Lee Hollin has watched every show Fox will premiere this fall.
He helped pick one show's theme music and frequently coordinated meetings between executives and producers. Fox hired him in January and promoted him to a full-time gig in March.
All before he graduated.
On Sunday, Hollin and 11 other students were the first to graduate from Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Entertainment Industry Management program. The program, which teaches students here for the first year and at its Los Angeles campus for the second, is designed to give aspiring executives an edge on the glut of young talent hoping to make it in the entertainment business.
"First and foremost, it's one of these things that is universal. Everybody watches television, and everybody goes to the movies," said Hollin, 27, of Philadelphia. "The hardest part about Hollywood is breaking in."
The allure of an industry that asks its workers to watch television on the job, mingle with Hollywood executives and join a creative process that affects millions attracts a crush of talent. Universities are responding with more specialized programs to formally educate the next generation of entertainment executives, producers and managers.
Point Park University created its Sport, Arts and Entertainment Management program four years ago, and this year, New York University introduced a program similar to Carnegie Mellon's. Students are looking for a foothold in the industry where technology quickly changes how movies are made and distributed, and where the need for behind-the-scenes executives is greater than that for on-screen talent, graduates and some moviemakers said.
Carnegie Mellon's network of Hollywood power brokers -- alumni Steven Bochco, John Wells and Bud Yorkin among them -- told the university it could create a niche program to capitalize on that market, program director Dan Martin said.
"They said they didn't see really anyone outside of (the University of California, Los Angeles) or (the University of Southern California) really looking at the executive positions at these companies and providing training for them," Martin said. "There were lots of MBAs and MFAs going out there with training, but we thought we could provide a specialized education for that."
Hollin is one of several of the graduates who found jobs. But he has more than $100,000 of debt from the two-year program, and a yearly base salary of less than a third of that debt. He hopes big raises will move him toward Hollywood's high-salary ceiling.
Though the entertainment industry is a big, corporate business, elite-brand academic degrees do not ensure success as much as they might in law or medicine, said Carl L. Kurlander, a University of Pittsburgh professor who wrote "St. Elmo's Fire."
"You need a 16-hour day to make it in the film business," he said. "The students who sit there and go to film school like they're going to dental school will find out they just wasted a lot."
The assurances of a full-time job also can be difficult to find, especially for on-screen and production workers.
After he graduated from Penn State University as a telecommunications major in 2001, Daniel Rosenthal got a job with ABC's "Monday Night Football." As with many production jobs, it was part-time, and when the season ended and the ABC show he was working on got cancelled, he was out of work.
After a brief and unhappy stint at a talent agency, he spent the next year unemployed, living at his parents' home on Long Island.
"I just didn't know what else I could possibly do," he said. "This is what I had gone with, I had put my chips down. I hadn't really been trained in anything else."
To be prepared for those situations, more theater students are supplementing their degrees with business training, said Robert Bunnell, director of Point Park's program.
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