La Voz

It's not every day students are immersed into a universe where they are running away from body-snatching aliens, defeating monsters from Mars, experimenting with chemicals on animals and taking trips to the moon in a space capsule.

Instructor Glenn Lovell takes students beyond the confines of earth into a world limited only by imagination. Lovell teaches F/TV-41, Film Genres, in room ATC 120 and said that sci-fi is one of his favorite genres. "Psycho," by Alfred Hitchcock, is his favorite. He grew up during the "sci-fi generation" when "critics fell in love with sci-fi and horror."

Lovell, while a movie critic for the San Jose Mercury News, interviewed great Hollywood directors and producers including Howard Hawks, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Ray Bradbury.

Lovell remembers a colorful Tarantino during his early days of filmmaking. In an article Lovell wrote for the Mercury News in 1992, he quoted Tarantino: "I write like an actor acts. What I do is just get the characters talking to each other and jot down what they say. It's like I'm playing the parts. I'm good at dialogue. I like word plays. I just have a good memory. It's not so much jotting down the exact things I overhear at Denny's, but the rhythm in which things are said."

Lovell likes to teach at De Anza College because he is allowed to teach what he feels is important, which he is not able to do at other colleges. "I like the fact that it's an intimate campus," Lovell said.

Lovell will teach film a class on film artists in the spring quarter, F/TV-43. The class will probe deeply into the works of two Hollywood directors, David "Sam" Peckinpah and Tarantino, whose controversial films use blood, gore and violence. The course will not focus on memorizing dates and terms but, instead, will focus on the personalities of the filmmakers.

"I like to put a filmmaker in context and take a close look at the filmmakers that influenced him or her," he said. Lovell is completing a book about John Sturges that he has worked for roughly 10 years. "If you teach something you're passionate about, it's not work. It's a good time," he said.

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