. While we were given guidelines relating to the structure and character arcs, the creative decisions in the script were for me to figure out. The screenplay that I wrote was a drama called “Trail to Treason” and the premise of the story was that the women protagonists would be in control of the disruption in their lives. I felt that oftentimes women characters were thrown into situations in films and were left to sort out the mess, so in this script I wanted my characters to choose to get involved in the conflict because they wanted to, not because a man had asked. Similarly to my writing sample, I chose this topic based on my interests. I was a big fan of the themes in the television shows The Undoing and Big Little Lies but had never found a film equivalent, so I figured that I could write one myself. Lastly, I am an avid podcast listener, and I was able to incorporate that hobby of mine into the script which made the task more fun and personal.
This was a rigorous course because we were required to write approximately ten pages of the script a week. I found that writing a script about something I would want to watch made the process easier as I could really envision the story playing out as I wrote each week. Due to the intensity of writing required to complete my screenplay, I found this course to be very challenging. There were some weeks that I felt less creative than others, but I had to continue to write or else I would fall behind during our writing workshops. By the last week, I ended up writing 109 pages and I felt extremely accomplished because I never expected myself to write something of that length during my college experience. Another achievement with this work was that Professor Curry graded my script with an A and it felt rewarding to know that my work had paid off academically. I do not have plans of writing screen plays as a career, but I do think that having my own script could come in handy one day. I also think that knowing how to write a complete feature length film is a unique skill and if I were to ever come up with an idea for another film, I would have the technical and creative skills to see my vision come to fruition.
Overall, I think that my research paper and screenplay relate to my future ambitions because they each provided me with a different perspective of the film industry. For my research paper, I learned about the need for more women in film and how an actor’s appearance can impact audiences. This will be useful if I am ever working on the set for a movie or television show as I can be mindful of how many women are around me and see if their voices are being heard. As for my screenplay, learning how to read and write edits into a script quickly is a life skill that I may need if I ever am working as a production assistant or a producer for a project. I also know how difficult it is to write a script, so I will make sure to applaud any that I may work with and be able to give assistance if needed. Breaking into the film industry is not easy, but hopefully having these skillsets of knowing how to write and research in the field will make the process go more smoothly. I am also preparing myself to work a wide range of jobs in my future as the entertainment field is constantly changing, therefore having a wider skill set will only help me in the long run. I am proud of all of the knowledge that I have acquired at the University of Tampa and am excited to see where these skillsets take me in my next steps.