Lights! Camera! Accolades!

FSU’s Film School Helps Students See Their Names in Lights

By Rosanne Dunkelberger
Photo by Scott Holstein

It looked like one of the most intense hours in Anjuli Hinds’ life.

The first-year graduate student at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts – better known as The Film School – was laying out the vision for her first film project in a session known as “director prep.”

Hinds had spent the early part of the fall semester crafting her tale of a young woman in peril, and this session was the first time associate dean and directing teacher Reb Braddock would be reviewing her plans for the shoot, which would occur four days later.

Supported by her other “above the line” collaborators – including the producer, cinematographer and production designer – Hinds stood in front of storyboards pinned onto a massive corkboard and gave a shot-by-shot summation of the story.

Braddock studied her shot list and peppered her with questions, suggestions and challenges while student producer Derek Meyer scribbled down the teacher’s comments. In a conversation that included lots of gesturing and the liberal use of film speak such as “beat change” and “two shot,”  as Hinds, the film’s writer and director, described her vision, the most notable back-and-forth was about whether a rope that makes an appearance in the script could be considered a weapon. Weapons – along with animals and most minors – are verboten in these early films, says Braddock, because they require special permissions and accommodations that can sidetrack the novice filmmakers. (According to the project’s parameters, “no stories of suicide, assassins, terrorists or tortured artists” are allowed, either.)

When the meeting was over, Braddock sat down with producer Meyer, who signed a contract laying out the shooting schedule (12 hours in one day for a film that will last about four minutes) and the penalties for overtime or late lunches.

Overtime? Late lunches? What do these mundane concerns have to do with the pursuit of Art?

Plenty, according to The Film School’s faculty and administration. The school is committed to creating original, quality productions, with about 240 films created by students each year.

However, unlike most of the nation’s top film schools, its curriculum is firmly rooted in the practical business of filmmaking, which means dealing with issues such as budgets, schedules, bosses and union rules.

“We’re trying to train them not only as artists but also as craftsmen,” Braddock said. “Our fundamental philosophy is craft is the pathway to art. You don’t paint a Mona Lisa by not understanding how paints and pigments are mixed together and how you create light and how you prepare a canvas. So we start with the craft.”

Different from other film schools in many ways (for starters, it’s the only major U.S. school that is not in the Los Angeles area or New York), FSU’s film school has created a winning – quite literally – formula that gave it almost instant success. In its relatively brief history, the school has gained a worldwide reputation as its students consistently win major college filmmaking awards and quickly find jobs in the industry after graduation.

A particular draw is that all of the students’ equipment and filming expenses are funded by the college, a huge advantage when you consider that a thesis film can cost up to $50,000 to make.

Melissa Carter describes the dilemma of most student filmmakers: “Do I eat this month, or do I feed my crew and pay for film?” She was lured to graduate school at FSU in the mid-1990s, her thesis film earned a nomination for a student Academy Award, and she has become a successful Hollywood screenwriter, earning writing credits for the feature film “Little Black Book,” as well as several television episodes and films now in production.

Another huge variation for The Film School is its selectivity and rigor. Of the estimated 2,000 students who apply, only 60 are admitted each year in the fall – 30 undergraduates and 30 graduate students. Each student will get the chance to write and direct about two films per year and collaborate on dozens of classmates’.

Other prestigious film schools have considerably more students (nearly 1,500 at the University of Southern California and about 1,100 at New York University), but only a small percentage of those will go on to find careers in the movie or television industry, said Frank Patterson, dean of The Film School at FSU.

“We couldn’t compete if we wanted to play the numbers game,” he said. “With those kinds of numbers, what you do is you give ’em a learning environment with some equipment and stuff and you sort of let the cream rise to the top, and you take that cream and you go promote it. We don’t do that.

“We pick the cream off the top, we put a lot of money behind them, and then we surround them with filmmakers – and they learn,” said Patterson, who taught at the school for nine years in its early days and returned in 2003 to take the position of dean.

Rolling, Episode I: The Film School Gets Started
Florida’s Legislature decided to “make a play” for the film industry and, in a “prescient moment” in 1989, funded the start-up of a film school, according to Patterson. “They (saw) it as a really smart industry for Florida to be involved in,” he said. “They realized that the game was in Los Angeles, and they realized that the only way to get the game to Florida was to get Floridians in the game. So they created this film school with a clearly expressed and very important mission, which was to prepare men and women for successful careers in the film and television industry.”

After some intrastate wrangling, The Film School ended up at FSU (due in no small part to the efforts of FSU grad and current occupant of the university presidency T.K. Wetherell, who was in the Legislature at the time). In the early years, undergraduates studied in Tallahassee while graduate students were based in Sarasota. The two programs consolidated in 1995, when the school moved into its newly built digs at FSU’s University Center.

The now well-worn facility (it’s available for use 24 hours a day) has everything students need to create professional-quality films, including a huge inventory of cameras, lights and other equipment, two soundstages, two sound-mixing theaters, a dailies viewing theater, a visual-effects lab, multiple editing suites and a film library.

Rolling, Episode II: How It Works
In addition to bucking film school norms, FSU’s school doesn’t operate quite like the rest of the university community. For starters, there is its mission statement, which includes terms such as “career” and “industry.”

“To an educator, it sounds ‘vo-techy,’ like you’re preparing them for jobs,” Patterson said.

But the dean isn’t apologizing for turning out career-ready graduates. He discusses a hypothetical student he calls “Little Timmy.”

“If Little Timmy gets into (FSU’s) film school, Little Timmy will likely have a career in the film industry,” Patterson said. “If, for some reason, (graduates) choose not to go into this industry – and it has happened – they are very prepared for any other industry. They can’t get through the program if they don’t have a strong work ethic. They’re incredibly responsible by the end of the program. They know how to collaborate, how to work in teams, how to think critically, how to think fast, how to work in high-pressure situations. Just think of any field where those aren’t great qualities.”

In another break from academic tradition, none of the production faculty members are tenured, and the vast majority are successful motion-picture industry veterans rather than trained educators.

A quick scan of The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) reveals a staff of instructors with scores of credits on classic, successful and highly praised films. Posters for some of them line the walls of The Film’s School’s conference room, including “The Godfather,” “On Golden Pond,” “Ghost,” “The Abyss” and “Ulee’s Gold.”

Teachers include independent filmmaker Victor Nunez, Academy Award winner and visual-effects artist Stuart Robertson, television director Chip Chalmers, picture editor Bill Carruth, story executive Valerie Scoon, and marketing and distribution executive Paul Cohen. Also on the faculty is the Gordon Sawyer Professor of Recording Arts and Distinguished Filmmaker in Residence Richard Portman, who Patterson calls “literally, and this is not an exaggeration, the most knowledgeable living person in motion sound.” Portman earned an Oscar for his work in “The Deer Hunter” and was nominated for Academy Awards 11 times.

“It’s not a faculty of somebody who graduated from college to learn how to teach something,” said Rexford “Rex” Metz, a cinematographer who has worked on about 80 pictures – including “Jaws” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” – in a career spanning more than 40 years.

“(Students are) amazed at the films that we’ve made before we came here,” Metz said. “To pass on that information … it keeps me alive and on my toes at my age now, because I’m surrounded by energetic young people asking me questions. I need to field them, and my experience allows me to do that.”

In yet another departure from the norm, faculty members are allowed to leave their teaching duties to work outside of the school.

“The faculty is encouraged, if jobs come along, to pursue them, because I think the students appreciate the fact that people have worked and are ongoing in the professional world,” said Nunez, who taught film-related courses back in the 1970s, when the program was part of FSU’s art department.

“We recognize that the industry is changing, as everything else is, and it’s possible that the specialization right now might be totally different in 10 or 15 years,” said Robertson, who has certainly seen many changes in his specialty – visual effects – since he won an Academy Award for “What Dreams May Come” in 1998. “We want our kids to (have) a good grounding in as much as we possibly can so they will be flexible for whatever happens to come along.”

(An aside: In an unofficial film school tradition, Robertson’s students get some career mojo by passing his surprisingly heavy Oscar statuette hand-to-hand among themselves during a photo op. “I think it’s a nice picture for them to send back to their long-suffering parents who are paying their bills,” he said.)

Rolling, Episode III: Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration
One of the enduring notions in film theory – and the career aspiration of many a film student – is that of the auteur: the multitalented director whose genius is a movie’s dominant creative force. What these aspiring talents sometimes fail to realize is that even the brilliance of François Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock was backed up by a production team.

“The manufacturing of a movie is a real collaboration of 40 or 50 people, and it’s just impossible for it to be anything else,” Patterson said. “Central to our education is that students are required to collaborate.”

When they start in The Film School, students are required to check their egos at the door. They will have a shot at working in creative, high-profile positions – those “above the line” titles mentioned earlier. But in their two years of study, graduate students can expect to work on upwards of 40 films, many times in unglamorous roles as grips, gaffers, assistants, editors and technicians.

Because the school pays the production costs, “the sort of secret in the sauce is that it gives us the control to establishing the learning,” Patterson said. “If I’m paying for the film, I’m going to tell you when you can shoot and who you have to work with.”

The Film School’s way of doing things also allows students to discover hidden strengths or weaknesses.

“A lot of programs … say, ‘You’re going to be a cinematographer, like it or not,’” Robertson said. “In ours, people can specialize in one thing or another, but they’re allowed to try writing, directing, cinematography and pretty much everything else.”

The collaboration crosses boundaries within the university, too. One of the assignments for first-year film graduate students is to partner with an acting student from FSU’s School of Theatre, then write and create a short movie using that actor as a lead.

Acting teacher Leslie France-Patterson (she also is the wife of Dean Patterson) brings students from the School of Theatre – most of them trained for stage work – to The Film School for classes on the technical art of acting on camera.

“Part of my job is to build this bridge,” she said. “It’s a no-brainer … but every moment of (students’) time is dedicated to something, so I had to break into those schedule issues.”

The Final Chapter: The Future
The Film School has come a long way in its 18-year history, but the final chapter is far from being written, according to Patterson.

“Our oldest alums are 40 years old. They needed to get into the game. And they have,” he said. “They’ve been very successful in L.A. and New York, and it’s no surprise that they’re looking to make films in Florida.”

Patterson reports that the university recently agreed to enter into an affiliation agreement with a for-profit company, Torchlight Entertainment. Certain film school faculty members have agreed to produce and distribute motion pictures in conjunction with coursework at The Film School.

“This is the next chapter of The Film School,” Patterson said. “We’re now in a position to leverage our relationships in the industry to bring real film industry (to the state) – real home-grown original voices from Florida.”

Epilogue
Patterson was in California when he got the call to replace retiring Dean Raymond Fielding. At the time, he had the opportunity to head three other, larger film schools. His friends in Los Angeles considered FSU the least appealing choice, but Patterson has what he calls an “ethical dilemma” regarding the larger schools.

“What happens, when you have 1,600 students, to the 1,400 who really don’t have a chance of working in the industry?” he recalled asking himself. Deciding he could keep the faith with the parents of “Little Timmy” at The Film School, he chose Tallahassee.

Patterson reminisces about when he realized it was the right choice: “The first time I realized I really liked my job” was when his son, Oscar (named for an uncle, not the statuette), was 5 years old. Patterson was scheduled to visit screenwriter and film school alum Ron Friedman, one of the writers of the Disney animated feature “Brother Bear,” and decided to take his son to see the movie before his trip.

“During the movie, I’m saying (to myself), ‘He’s getting it.’ He’d become a storyteller,” Patterson said of Friedman. “I was so proud.”

In the story, a bear takes the life of the oldest of three brothers, and the youngest brother, Kenai, kills the bear, only to be transformed into a bear himself. When he is hunted by his vengeful middle brother, Kenai’s only hope for survival is to befriend his own worst enemy, a grizzly cub named Koda who teaches him the real meaning of brotherhood.

On the drive home, “Oscar says, ‘Dad, are you going to die one day?’ So I said, ‘Well, sure I am, yeah, and so are you.’ I realized this is one of those pull-over-and talk-moments – we ended up talking for 20 minutes.

“Ron goes into the industry, makes a movie that actually impacts my son to ask me a question so I can have a father moment, that I’m sure a lot of fathers were having at the same time. This is a gift for me. I worked my a-- off, and it came back 10 times.”

By the Numbers
- 700 Awards, honors, prizes and featured screenings won by students at national and international festivals and competitions.
- 8,000 Inquiries annually about applying for The Film School.
- 2,000 Applicants annually for The Film School.
- 240 Interviews granted each year for applicants.
- 60 Students accepted annually into The Film School.
- 6,000 Movies available to students in the school’s library 

Jonathan King

Creating Movies That Will Change the World 

Producer Jonathan King recalls the “Wild West days” of  Florida State University’s fledgling film school in Sarasota when he was a graduate student in the early 1990s.

“It was largely like working in independent film because you just had to create,” he said. “There was equipment, money and people. Not so much curriculum. I envy the kids here now because they have such a great program, great curriculum, amazing facilities … but we made it work for us.”

Immediately after graduation, King loaded up his car, headed for California – and the rest is Hollywood history.

He had a bit of a head start, with film work in New York and friends in the business, but spent his early years “doing work on independent films that I liked for free and doing money jobs on commercials or for whoever would pay.”

King then decided to work only on projects that appealed to him.

“I went broke,” he said. After analyzing his experience up to that point as “broad but shallow,” King thought he might be suited to working for a studio or production company.

“So I looked at all the movies I liked that year, and almost all of them were Miramax movies – so I said, ‘I’m going to work there,’” he recalled.

Fortunately for him, it was the studio’s heyday.

“I literally walked in the front door and said to the receptionist, ‘Are your hiring?’ and she looked at my resume and said, ‘Yeah, do you want to work in publicity?’” King said. “I thought to myself, ‘Not really,” but I told her, ‘Sure.”

He would be in that job only for a couple of months, moving on to a position in acquisitions – “a job I was actually qualified for because I knew all these indie filmmakers from working on their movies for free and they all realized they owed me favors,” he said. King would work there during three years of what he called “explosive” growth.

In addition to Miramax, King has worked as a production and acquisitions executive for Focus Features and MGM. He also was president of Lawrence Mark Productions and has several credits as an independent producer.

King now is executive vice president of Participant Productions, where he oversees development and production of all the company’s feature films. Participant’s mission is to create socially relevant films that inspire audiences to become active in social change. Its films include “Syriana” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” as well as Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” – Rosanne Dunkelberger

Career Highlights
“Dreamgirls” (co-producer)
“Slap Her … She’s French” (producer)
“Finding Forrester” (executive producer)
“Bruno” (executive producer)
“Slow Motion” (producer)
“Guinevere” (producer)
“Judas Kiss” (producer)
“54” (associate producer)
“Starstruck” (producer)
“The Alarmist” (co-producer)

Melissa Carter

An Overnight Success in Eight Years 

After earning a graduate degree from Florida State University’s film school in 1996, Melissa Carter headed for Hollywood. She took with her an honor – her thesis film, “Used Cars,” was a finalist for a Student Academy Award – and a “calling card.”

That calling card was a movie script called “Flawless” that she had written as her M.F.A. thesis. It is the story of an insecure young woman who, curious about her boyfriend’s former loves, decides to befriend them and becomes entangled in their lives.

That script would become a major motion picture – but Carter’s greatest career success was no rocket shot to stardom. For starters, the name had to change; there already was a film called “Flawless,” so it was retitled “Little Black Book.”

Seeing her story appear on the big screen would take many years and some heartache. The movie was released in the summer of 2004 and starred Brittany Murphy, Holly Hunter and Kathy Bates, with a story in that in many ways was quite different from Carter’s original script.

The story was picked up by producer Ricardo Mestres almost immediately after Carter graduated, but after she worked on it for a year, the movie didn’t get made and it went into what is known as “turnaround,” in which the rights revert back to the writer. Time passed, Carter did numerous rewrites, and the script ultimately was bought – and then rewritten – by Revolution Studios.

“It was very painful for me to have it taken away and rewritten,” she said. “It went through a lot of change between the time I did my last draft for Revolution and the time it came out. The reason I was able to get shared credit is because the things they used were all the characters I created – or enough of those characters to be recognizable – and the story structure.”

Since then, Carter has kept busy writing scripts for movies and television and even rewriting other people’s movie scripts. The writer’s life is not glamorous, she said, although she has been “taken out to lunch” and drops names such as Richard Gere and Diane Keaton.

Carter is married to British screenwriter Matthew Newman, has a 6-year-old son named Elijah and lives in Burbank, Calif.

“I write from 8:30 to 3,” she said. “I pick (Elijah) up from school, and I’m with him the rest of the day. I make dinner. It’s a very normal life.”

Even when a film is being made, it is rare for the writer to rub elbows with the stars on the movie set, according to Carter.

“I look at scriptwriting as creating the blueprint – and someone else is building the house,” she said. “Your job is to make a structurally sound blueprint that anyone can go and build your house.”

This year, Carter sold a feature screenplay, “Parental Guidance,” that she wrote with screenwriter Stu Gibbs to Summit Entertainment and Mandeville Films. Another script, called “Talk of the Town,” currently is being reviewed by several directors. That one, she said, was a “page one rewrite,” a rewrite process  in which “we kept the core idea. It’s sort of like what happened to me in ‘Little Black Book.’”

Carter earned her undergraduate degree from Ohio State University and was working in the film industry as much as one could in Columbus, Ohio, when she heard from a friend at FSU’s film school who told her about the “amazing equipment” and that the school would pay for all film costs – a relatively unusual perk in the film school world.

“The only way I could continue making films would be to take out lots of student loans and go to graduate school,” she said of her decision to head south.

“It was because of ‘Used Cars’ that I got my first Hollywood call,” Carter said. “If I hadn’t made that film at Florida State, I still think I would have made it as a screenwriter, I just think it would have taken longer.” – Rosanne Dunkelberger

Career Highlights
Films
“Parental Guidance” (cowriter, now in production)
“Little Black Book” (screenplay/story)
“Used Cars” (writer/director)

Television
“Yes, Dear” (writer, two episodes)
“Life As We Know It” (writer/producer, one episode) 

Ali Bell

Girl in the Hood 

Ali Bell can recall the precise moment she knew she would work in the film industry.

One sixth-grade afternoon, Ali’s mother approached her, overcome with emotion, to share the name of a movie she believed would change her daughter’s life. The film was “Boyz in the Hood” – and change her life it did.

“There’s a shot in the movie, of nothing more than a sink full of dirty dishes, a dripping faucet and a needlepoint that looks like something my grandmother would have made,” Bell said. “In that instant I knew film was the perfect blend of acting, photography and storytelling at its peak, and I was dying to find my voice in that world.”

A native of Indianapolis, Ind., Bell began developing that voice while earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees at the FSU Film School. She said her experience in the program served not only as preparation for her ultimate relocation to Los Angeles, but also “played a huge role in who I have become as a person.”

“For four years I was supported by the faculty and my peers to think critically, challenge myself and work hard,” Bell said. “Even now, when I hire interns from The Film School at Florida State, they have a confidence and a work ethic I don’t see from any other school.”

Since her 1999 graduation, Bell has held a series of impressive jobs at some of the most prestigious studios in Hollywood – including Nickelodeon, Heydey Films and her current gig at the Montecito Picture Company.

Though the popular television channel went on the air the year Bell was born, Nickelodeon’s film department was brand new the year she graduated.

“I wanted to be there as something I had grown up with redefined itself and rebranded itself for a new marketplace,” she said. But after three years, Bell realized “there was a side of my brain that was dying to work on ‘important’ films, or at least films with four-letter words and romantic subject matter.”

She got her fill of expletives and romance during a two-year stint with David Heyman’s Heydey Films, where she grew restless after “working on nothing but dramas,” but walked away with renewed wisdom. 

Bell is particularly grateful for the lessons in humility she learned from Heyman, producer of the acclaimed Harry Potter film adaptations. “When you are humble and able to listen, you are truly able to collaborate and explore a medium that thrives and exists only because a group of people share and contribute to a vision and a story,” she said.

Today Bell contributes her vision to films produced at Ivan Reitman’s Montecito Picture Company, where she is Vice President of Production and Development.

“Every day is an education, and I am very aware I may never have a job that is more fulfilling and fun than the one I have now,” Bell said. “I am surrounded by people who love each other as much as we love the projects we are working on, and I think that’s rare in any trade.” – Ashley Kahn

Ron Friedman

Putting Words in Your Favorite Cartoons’ Mouths 

Like many writers, Ron Friedman is quiet and unassuming – that is, until you get him talking about his work. When he speaks about the process of animation, the humble screenwriter, who has scripted such hits as “Chicken Little,” “Brother Bear” and “Open Season,” became positively, well … animated.

According to Friedman, who attended Florida State University’s film school in Sarasota from 1993 to 1995, animated films can take anywhere from three to 10 years to make.

“Strangely enough, it’s not like you write out the story and animate that,” he said. “You don’t start with a script; it’s a circular process.”

The first step is an idea for a character, theme or initial plot, which usually is generated at the studio. Writers then draft a scene to be given to storyboard artists, who “draw out almost a comic book version, then pitch it with a little skit,” Friedman said.

“Then they ask the artists to redraw things and the writers to rewrite things. You literally have 12 people in a room and everyone’s laughing, and then it stops and everyone starts making changes.”

Friedman credits his experience at FSU with his success in the collaborative effort of filmmaking, adding that The Film School differs from other programs because it recruits students from different backgrounds with varying interests.

“I would say the best thing I got out of The Film School was meeting all the other students,” Friedman said. “Whatever edges in your personality might not let you get along with a lot of people, it takes those off, so in the end you’re part of this unit.

“They didn’t necessarily select film majors,” he said. “I was a philosophy major. I don’t know how I wound up in the film school, but they let me in.”

With so many credits to his name and more on the horizon, Friedman admits he hasn’t done it all on his own. He works with a writing partner, Steve Bencich, who he has known since he was 13.

“Ron doesn’t like to talk about himself,” said Ryan Saul, a literary agent and former classmate, who is happy to brag about Friedman’s success. “Combined, their movies have made over half a billion dollars.”

As far as he has come, Friedman can’t forget his first months in Los Angeles. Having graduated in the early days of The Film School, he said there was little FSU presence in Hollywood.

“Not to sound like we were pioneers out in Montana, but when we got out there, we didn’t know which kind of jobs to get,” he said. “There was this frantic improvisation that had to be done to break through … we were just like everyone else.”

Today, Friedman says, there is more of an alumni network, “and the school encourages that.” Once a year, FSU invites graduates to Tallahassee, and they also fly students to Los Angeles to become acquainted with the city and learn from people in the industry. – Ashley Kahn

Ryan Saul

From Swordfighter to Sherpa in 10 Years Flat

A decade ago, if you had asked Ryan Saul what he would be doing today, chances are he would have pegged himself for the big screen or the director’s chair. In fact, according to then-classmate and current client Ron Friedman, Saul was “not just an actor, but the actor in our class.”

After studying theatre arts and European history at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., Saul took to the stage in several M.F.A. theatre productions at Florida State University.

His toughest role: Laertes in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” “(The actor playing) Hamlet was afraid to swordfight me because he thought I was going to kill him,” Saul said. “I was very intense.”

His intensity paid off.

Over the course of the two-year program, the young actor moved into producing and was on track to become a producer by the time he graduated from the The Film School in 1995.

But Saul never had set foot in Tallahassee until August of 2007, when he attended the annual Gold Carpet Gala. (The Film School originally was located in Sarasota.)

“It was a work in progress,” Saul recalled of the early years. “We were like pioneers.”

Saul, who describes himself as “short, Jewish and angry,” headed for Los Angeles soon after graduation. He ultimately became a literary agent, now with Metropolitan Talent Agency, through what he recounted as “a series of odd circumstances and ballsy maneuvers.”

If you’re familiar with the HBO comedy series “Entourage,” Saul’s job would be that of the egomaniacal agent Ari Gold, a scenery-chewing role that earned actor Jeremy Piven two Emmys.

“As broad as that portrayal is, it’s also accurate in a number of ways about the (problems) agents have to deal with on a daily basis,” Saul said.

Before joining Metropolitan, Saul worked for Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Company and the Jim Preminger Agency. His clients have written for screens big and small, including the films “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Brother Bear,” “Chicken Little,” “Open Season” and “Delta Farce” and the television series “Becker,” “Frasier,” “Wings” and “CSI: Miami.”

Contemplating a career in Hollywood? Call Saul.

“You need an agent,” he said. “Just period. You’re not going to climb (Mount Everest) without a Sherpa. An agent is your Sherpa. He’s not climbing the mountain for you; he’s climbing it with you to make sure you don’t get lost.” – Ashley Kahn