Don Pollock Not yet ready to head upstairs to his second office in the LVTV studio, Don Pollock, professor of communications, walks outside of the Art and Communications Building, grabs a half-smoked cigar off of the windowsill and puts on his sunglasses before taking a seat on the bench and lighting up. The next few moments of relaxation, including brisk puffs from a Cuban, are savored before the stubby cigar is replaced in its corner to the left of the glass doors to be finished at a later time. His love of cigars and his calm, island demeanor are rooted in travels, not just to Cuba, but all over the world. Adventures in Hawaii, the Amazon and the islands of the South Pacific seem to have influenced his casual style of dress and personable approach as a professor. He frequently pairs jeans or slacks with Hawaiian print shirts, and he intertwines jokes and anecdotes with lecture notes. “Travel expands you and makes you hyper-aware,” he says as he describes his various trips during the past 12 years to places such as England, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, Cuba, Costa Rica and Hawaii. While on sabbatical in 2005, in the Warawara Indigenous studies program at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia, Pollock watched many films produced by Aboriginal filmmakers and interviewed a number of filmmakers. He also took a class in aboriginal art in Australia, reconnecting him to his early interest in the artistic aspects of film. As a student at the University of Southern California film school, he learned the more narrative aspects of film production but never clicked with Hollywood, even after interning with the TV shows “Dallas” and “L.A. Law.” “You have this idea that you want to break into Hollywood, but you have to spend a lot of time schmoozing to try and meet people and I realized I wasn’t comfortable with that lifestyle, particularly because I was married, had a child, and it was very unstable,” he says. In between earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees he made up for not being able to enroll in art classes during his undergraduate years by taking community college and university courses, studying painting, drawing, design, photography and cartooning. “When I went to film school my interest was more in art,” he says. “But when you go to a school like USC, the focus is so much on narrative storytelling and Hollywood that you need to accept that or you’ll be very frustrated because there will always be a professor who will say, ‘If you wanted to make art movies, you should have gone to art school,’” so I said, ‘OK, I’m here, I’ll learn narrative.’” He says he is now looking forward to having time to enjoy the canvases and paints he recently bought. He hopes to create a series of paintings inspired by his travels in Australia. He first became interested in travel, specifically in wandering the South Pacific, as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “That became the thing I really wanted to do; it was a part of the world that really intrigued me,” he says. Eager to begin a series of nomadic journeys, he initially applied to graduate school in anthropology at the University of Hawaii but was not accepted. Undeterred he moved to the state anyway. “I turned 22, moved to Hawaii and thought ‘What the heck am I going to do?’” he says. Always interested in anthropology and social work, he enrolled in school and divided his time between the art and social work departments at the University of Hawaii. Eventually, he was accepted to the master’s program in social work. But the urge to go further into the South Pacific never left him and after completing his MSW degree, while visiting a friend, he met a stranger who had just returned from a five-year sailboat trip through the gorgeous islands. It was all the encouragement he needed. “He had wonderful slides and said it was so great, so cheap to live, that the people were great and I said ‘That’s it, I’m going to go.” So he sold everything he owned to pay for his long-awaited trip. He collected $1,700 and bought a one-way ticket to Samoa. Once money ran out, he returned to Hawaii and found work as a social worker in the state mental hospital, working in chronic schizophrenia ward. He began making films with patients, and, later while running a drug program he produced a film about cocaine use in Hawaii This experiences made Pollock decide to enroll in film school. After completing his MFA degree in filmmaking at USC, Pollock returned to the South Pacific, this time with his girlfriend, visiting Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand, . He was married in 1988 to his girlfriend Frances, whom he met in Hawaii. She also loved to travel and Pollock joked that if they could survive three months in a tent together in the South Pacific their relationship could probably survive marriage. And when he was about to have his first child, he traded unpredictable work in the film business for a job producing community access television in West Covina, a position that led to a job offer from the University of La Verne. He has taught broadcasting classes, produced over 200 films, and headed LVTV-3 for 16 years. Many of his students have won awards for their video productions and numerous communication department graduates work in the film and television field. Two of Pollock’s former students have won Emmy awards. Pollock enjoys working with communication department colleagues Mike Laponis and Shane Rodrigues on video productions. He lives in Claremont with Frances, now a nurse in the Rialto School District, and his two teenaged children. He says he has combined his love of filmmaking with his desire to be involved in the community by working in public access television and continually learning about international broadcasting education. “A lot of our students have this idea that if their not working in Hollywood that it doesn’t really count but the truth is a lot of those productions working on a TV show are very long days, locked in a studio, doing the same thing over and over again,” he says. “But if you work on industrials, commercial productions for other entities, it’s fascinating because you have to become an expert on whatever you’re working on.” Pollock has also shared his love of travel with his students. Pollock along with Communications Department chair Dr. George Keeler has led trips to Costa Rica, the Amazon (twice), Cuba and Hawaii. He recently made an hour long documentary about the synagogue he belongs to in honor of its 75th anniversary. He is currently working on a film about Australian Aboriginal filmmakers. Though he used to be a part of an “ old man’s softball team,” a foot injury has prevented him from playing for the last couple of years. Other injuries have also “halted his athletic career,” as he jokingly says, but he finds time and energy to hike in the mountains and enjoys snorkeling and boogie-boarding with his family during the summer. Pollock has recently stopped smoking cigars. RETURN TO FACULTY LISTHome.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
Don Pollock