Farewell Scottsdale Community College

A new unspoken high school ritual is for some jock to play the Green Day song Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) on a warm acoustic at graduation. It’s cute. Preppy girls cry. In fact, nearly every student who valued those pointless four years cried. Part of me wonders if I’m disconnected from human experience on the whole, because at my graduation ceremony I did not cry. I guess I couldn’t feel what they felt.

But I swear to you, had some jock jumped in front of that dinky little TCM 245 classroom tonight (the very same classroom where I had my first production class at SCC), I would have gotten teary.

Yes, this evening, the venture known in my life as Scottsdale Community College came to an end.

Why would I have never even cried at High School, but considered it at SCC? Simply put, I had a role in what happened at this film school on the fringe of an Indian Reservation. I wasn’t a legend (far from it) but I was a character in the drama that unfolded around this hidden nook of campus. That in itself is of incalculable value.

Some consider my occupation at this school to be for the worse. I’ve been told that I’ve wasted my time. Do I consider my tenure at SCC to be of a negative impact? Not in the slightest; one thing I’ve learned this semester is that the finest individuals in the business are shaped by the experiences they’ve had in life. And yes, bad experiences are included in that. The worst filmmakers? They are the ones who instead create their own silent, white void. They mute.
With that in mind, being at SCC hasn’t strictly been a series of bad experiences, and it hasn’t strictly been a series of good experiences (lord no). It’s been both. But the most empowering experiences for the creative mind are those which reek of both the disquieting and the rosy. Both are illumination, but of a different breed. When I walked out of SCC tonight, I wasn’t just some kid who had participated in that community for the past two years. I shaped it. We built a tent in the school’s studios, loaded film in those studios. I bled in those studios! I saw a plethora of boys and girls peak and recede through my tenure…co-conspirators like Chad Einwalter who gave way to confidents like Drew Hoffman. I started school in the same classroom and ended it in the same classroom, but watched those sitting around me change in between. These people, these experiences shaped me into the person I am tonight…and from here on out. I learned that I am the main character in a film that only I can watch.

That being said, Green Day’s pop angst wasn’t appropriate for what I felt tonight, for the grand summation of my pain-riddled, harrowing adventure. As I strode out of that school, past the studios, past the dinky classroom, I played Psychocandy’s “Just Like Honey”.

Next time you’re wandering around SCC at night, dear reader, play that song and take a stroll down the walkway wedged between the LC and AP buildings. You won’t feel good. You won’t feel bad. You’ll feel what Brock H. Brown felt.