Second City announced Tuesday that it is opening what it calls “the world’s first film school dedicated to comedy.”
The new venture at the comedy institution’s Chicago headquarters is named for Harold Ramis, the late Second City alumnus and widely beloved mensch who went on to a formidable Hollywood career while preserving a reputation for collaboration, respect for others and, in improv terminology, a “yes, and …” approach to moviemaking.
The Harold Ramis Film School is slated to accept its first class of students in September.
“Harold is the perfect person to have a school named after him,” comedian Martin Short said in a recent interview. “He taught us all how to act and how to live. He was the ultimate teacher.”
Short will be on the advisory board of the new school, along with a host of other industry luminaries, including the actor-writer-producers Steve Carell, Eugene Levy and Keegan-Michael Key, along with Doug Belgrad, president of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group; producer Stuart Cornfeld of Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Films; David Kramer of United Talent Agency; and Emma Watts, president of production at 20th Century Fox Film Corp.
Adam McKay, co-founder of the Funny or Die comedy website and director of “The Big Short,” also said he planned to be involved in the new school, for which he argues the moment is ripe.
“Harold was a titan of comedy,” McKay said. “And Second City has the scope to do this. More and more you’re seeing improv becoming the standard method by which comedy is made — in Hollywood and everywhere else.”
The Harold Ramis Film School will be a yearlong program — students will not work toward a formal degree but will instead receive a certificate, along with a portfolio of screenplays, short films, comedy pilots, Web series and other calling cards. Given the clout of many on the advisory board, the idea is also to network graduates to at least the possibility of a Hollywood job.
Andrew Alexander, who co-owns Second City along with his partner Len Stuart, said the new school was intended as a complement to Second City’s long-standing training center, which has trained generations of comedy writers and performers in the theater’s signature method of creating original, scripted content through improvisation and collaboration. It currently enrolls more than 3,500 students in one class or another.
Historically, the training at Second City has been rooted in live performance, not work in front of and behind the camera. But the market for comedy has changed, and the Hollywood stock of trained improvisers has risen.
“We want this to be a place where you can learn your craft,” Alexander said.
The school will be run by Trevor Albert, a Hollywood producer and longtime Ramis collaborator. “We hope to work with people who don’t have giant egos,” Albert said, “but want to make the whole group look good. As did Harold.”
A veteran of SCTV, Ramis made the whole group look good in movies like “Groundhog Day,” “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters.” He died in 2014 in his Glencoe home.
Tuition will be about $15,000 per year, Albert said, with a small group of new students enrolling every three months. It’s intended to be a boutique operation with only about 15 students at each entry point, ratcheting up to a total enrollment of about 60. To some degree it will compete with such existing schools as the American Film Institute in Hollywood, the California Institute of the Arts and, closer to home, Columbia College Chicago, which has one of the largest film schools in the country in terms of student enrollment. None of those schools specialize in comedy, although student filmmakers at all of them certainly can and do work on movies intended to be funny.
Columbia — the alma mater of Len Amato, president of HBO Films — charges over $23,000 for undergraduate tuition; on the other hand, it also hands out degrees.
“We don’t see it as competition,” said Bruce Sheridan, chair of the Department of Cinema Art and Science at Columbia College. “We see it as complementary.”
Without formal accreditation, the Harold Ramis Film School will have to compete based on prestige, intimacy and the quality of its network, although Albert argued that the lack of accreditation (at this juncture, anyway) also will allow for “a more innovative kind of curriculum.” It also will be an interesting test of the new market for creatives trained specifically in the revered and increasingly codified Second City method, which the privately held company already has expanded to the field of business education with considerable success.
McKay argued that, more and more, studios are accommodating writers, directors and performers who prefer to work through improvisation. “I find that a lot of (film) editors have a feel for this now,” McKay said. “But if you had said that to me 20 years ago, I would have said you don’t know what you are talking about.”
Alexander said he expects the new film students to come from a variety of backgrounds, and that students with and without undergraduate degrees will be considered. Scholarships will be available, he said, especially for diverse candidates. Some of that scholarship funding is coming from Erica Mann Ramis, the widow of Harold Ramis. Mann Ramis also is on the advisory board.
Faculty will be drawn from Second City’s large roster of teachers, and the curriculum will include everything from the history and theory of comedy to film production classes. Housed in the former AMC Pipers Alley movie theater, the new school includes a sound stage, classroom space, screening room, editing suites and the other necessities of the teaching of moviemaking — with content emphasized over production. On a recent tour, construction workers were completing the interiors.
“Content creation will be the DNA of the school,” Albert said. “We intend to be all about content creators.”
That certainly describes Ramis, who said often that the techniques he had picked up at Second City informed his entire career.
And these days, everybody is hungry for content, especially when it is profitably funny.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
