Leena Jayaswal: Can you both tell us a little bit about your journey after AU and how you got into the [film and television] industry?

Russell Williams: Internships while I was at AU were key. I thought I was going to work for NBC because I worked every day of the Watergate hearings as an NBC engineer. But then I got a taste of film at our local Channel 7, which also introduced me to international travel on someone else's dime—as a kid from Southeast Washington, I'm standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. I only knew the Trevi Fountain for movie stars riding their little scooters around there. So I went to [SOC professor Glenn Harnden’s] office. It was about four years between graduation and going to LA, and I said, "You know, we need to take a meeting." And I said, “What do you what do you think about this cockamamie idea?” And so he said, “Hey, you already know what the hours are. You probably need to spend some time in the real place just to see what it would feel like.” And I took his advice literally.

I took a 90 day leave of absence from my then-job. In my mind, I had 90 days to shake some hands, hand out some paper resumes. The idea was, as I try to convey to my students over the decades, you are an unknown quantity. Forget what you look like in the mirror. You're the scariest thing anybody who's experienced in this business has ever encountered because we don't want to trust you with our ten, 10,000, 10 million, $100 million project. So you have to overcome that—because everybody thinks they want to be in this business until they get a taste of it. Thanks to those 90 days, thanks to Glenn's mentoring, and thanks to the fact that I had just a smidgen of personality, I could at least talk myself into a position where somebody may trust me. But then the hard part comes because then you have to deliver . . . one project at a time. . . . But it was pretty much the connections that started in DC that turned into something a lot more bountiful out here.

Barry Josephson: I don't know if anybody in the audience had this experience, but, you know, I went to college for one reason, which was to go to law school, because that's what my parents wanted. It could have been a different journey. . . . But when I think about it, I think my sophomore or junior year, I took a course in survey research, which is doing polling. And, you know, you go to college and you're well-intended and you think you know the world and so on. But I would do these polls, and now you're speaking to the world in your polling—you're talking to people, you're going into people's homes. And the diversity of what I heard compared to what I was pitching was so remarkable and so different. So that opened me up a lot. It also taught me how to pitch and ask questions.

I also ran the [AU] concert committee for a year and a half as well and I took a film course while I was at AU. So, by the time I got to graduation and was accepted to law school, I decided to take a year off and move to Los Angeles to go work in the music business. And it was just such a completely insane left turn. But I had been—at college—transformed in a way. I had a different path. I felt this yearning to do something creative and something different. And so that's what led me into my early first jobs. And I think the concept of one thing led to another, just relationships I made during each of those jobs. It always was a discovery process, especially in those first ten years I was in Los Angeles. I just basically really realized what I wanted to do. I sort of discovered me and discovered it as I went along. I'm blessed that AU gave me that opportunity. It opened me up to a different kind of thinking. Obviously, my parents didn't talk to me for a year and that was difficult. However, they did appreciate what I did and what I became.

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