Life > April 3, 2008

By Carie McElveen | Contributing writer

The university’s first Reynolda Film Festival is being held April 11-13, and one of the films being shown is Ethan Cushing’s Negotiations. Cushing, 26, is a university alumnus from the class of 2004.

After graduating, he went on to Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, one of America’s top up-and-coming film schools.

Cushing is now the vice-president of development at the production company Avatar Entertainment.

Cushing graduated from high school in Boston in 2000, and he originally planned to attend Syracuse University in New York until he toured the university at the last minute.

The friendly culture, the liberal arts focus and the Southern location drew him, and he enrolled here instead. Cushing thought he would be a communications major with a minor in art, and go into advertising.

As time went on, he discovered that his real passion was film.

He got involved in WAKETV and became its president during his senior year.

He did one show called Kicking Ash, shot on the roof of Taylor, which consisted of him and his friends smoking cigars and goofing off.

“The great thing about WAKETV is that it gives you freedom to mess up and try new things,” Cushing says.

Cushing met Professor Mary Dalton, who encouraged him to take more film and writing classes during his junior year.

“I got to make a documentary on Krispy Kreme for her documentary filmmaking class—I even saw their secret recipe,” Cushing says.

He also interned with David Letterman the summer after his junior year.

Cushing refers to what he does as “entertainment,” but his intent clearly goes deeper than amusing an audience.

“People go to the theater and see movies like Mystic River, Flags of Our Fathers — films that make you question, ‘What am I doing with my life?’” Cushing says.

He hopes to make films that are more than a distraction, ones that foster thought and conversation. Negotiations, his 19-minute short being shown at the Reynolda Film Festival, is about a hostage negotiator whose wife dies, and the grief leads him to shut out every part of their life together, even their small son.

Years later, the grown son realizes that there is only one way to regain his father’s attention, and stages a hostage situation that forces the first face-to-face meeting since his mother’s death.

Cushing used this plot to create a dynamic that leads people to think about their own families.

Cushing’s directorial influences include Robert Zemeckis, whose success with the Back to the Future trilogy Cushing attributes to a multi-layered plot and broad appeal for fans of all ages.

Cushing also greatly admires Ron Howard, who directed Apollo Thirteen and A Beautiful Mind, because his films are solid and can appeal to audiences universally, something Cushing tries to achieve in his own work.

He considers it fitting that Negotiations is to be shown at the university’s first film festival.

“This sounds cheesy, but it’s great to see the culmination of your educational career at the place where you discovered what you wanted to do with your life,” he said.

About his experience at the university, Cushing says that he considered transferring to North Carolina School of the Arts his sophomore year but he decided that the university’s liberal arts approach to learning allows itsstudents to have varied knowledge as a foundation to do whatever they choose.

“A liberal arts education gives you a better understanding of the world … Take crazy classes!

“You’re not wasting time — you have two years before you need to declare a major,” Cushing said.

“I have friends who went to Wake, took their divisionals, got a degree, that’s it. Other kids did service projects, went abroad, that sort of thing — they got an experience.

“Wake gives you the tools, but you have to use them. People can get a lot out of Wake when they put their minds to it.”