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Tufts students bring home College Emmy
By Benjamin Witte
For a group of Tufts students whose recent film project about “grease cars” just netted them a College Emmy award – and with it an all-expenses-paid trip to California – third place never looked so good.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles-based Television Academy of Arts and Sciences honored seniors Phil Martin, Emi Norris and Assaf Pines, and freshman Sean Malahy with third place in the documentary category for their film “From the Fryer to the Freeway.”
The College Emmy, a first for Tufts University, is a huge accolade. It also came as a huge surprise for the inexperienced foursome. Two of the four had never made a film before.
“We had a screening at the end of the [Fall] semester and submitted it to film festivals not thinking anything was really going to come of it. Just like a crap shoot. If it works out, it works out,” said Martin, 21. “It was a shock in that sense. I’d been told by my friends it was good, but you have to take that with a grain of salt. So it was shocking and validating at the same time.”
The award earned the young filmmakers a few perks as well, namely a trip out to Los Angeles for last Sunday’s award gala, meetings with an HBO producer and a $500 cash prize – all for a 15-minute movie that cost about $100 to put together.
“They’re putting me up in the Renaissance Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, which from the Web site looks nice. I don’t now how it actually is in person,” said Martin, a few days before departing to California.
The team made “From the Fryer to the Freeway” originally as a school project for a class entitled “Producing Film for Social Change.” The short documentary tells the story of several individuals, among them Tufts freshman Alex McCourty, who in an effort to curb their dependence of fossil fuels, converted their vehicles to run on used vegetable oil. McCourty, for example, owns a late-model Mercedes Benz she purchased on e-Bay for $400. A so-called “grease car,” McCourty’s burgundy Benz runs on used cooking oil, the type discarded in abundance by fast food chains. The proactive freshman doesn’t expect to single-handedly reverse the country’s over-reliance on petroleum. She does, however, hope to lead by example.
“I didn’t invest all that time, and much of my life savings because I believed vegetable oil was the long-awaited solution to our energy woes,” she said. “I don’t believe fast food leftovers will fill our tanks in the future, although I do anticipate an end to our dependence on petroleum-based fuels. As a nation, we must change our ways in a movement that will be monumental, though gradual… With prices at the pump quickly approaching $3 a gallon, I’m proud to say I’m driving vegetarian.”
For Martin and his classmates, McCourty’s lead-by-example approach provided a real inspiration, from both an environmental and cinematic standpoint.
“I’d been reading a lot about different energy stuff, and kept hearing about this, and I thought, ‘really cool,’” said Martin, a political science major. “Just the idea that you could drive a car based on stuff that you grew is mind boggling. And on top of that, the whole imagery of someone running a car on vegetable oil is perfect for film.”
The idea, apparently, was also a hit with the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences, something that Prof. Roberta Oster-Sachs, who teaches the “Producing Film for Social Change” class, found particularly satisfying. “I thought the committee at the Emmys that selected this film saw its value as a great example of using media for positive social change,” she said.
Oster-Sachs, herself an Emmy award winning producer, agrees wholeheartedly with the committee’s choice to honor her students’ work. Besides being “creative” and “unusual,” what the professor really appreciated about the film was how its producers placed the issue of “grease cars” into a larger political context.
The second half of the film, in fact, draws heavily on interviews with two energy experts: Bruce Everett, a Fletcher School professor who worked for 22 years with Exxon-Mobil, and Hampshire College Professor Michael Klare, author of several books, including “Blood and Oil” and “Resource Wars.”
The two professors offer a barrage of relevant information. The United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day, over half of which is imported, explains Everett, adding that the world as a whole has consumed nearly half of the two trillion barrels in known global reserves. And, warns Klare, in the next 20 to 30 years, the oil “will disappear,” leaving us barely enough time to put in place an alternative energy system.
“What I especially liked,” said Oster-Sachs, “was that [the producers] included substantive interviews with a Fletcher professor and a Hampshire professor who outlined the deeper policy issues that related to alternative energy.”
With a College Emmy under their belts and Sunday’s award ceremony behind them, the student filmmakers – particularly the three seniors; Martin, Pines and Norris –are turning their focus toward the future. Martin expects that Norris, a Spanish major and Los Angeles native, and Pines, an Israeli-born Psychology major, will stick with film. As for his own plans, Martin is considering several possibilities.
“When I made this movie I didn’t really think I had the skill set or the experience necessarily to go into [documentary film]. But now, hopefully with winning this award and with people seeing the film, that might be an avenue I could pursue… It also got me thinking about going into the alternative energy field.”
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