What you do

Martin Scorsese, an American filmmaking institution, finally will take home some Oscar hardware this Sunday. And while the director’s time is now, it’s also up—he’s the last of his generation.

Educated by way of New York University and the proverbial Roger Corman boot camp, Scorsese learned his chops at film school. Now, as noted in a recent New York Times article, aspiring filmmakers are opting out of college, putting their tuition money toward Apple G5s and DV cameras instead of into the coffers of USC.

Consider Roseville natives Michael and Mark Polish, whose film The Astronaut Farmer opens this weekend nationwide. The twin filmmakers sidestepped film school, made a few award-winning shorts, then directed 1999’s Twin Falls Idaho for a cool $500,000. Jonathan Kiefer documents their outsider ways in this week’s arts feature.

Marin County-raised David Fincher also never attended film school.

An Industrial Light and Magic alumnus, Fincher learned the ropes on Return of the Jedi before making Levi and Nike commercials and pre-Idol, sexed-up Paula Abdul music videos. His big break came with Alien3. It flopped. He rebounded, however, by delivering Gwyneth’s head in a box, in Se7en, which made him a back-lot hotshot.

Fincher’s latest, Zodiac, comes out next week. It doesn’t stray far from his penchant for exacting storytelling about exacting homicidal maniacs—CSI meets Stanley Kubrick—but it does take viewers back to cinema’s late ’60s heydays, bad suits and oversized gas guzzlers and all.

“The Zodiac is back” in our pages this week, too, and R.V. Scheide examines both the phenomenon of the Bay Area killer and also the schooled professionals and armchair gumshoes who’ve taken a stab at nailing his identity. Sprees by Ted Bundy and the Manson Family sparked a paranoia that filmmakers like Scorsese channeled during the ’70s, or the “decade under the influence”—an era Fincher and contemporaries never hesitate to revisit.

Most of us aren’t filmmakers, but there’s one thing we can learn from Scorsese: It’s not what you know, but what you do. It just helps if you’ve got the guts, passion and encyclopedic knowledge of a guy like Marty.