The New Best

There is a new courtyard in the campus of the University of Southern California—the school itself buried snuggly just south of downtown Los Angeles. Three looming buildings stand connected to one another, blurring their individual distinctions, and a majestic archway squares off the area.

Palm trees, no less than 200 years old, have found their new home nearby. Encompassed by the best and brightest sun and young, will-be professionals, the trees’ original home is appropriately forgotten and irrelevant. They are in Los Angeles now, able to shake off their old names and old destinies.

A statue fountain occupies the middle of the courtyard as a testament to the plentiful water supply in Los Angeles. The water flows smooth and clear, even the sound flows like a steady stream of perfection. Unlike the well-hidden drinking fountains, touching the water with your hand would create a barrage of impurities on par with dumping a trash bag of road kill in the water.

The northwest corner--the corner closest to only the best chain coffee shop--is shaded by a wooden roof that would be rather useless in the event of rain. Fortunately Los Angeles paid off Mother Nature and it doesn’t rain. But the wooden roof serves its purpose as invisibly as all the other elements.

Blanket by the cool shade, film students, teachers, lovers and buffs mingle, successfully avoiding the notoriously sunny weather of southern California. Most talk about subjects ranging as far as any twenty people can talk about, though all are strengthening their contacts more than their conversations. Some negate such subtleties, though, and directly plan how they will become the entertainers of us all in twenty years, ten years or next week.

And why shouldn’t they plan? Towering over all of these conversations on either side stand two buildings named George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, respectively. The latte-drinkers, studio runners and digital craftsmen can’t escape the task laid before them. Each of us is meant to give more than we get in this world, thereby holding each of the fifty students to give two of the most grand film schools ever built--as they were all given one.

And grand the school is. The American Southwest almost-adobe architecture blended with European marble is nothing less royal than the finest castles still standing in the world. Finding the best of everything required to construct and maintain this Hollywood stepping stone, these buildings truly find their individuality, not in conception, but in execution. For being the best, is being unique.

More than what new tile can do, this new world of cinema will undoubtedly create a new generation of filmmakers that could not have otherwise existed. No, the bar of expectations isn’t just thrown in the artists’ collective face every day, it is also launched into the stratosphere.

Though we all like to reach for our ambitions, the stars, they are particularly hard to see in the Los Angeles sky, making this courtyard the best built launching pad that it desired to be.