In weekend nights, Church Street is desolate between Fourth and Eighth Avenues. Windows are boarded with plywood; rows of buildings are interrupted by empty lots, like the gaps left by missing teeth. On weekend nights, without the flow of tourist traffic between Broadway and Second Avenue, the feel of the street should be even worse—especially on a cold, rainswept Thursday night like this one, when construction on a new highrise has closed Sixth Avenue to traffic.
It’s strange, then, to see a steady stream of people ducking into a scaffolding tunnel and disappearing into the gray bunker-like building at the corner of Sixth and Church. There aren’t any other signs of life on the block. Castner-Knott closed earlier this year; now its building stands deserted. The Harvey’s building, once the anchor of the Church Street shopping district, is now a heap of rubble.
The ground floor of 601 Church St. is completely dark. When the elevator opens onto the third floor of the building, the former home of Woolworth’s, the rooms are bustling with people. The level of activity at the Watkins Film School seems to contradict its drab, institutional cinderblock walls. The decor, with its bilious colors and dingy linoleum, is strictly 1960s detention hall. Nevertheless, the fledgling film school, which held its first classes only a year ago, is generating a ground swell of enthusiasm—much of it from people with little or no interest in film.
It has now been two years since a new management team, staff, and faculty seized the helm of the venerable Watkins Institute and initiated a series of changes that have reenergized the school. Even some skeptics concede that Watkins—which teetered on the brink of collapse just three summers ago—may well be making a dramatic turnaround. Since 1994, the school’s declining enrollment has taken a remarkable upswing; the newly formed Watkins College of Art and Design received accreditation with unusual efficiency; and the school’s sizable debt of $300,000 has been erased.
Some even suggest that the newly awakened Watkins Institute may be a sort of cure-all for a number of civic maladies. Hoping that the school will attract, develop, and graduate young filmmakers, the local film and video community has taken an active interest in Watkins’ renaissance. At the same time, groups concerned by the sorry state of Church Street are hopeful that Watkins will become a sorely needed downtown anchor. Suddenly, it seems, Nashville has decided it has a stake in the future of the historic school.
Such hopes add up to an enormous burden for a film school that has yet to produce a single graduate, let alone a feature film. What’s more, over the past two decades, Watkins’ track record has done little to inspire optimism. And there are understandable quesions about how much impact a Nashville-based film school can be expected to generate.
Historic footage
For 111 years Watkins Institute has been the one constant on Church Street. In 1880, the Virginia-born Samuel Watkins died at age 86, leaving the city of Nashville $100,000, along with a parcel of land at the corner of Church Street and what is now Sixth Avenue. Watkins’ life had been a colorful one. At age 4 he had been orphaned; impoverished, he became an indentured servant to Jonathan Robertson, the oldest son of James Robertson. Later, as a state militiaman, he served under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Eventually, having served as a stonemason’s apprentice, Watkins formed his own masonry business and built a fortune—all without the benefit of a formal education.
Watkins’ bequest to the city of Nashville was intended to provide the site for a school that would bear his name. The money would finance construction.
In 1885, Watkins Institute was formally dedicated to the people of Nashville. With its ornate brick-and-stone façade, the Institute developed into a social center as well as a center for learning. Its auditorium became a popular stop on the national lecture circuit. Literary groups met in the Watkins library, which was stocked with $15,000 worth of books. By 1889, a Watkins Night School had been established, offering classes to more than 400 students. Its programs in adult education and continuing education were extensive. They were, in fact, the only formal education many Middle Tennesseans, including thousands of European immigrants, ever experienced.
One of these students was Buford Tatum. Reared on a Dickson County farm without running water, Tatum received his high-school education from Watkins as an adult in the late 1930s. When Tatum died in 1993, he left Watkins a final token of his gratitude—a bequest of $562,000.
The money could not have come at a better time. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the Watkins Free Night and Day School thrived on its adult education classes, teaching everything from dressmaking to English as a second language. During World War II, the school offered courses in aeronautics, “incendiary bomb control,” and first aid. At one point in the 1930s, Watkins Institute had an enrollment of 2,700 students.
By the 1980s, though, the school’s enrollment had declined. With a W.T. Grant store occupying the ground-floor level of the school’s property, beginning in 1957, Watkins had become, quite literally, an underground activity. Woolworth’s took over the W.T. Grant space in 1976, but it fared no better than other downtown enterprises at the time.
As churches, YMCAs, high schools, and other community organizations began to offer a wide variety of adult education courses, Watkins felt the crunch. Just as Castner-Knott, Cain Sloan, and Harvey’s on Church Street were felled by competition from outlying shopping centers, Watkins began to suffer as its students opted not to go downtown for classes they could find in their neighborhoods. Furthermore, an unsuccessful effort to make Watkins a community college in the 1980s left the school approximately $600,000 in debt. Severe cutbacks reduced the debt to $300,000 by 1994, but trustees and observers feared the school’s days were numbered.
“We had this doomsday timeclock ticking on us: Dec. 31, 1996—the day that the Woolworth’s lease runs out,” explains David B. Hinton, now dean of Watkins Institute College of Art & Design. Although Woolworth’s vacated the bottom floor of the Watkins building many years ago, the company continued to pay $130,000 annually for its lease on the empty space. The money accounted for some 14 percent of the school’s budget. When the lease expired, Hinton says, most people expected the school to expire with it.
Director’s chairs
Instead, the school’s trustees hired a new president, Brian McQuistion, in 1994. McQuistion had retired as director of personnel and community activities at Fort Campbell, where he had overseen the base’s education division. He found the school operating with a skeleton staff—and without a marketing plan or any strategic plan for fund-raising or increasing enrollment. McQuistion hired Hinton, a film historian and former investment banker, as the school’s new dean. “It was the first smart thing I did,” McQuistion says.
Working together, McQuistion and Hinton established two goals in hopes of forestalling the school’s demise. First, they decided, Watkins had to establish a school of art and design that would eventually become a four-year program. Second, they decided, that school would have to gain accreditation. To boost enrollment, McQuistion and Hinton hit upon the idea of offering film classes as part of the new College of Art & Design. At that point in the summer of 1994, however, Hinton had little to offer potential students.
“Prospective students would come, and I’d give them what I called ‘the nickel tour with 3 cents’ change,’ ” Hinton recalls. Watkins had no film equipment, and its facility was unappealing. All students had to go on was the school’s word that, somehow, the necessary equipment would be in place by the time production courses began. The first semester would be devoted to basic classes such as film history and fundamentals of screenwriting—classes that didn’t require cameras.
When Watkins began to advertise its film program, McQuistion says, he and Hinton expected only 30 students to enroll. By the time the Watkins Film School started its first session, in the fall of 1995, enrollment had ballooned to 112 students.
The school used Buford Tatum’s bequest to pay off its debt. Watkins has also used funds from Tatum’s gift to purchase equipment, including computers, 8mm video cameras, and two state-of-the-art AVID editing systems worth $160,000. Students who transferred from other film schools were surprised to find that they had direct access to the equipment. Many film schools refuse even to let students use a camera until their third year of classes. At Watkins, they were shooting films in their second semester.
Last June, instructors, students, their friends, and family members crowded into the tiny third-floor screening room for the Watkins Film School’s first night of student-produced films. The results were mixed. Most of the short films were technically rough; their problems ranged from poor lighting and spotty sound to amateur-night acting. Every once in a while, however, there would be a flicker of promise and inspiration, a glimpse of developing talent.
Some of those films have attracted attention beyond the school. One of Watkins’ first student films, “Bittums Bites It,” was accepted for screening by the 1996 Sinking Creek Film\Video Festival. Its writer and director, a young student named Jonathan Shockley, was one of five filmmakers honored at the festival’s opening celebration last week. In addition, a student-filmed video for local artists Verlon Thompson and Suzi Ragsdale made the playlist of CMT Europe this fall. Its director, Watkins student Mark Schlicher, filmed part of the video standing knee-deep in the Harpeth River, surrounded by candles.
Crew call
Today, the Watkins Film School has 165 students and a backlog of some 2,000 prospects. Watkins students have worked as interns on low-budget features, as research assistants for screenwriters, and as assistant editors at local post-production houses. They have had access to this sort of experience largely because of the school’s advisory board. Watkins has aggressively sought “advisors” in the film industry who will serve as mentors or industry contacts for students. Already, the advisory board includes director Bruce Beresford and producer Wallis Nicita, in addition to film and video professionals all over Nashville.
Watkins also continues to seek instructors who actually work in the industry. Valerie Stover, a graduate of Florida State University with a background in documentary and industrial filmmaking, was hired as dean of the new film school. Novelist Steven Womack signed on to teach screenwriting. Jim Mees, an Emmy-winning set designer best known for Star Trek: The Next Generation, relocated from L.A. to teach set design. Several established film professionals—including director/cinematographer Armanda Costanza, costume designer Cynthia Bergstrom, and producer Maureen Ryan—have taught classes at Watkins. For students trying to break into the notoriously clubby film world, the networking opportunities may prove more valuable than the curriculum.
The school’s five-year plan for its facility is no less bold. By 1998 Watkins intends to make urgently needed internal repairs to the building’s wiring and its air-conditioning units, as well as its decrepit boilers, which gave out at the end of last winter. By 2001, Watkins plans to have completed a mammoth renovation, which would greatly increase gallery space, add a 200-seat theater and a coffeehouse, and convert the former Woolworth’s space into a “visual arts center” with office space for community arts organizations. Two architectural firms—Manuel Zeitlin and Patrick Avice du Buisson and Maxwell Architects—have submitted sketches for a new façade that would replace the building’s tombstone-like exterior.
The entire project is expected to cost $10 million. A $5 million capital campaign has already raised $1.3 million from trustees and grants, including a $200,000 grant from the HCA Foundation, which last week also awarded the school its 1996 Award in Achievement for “management of innovation.”
If all goes as planned, by the turn of the century, the corner of Sixth and Church will be a radically different place. By that time, the film school is projecting an enrollment of 400 students. Their presence on Church Street would translate into more money for downtown restaurants and businesses. Gallery shows and movie screenings would attract visitors from outside the school, and visiting filmmakers would be exposed to the city’s fresh locations and talent pool. What’s more, the downstairs visual arts center would transform the Watkins building into a meeting ground for filmmakers, artists, and the directors of various arts organizations. The ideal is that, after a century of steady decline, Church Street would once again become the hub of the city’s creative activity.
But even if Watkins can raise the money, that’s only the first hurdle. James Threalkill, assistant for community affairs in the mayor’s office, says the film school could be a “tremendous benefit” for the arts community as a whole, but he wonders how it will fare, given its location so far from the coasts. “Areas like L.A. and New York are still the prime centers for the industry,” Threalkill says. “I’ve known lots of actors who’ve had to move elsewhere because they couldn’t find work.”
Work opportunities, of course, are the key concern. “Not to be overly pessimistic,” reads a passage underlined on the third-floor bulletin board, “but the industry does not need you.” David Hinton tells students candidly that, in the movie business, a diploma means nothing. “It’s all about experience,” he says, and right now in Nashville there’s scarcely enough feature-film work to support the existing community. The fear isn’t that Watkins graduates will take up the few jobs that are out there; the fear is that they won’t be able to create new ones.
Nashville’s film community still sees the Watkins Film School as a great resource, according to Lynn Bennett, who runs StagePost, a post-production facility and soundstage. A 20-year veteran of the local film and TV industry, Bennett chairs the Watkins board of advisors and serves on the school’s steering committee. He says Nashville will know Watkins is succeeding when people see more and more movies and TV pilots shooting around town.
“We don’t have a thriving feature-film industry,” Bennett says, “and we won’t have one until we start writing and producing features locally.” If Watkins produces hundreds of graduates each year, Bennett reasons, many of them will stay in Nashville and try to generate their own projects. They will form the nucleus of a local independent film industry.
As an added precaution, Hinton requires all Watkins film students to take courses in movie financing and marketing. “We don’t want just to graduate artists who don’t know how to make things happen,” Hinton says, “because if we do that, things won’t happen.” Watkins graduates will in turn have to educate Nashville’s banking community, which, with few exceptions, knows and understands very little about how movies are bankrolled.
Perhaps the most serious obstacle facing Watkins, however, is one of public perception. To young Nashvillians unfamiliar with the school’s history, Watkins is a genial, undemanding, even irrelevant institution that attracts hobbyists, not ambitious career-seekers. “The public perceives Watkins as not up-to-date,” admits Brian McQuistion. “People remember us fondly for something, but they aren’t sure what it is.” Rightly or wrongly, Watkins has a reputation for producing warm feelings, not outstanding art. To succeed, the school will have to produce both.
Professional credits
To its credit, though, the Watkins Film School hasn’t let the public know about its grand ambitions until now. The usual mistake, Hinton says, is to trumpet some grandiose dream without first having money and support. Instead, Watkins quietly assembled a faculty, enrolled students, and achieved some tangible results before announcing the full scope of its aspirations. “We have delivered on all our promises,” Hinton says. “We didn’t say, ‘If we build it, they will come.’ We said, ‘If they come, we will build it.’ ”
On a Thursday night at Watkins, the students seem satisfied with what they have found. All the production classes are under way, and quiet conversations spill from the classrooms. Much of the bustle comes from an editing room, where groups of students sit huddled around monitors. Each group has been given the same short script to produce; each monitor blinks the results.
Many of the students seem to be in their mid-20s, but otherwise the student body is notable for its mix of genders, backgrounds, and ethnicities. Artece Slay, who just finished directing her latest student project, says her goal is “to come out with a totally different movie, because people are tired of seeing the same thing.” Her cinematographer, Matthew Cox, says he was inspired by Harmony Korine, the young Nashville-born filmmaker who completed his directorial debut Gummo here this fall. Slay and Cox watch their short film on a monitor, and though they groan about the tedium of the process, they observe the results with bashful pride.
“I like the enthusiasm and passion of the teachers,” says Andy Gaines, a 31-year-old student. In one production class, screenwriting teacher Steven Womack works as a team member alongside some of his students. When Stover, the school’s dean, ducks into the editing room to ask a young director how his project is going, she addresses him with the informal enthusiasm of a fellow filmmaker, not the formal reserve of an administrator.
A cinematography instructor, Van Flescher, gives directions to a group of would-be cameramen, who hoist several yards of dolly track and march down the hall. The next day, with Flescher’s guidance, they will meticulously reconstruct a sequence from the Tim Robbins movie The Shawshank Redemption in a downstairs library. As they pass a room full of production students editing a short film, someone leans in and shouts, “Any of you wanna work on a movie tomorrow?”
Inside a small screening room, a student brushes his long hair away from his face and adjusts a VCR. Outside, two classmates are grilling their teacher, Andrea Forshee, about her favorite John Waters movie. A few minutes later, she reconvenes her class, and the voice of Debbie Reynolds in Singin’ in the Rain escapes out into the hall.
