Young Filmmaker With a Fine Sense of . . . Reality

Student filmmaking is a world where actors are paid with pizza, your bedroom and your editing room are one and the same, and big-budget means you financed the movie with your credit card.

In the middle of this world is Chen Rohwer.

Rohwer, 21, dresses in film-school regimental black--jeans, motorcycle boots and leather jacket. Tribal-design tattoos crawl out from under his sleeves and down his arms. He has three earrings in his left ear, two in his nose and one through his eyebrow. His appearance doesn’t prepare you for his soft-spoken demeanor.

“You’re doing these things so quickly, you barely have time to get an idea,” he said about a film production program at USC last summer, when he made five short films in five short weeks.

“I woke up Saturday morning and said, ‘I’ve got to shoot a film today, and I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ ” he said. “We shot it in about three or four hours, I edited it and turned it in Wednesday.”

The result of that hurried shoot was “Change,” a short Chaplinesque comedy about a young man who is chased down by a beggar he stiffed. It took top honors at the International Student Media Festival in the comedy category last month. “Through the Gate,” inspired by the recent deaths of both his grandparents, won as best drama.

Rohwer doesn’t talk much about his awards, though he’s raked in several others, including Best of Show at the Michigan Statewide Student Film and Video Competition three years in a row. Instead, he speaks about the many movies he’s seen recently, his girlfriend’s band or the tough time he had getting into film school.

After winning awards through high school, Rohwer set his sights on two of the top film schools in the country: the University of Southern California and New York University, which each accept about 6% of applicants. When he left his native Dearborn, Mich., he headed for the West Coast.

“The people that came out of USC seemed to be more focused on what they wanted to do. A couple of people I knew who graduated from NYU now, like, live in New Mexico. They’re really wrapped up in the art, and don’t understand the business much. I mean, this is a business,” he said.

But getting into USC and getting into its School of Cinema-Television are two different things. He was rejected three times from the film production program and was ready to leave when he was admitted in January, 1992.

Now that he’s crossed that threshold--symbolized at USC by a bridge between the instructional and post-production buildings where someone scratched “REALITY ENDS HERE” into the cement--he’s up to his splicer in super-8 film again. The first production class, CNTV 290, requires five more short films, but this time he’s got 15 weeks.

“I guess the trick is not to get overambitious. I tend to want to (say), ‘OK, then we’ll shoot this scene where 120 horses come running over this hill.’ No, you can’t do that. So you have to think, well, how do you make it look like that is happening, or how do you create that same feeling or emotion with what you have?

“I think a lot of people maybe come (to USC) with the idea to get seen, to be seen and sort of discovered. . . . (But) this is the only time that I’ll probably have where I can experiment and try different things and see if they work and see if they don’t,” he said.

He’s already had more time to experiment than most. His high school in Dearborn was endowed with a $650,000 video studio and he enrolled in a video production class when he was a sophomore. Five years later, instructor Russ Gibbs remembers Rohwer and talks about his talent with pride.

“There are certain kids that just have it,” he said. “I’ve had maybe five or six of them in 33 years of teaching.”

Right now Rohwer is financing his student films with his credit card, and working a part-time job to pay the bills. After graduation, he would, of course, like to get a job in the industry. But his role models aren’t USC alumni George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis but independent filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Gus Van Sant.

In the meantime, he’s working on a full-length script, making a video for his girlfriend’s band, Uluteka, and shopping around a 43-minute black comedy he made with two Dearborn-USC alums.

“I don’t have a (writer-director John) Singleton complex. I don’t expect that I’ll be directing major motion pictures right out of USC,” he said. “That does happen sometimes, but I understand that most of the time it takes some years.”