ABOUT HOWARD SUBER

Howard Suber has taught generations of screenwriters, directors, producers, and film scholars at UCLA’s celebrated film school for 46 years. Today, his former students are creating films and television programs and teaching film studies throughout the world.   

Suber has taught over 65 different courses in film and television, including screenwriting, directing, producing, film history, theory, and criticism. Twenty five years ago, he created and chaired UCLA’s current Film and Television Producers Program, which is focused on the realities of the modern motion picture and television industries. He has team-taught with or brought into the program many of the most important studio heads, agents, producers, lawyers, and executives in the industry.

Prior to his work in the UCLA Producers Program, Suber was a founder and for many years chaired UCLA’s program in film history, theory and criticism, including its Ph.D. program,  and was one of the founding directors of the UCLA Film Archive , where he helped build the largest collection west of the Library of Congress.

His achievements have been recognized by the award of the Distinguished Teaching Award from the UCLA faculty and students, and of a Lifetime Achievement Award from two film festivals.

Howard Suber is also well-known and widely respected outside the academy. For more than three decades, he has been a consultant and expert witness on film and television issues involving authorship, creative control, and the creative process. He has also been retained by corporations to advise them on strategic business plans and to explain to their own employees the nature and structure of the film business. He has been a consultant on screenplays to at least one studio head and Academy Award winning screenwriter.

Suber took early retirement in 1994 but has been rehired every year since as Professor Emeritus on Recall. He teaches the graduate course, “Film Structure” and the course colloquially called “Strategic Thinking in the Film and Television Industry OR: Is There Life After Film School?”

His books, LETTERS TO YOUNG FILMMAKERS and THE POWER OF FILM are a distillation of over eight thousand pages of notes, handouts, and articles that Suber has produced during his prolific and fertile career in film.