Seen and Heard

8 WRITERS,10 DIRECTORS AND 1 HIT

What do get when you put eight writers and 10 directors at the helm of a single feature film? When it’s o Voodoo Macbeth, a product of USC’s Feature Film Production class, the answer is “a winner.”

Faculty Adviser/Producer John Watson (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) was looking to give more of his students feature film experience and came up with the groundbreaking concept of uniting 10 directors for a single full-length film.

The class wrote and directed Voodoo Macbeth, a behind-the-scenes drama about Orson Welles’ legendary 1936 all-Black stage production of Shakespeare's Scottish play. With eight writers and 10 directors, you might expect a witch’s brew, but Voodoo Macbeth has been accepted into almost two dozen film festivals and won the Best of Fest Audience Choice Award at the Sedona (Ariz.) International Film Festival and the Best Feature Film prize at the Harlem International Film Festival.

“Our film is about a community coming together to make something special,” Watson says.

“It’s an all-is-one approach. Not the other way around.” —David Medzerian

FINDING HER VOICE

Throughout her drama training, Kathleen Dunn-Muzingo was drawn, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, to a book calledThe Use and Training of the Human Voice. She gravitated toward its voice workouts and often practiced them. When she had a chance to work with Arthur Lessac, its author, she jumped at it.

“His voice training changed how I looked at text, how to deepen my voice for pitch power and playing powerful roles. Before that, I always played the ingénue,” says Dunn-Muzingo, now an associate professor of theater practice in voice and movement at the USC School of Dramatic Arts.

Dunn-Muzingo soon was playing more than 20 dialect roles in film and theater. She interviewed people native to the dialects she was using because she was interested in carrying their stories onto the stage and film. Her credits now include such productions as Mad Men, Marvel’s The Avengers and How to Get Away with Murder in which her duties might include pre-shoot coaching, on-set consulting and post-production dubbing.

Her goal: ensuring that actors have the freedom to run on the set because they’ve done the research and preparation. “I feel like I’m a success,” she says, “when the actor is flying and doesn’t need me.” STAY IN TOUCH

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OLYMPIC DREAMS

Alan Abrahamson’s love of the Olympics dates to his teenage years, watching the Games at home in Clayton, Ohio. Later, as a young reporter, he hoped to cover the 1980 Olympics—so much so that he studied Russian for four years. Then the U.S. announced it was boycotting the Moscow Games. Over the next two decades, Abrahamson took off a year to travel the world, went to law school and took a job with a big San Francisco law firm—but the Olympic dream remained.

Abrahamson finally got his chance in 2000, covering Australia’s Sydney Games for the Los Angeles Times—the first of 18 Games he has covered and started him on a path to becoming one of the world’s authorities on the Olympics.

Coming to the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to teach journalism didn’t end his Olympic career. Now he covers the Games for his own Olympics website, 3 Wire Sports, and besides writing stories, he also posts video blogs. (He’s usually accompanied by Annenberg students, but the pandemic stopped that for now.)

Although his work may have changed, he still feels like that Ohio kid each time he walks into a new Olympic Village. “Very few people in life get to live out their dreams,” he says. “I get to.”