L.A.'s Loss

If you're lucky, when you're in school you get a teacher who helps you pull together concepts far beyond the boundaries of the class. I had that experience with Deron Overpeck while taking survey Documentary and Narrative film classes at LACC. So I had mixed feelings when I heard that he was leaving California for a tenure track position at Auburn University. Happy because he absolutely deserves to be on the tenure track at a major university. But also disappointed because people like Deron really add to the discussion about what film is and it just seemed right to me that he was in Los Angeles.

Besides teaching an excellent overview of the development of cinema as an art form, he also managed to clearly address the structural market issues and how they helped drive that development. He always treated student comments with respect, no matter how distant they seemed from the subject at hand, and always tried to find some truth from their input that was applicable to the topic.

My advice to cinema students at Auburn: study hard and bring extra pencils, erasers and blue books. You'll get as much as you put into his classes.