2008 Woodie Awards
Field of Dreams, Sum of All Fears writer and director Phil Robinson, '71, talks college and Hollywood with Concordy
Dylan Breslin-Barnhart
Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: News
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Concordiensis: My questions have to do with how your Union experience relates to what you ended up doing. I'm wondering if your political science experience at Union impacted your work experience or if you can draw some sort of connection.
Phil Robinson: Well, it does in the general way, in the sense that it really honed my interest in politics and my love for reading about it and learning about it and that, I think, has informed all the work I've done. Sneakers certainly has a lot of political stuff in it. But in a more specific way, I did my senior thesis as a documentary, and I had an advisor, who was the chairman of the Poly Sci department, named Joe Board, who just passed away a few days ago… Joe Board encouraged me to do this rather unprecedented and unusual way of doing a senior thesis, and that was the first film I ever made. And I just fell in love with production, doing that.
Concordy: Did you take any theater or directing classes here?
PR: No, never. And I still have never done theater. I'm fascinated by it. I don't know much about it. I'd love to do it some day, but no, I didn't. My creative experience here was at the WRUC. And I loved WRUC. I don't know what it's like now, but at the time it was a really creative place. There were no grown-ups around, which was great, and we were left to just be creative. For a couple years I did the morning show. I did the seven a.m. to nine a.m. show, and that was like my fraternity. We would all hang out there and stay there until two o'clock in the morning producing weird little audio tapes.
Concordy: Anything distinct you remember from your Union education or political science studies that influenced your professional direction?
PR: The strongest memory I have of that is something I've never forgotten. There was a day in, I think it was 1970, when Nixon had made a speech. He went on television making a speech announcing that he was going to invade Cambodia or something, something just insane. And we had a protest. And that night, around the flagpole, somebody had an effigy of Nixon... It was like a scarecrow, and they put a Nixon mask on it. And they ran it up the flagpole. And then somebody had the idea to set the straw on fire, so we had this burning Nixon effigy on fire on the flagpole. We all thought that was pretty funny and pretty cool, and a photographer from the Schenectady Gazette took a picture of it, and it ran the next day, not only on the front page of the Gazette, but the Associated Press picked it up, and it ran on newspapers all over the country, and we thought we were really cool. And that night, Nixon went on television and made another speech, referring to us, and to one other campus, as "campus bums." And we were really proud at that point that we had gotten to him. The "campus bums" remarks spawned protests all over the country, and the next day, at Kent State, students protested the "campus bums" speech, and that was the day the National Guard opened fire and killed four students. And we didn't think that it was so cool at that point. And I've never forgotten that, in terms of the unintended consequences of something, that you never know when you drop the pebble in the pond where the ripples may wind up.
Phil Robinson: Well, it does in the general way, in the sense that it really honed my interest in politics and my love for reading about it and learning about it and that, I think, has informed all the work I've done. Sneakers certainly has a lot of political stuff in it. But in a more specific way, I did my senior thesis as a documentary, and I had an advisor, who was the chairman of the Poly Sci department, named Joe Board, who just passed away a few days ago… Joe Board encouraged me to do this rather unprecedented and unusual way of doing a senior thesis, and that was the first film I ever made. And I just fell in love with production, doing that.
Concordy: Did you take any theater or directing classes here?
PR: No, never. And I still have never done theater. I'm fascinated by it. I don't know much about it. I'd love to do it some day, but no, I didn't. My creative experience here was at the WRUC. And I loved WRUC. I don't know what it's like now, but at the time it was a really creative place. There were no grown-ups around, which was great, and we were left to just be creative. For a couple years I did the morning show. I did the seven a.m. to nine a.m. show, and that was like my fraternity. We would all hang out there and stay there until two o'clock in the morning producing weird little audio tapes.
Concordy: Anything distinct you remember from your Union education or political science studies that influenced your professional direction?
PR: The strongest memory I have of that is something I've never forgotten. There was a day in, I think it was 1970, when Nixon had made a speech. He went on television making a speech announcing that he was going to invade Cambodia or something, something just insane. And we had a protest. And that night, around the flagpole, somebody had an effigy of Nixon... It was like a scarecrow, and they put a Nixon mask on it. And they ran it up the flagpole. And then somebody had the idea to set the straw on fire, so we had this burning Nixon effigy on fire on the flagpole. We all thought that was pretty funny and pretty cool, and a photographer from the Schenectady Gazette took a picture of it, and it ran the next day, not only on the front page of the Gazette, but the Associated Press picked it up, and it ran on newspapers all over the country, and we thought we were really cool. And that night, Nixon went on television and made another speech, referring to us, and to one other campus, as "campus bums." And we were really proud at that point that we had gotten to him. The "campus bums" remarks spawned protests all over the country, and the next day, at Kent State, students protested the "campus bums" speech, and that was the day the National Guard opened fire and killed four students. And we didn't think that it was so cool at that point. And I've never forgotten that, in terms of the unintended consequences of something, that you never know when you drop the pebble in the pond where the ripples may wind up.
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