Monday Morning Spotlght

From Hollywood to Midwood

Professor Frederick Wasser worked in the world of Academy Awards in Hollywood before opening the envelope and joining academia. For close to a decade, he was a picture and sound editor for some blockbusters, including M.I.A., and Tango & Cash, as well as for TV series such as Murder She Wrote and Colombo. These solid Hollywood credentials appeal strongly to his Brooklyn College film students.
Author of many essays on the film industry, Professor Wasser published Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR in 2001, about the impact of the VCR on the filmmaking industry in the 1980s. The book won the 2003 Marshall McLuhan Award for the best book in the field of media ecology. Currently, he’s working on a new manuscript, “Steven Spielberg's America,” which Wasser hopes will contribute to the debate about how mainstream filmmaking in Hollywood has responded to the growing importance of an international audience, even while the U.S. has isolated itself politically in recent years.
“While mainstream Hollywood gears films more toward foreign audiences, Spielberg, has become more of an intellectual than the entertainer he started as, and is now more interested in telling American stories, modeling his characters after the 1940s, 1950s Hollywood heroes,” Professor Wasser’s writing suggests. “He [Spielberg] seems to be more interested in heroes that do not break the law than the outlaws and desperadoes the industry likes nowadays.”

BC Senior Works Hard to Make a Difference

Along with taking 21 credits last semester, studying at Oxford University in England and recently being named a finalist for the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, senior Mary Pennisi has also founded a non-profit coalition to help immigrant Brooklyn College students get acclimated.
      During an internship with New York Rep. Edolphus Towns, where she worked in constituent services, she was “struck by how many immigrants needed help but weren’t aware of what services were available to them.”
      So Pennisi, who double majors in political science and philosophy of law, co-founded the non-profit Coalition for Government and Community Resources with noted Brooklyn College alum Ryan Merola, a winner of both the Harry S. Truman Scholarship and the New York City Urban Fellowship. The coalition hosts a series of workshops in which they bring in government officials and people from grass roots organizations to educate immigrant students on services available to them. The coalition also sponsors a volunteer program that partners students from the Honors Academy with English-as-a-Second-Language students from the adult literacy program.
     “I come from a family of immigrants,” says Pennisi, a future immigration lawyer whose family is from Italy. “I grew up in a household that had a different cultural perspective from the mainstream.”
     Born and raised in Marine Park, Pennissi holds dual citizenship with the United States and Italy. She speaks English, Italian and French and is currently learning Spanish and Czech. She also has a passion for European politics, one that was cultivated when she studied abroad at Oxford the summer after her freshman year.
     “In the future, what I would really like to do is set up a think tank with a social outreach program similar to the Coalition for Government and Community Resources,” she says. “It would be part think tank and part social outreach organization.”
     After graduating from Brooklyn College this spring, Pennissi would like to get a master’s degree, possibly in urban planning, and then go on to law school.