USC School of Cinematic Arts - History

History

The School’s founding faculty include Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, William C. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, and Darryl Zanuck. Notable professors include Drew Casper, the Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Professor of American Film; Tomlinson Holman, inventor of THX; film critic and historian Leonard Maltin; and David Bondelevitch, President of the Motion Picture Sound Editors.

In April 2006, the USC Board of Trustees voted to change the school's name to the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

On September 19, 2006, USC announced that alumnus George Lucas had donated US$175 million to expand the film school with a new 137,000-square-foot (12,700 m2) facility. This represented the largest single donation to USC and the largest to any film school in the world. His previous donations resulted in the naming of two existing buildings after him and his then-wife, though Lucas was not fond of the architecture used in those buildings. An architectural hobbyist, Lucas laid out the original designs for the project, inspired by the Mediterranean Revival Style that was used in older campus buildings as well as the Los Angeles area. The project also received another $50 million in contributions from Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and The Walt Disney Company.

The USC School of Cinematic Arts joined forces with the Royal Film Commission of Jordan to create the Red Sea Institute of Cinematic Arts (RSICA) in Aqaba, Jordan.