Entertaining, Engaging, Hollywood 3.0

In the entertainment industry, people always say “It’s not about what you know, it’s who you know.” And rest assured, USC’s Annenberg School of Communication lets the USC community know just exactly who they know in this year’s Hollywood 3.0 Forum.

From music industry publicists to radio personalities, Hollywood 3.0 is an event geared towards the future of students in entertainment.

Hollywood 3.0 is a free conference hosted by USC’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism that discusses the future of media and entertainment. Varying from year to year based on the cohort of students, the forum will feature a combination of professional panel discussions and transmedia presentations presented by USC Graduate students in Professor Daniel Kregg’s CMGT 543 Managing Communications in the Entertainment Industry course. The event promises to be entertaining, and students interested in pursuing careers in entertainment will also find this conference resourceful. Hollywood 3.0 gives a glimpse into the life of working in the entertainment industry while discussing the direction the industry is heading in as new trends become promising in taking entertainment by storm.

The graduate students putting this event together strive to give USC students interested in media and entertainment an opportunity to discuss with a variety of professionals about their jobs and how what they do impacts the industry. Tim McHugh, a graduate student studying Online Communities and Team Lead of Promotions of the event touched upon what the USC community can gain from Hollywood 3.0.

“I feel like each panel provides a variety of tidbits of information that anyone wants to pick up on,” McHugh said. “If someone were interested in going into Public Relations, you will definitely learn a lot from the PR panel. . . We wanted to get a variety of people who can approach the growth [of entertainment] from different angles. It’s purposely a wide net, and because of that, I believe there can be a lot taken from it.”

Two of the prominent panelists and headliners of the event is the father-son duo of Henry and Max Winkler. McHugh promises that their panel will not only be inspiring, but also one everyone can gain something from.

“Anyone can have fun with the Winklers,” McHugh states. “Henry Winkler played the popular character Fonzie back on Happy Days and his son Max is a writer, director, producer in his own right in filmmaking. It’s kind of a generational panel… the Winkler event will be in the Annenberg lobby, to create more of a sit-down vibe to it. It’s also about what it’s like working in front and behind the camera and needing to diversify skill sets especially in today’s modern Hollywood.”

What Hollywood 3.0 recognizes is the multiple levels of media and entertainment that help define its place in pop culture. An event focused on the future of media and entertainment, Hollywood 3.0 approaches this concept from a variety of perspective which makes this event not only entertaining and resourceful, but engaging. From the “I am East Hollywood” transmedia presentation that strives to create the awareness of the wealth East Hollywood possesses in regards to culture and its movement to the public relations panel “Pitch & Toss: The Importance of Maintaining Relationships in Public Relations and Advertising”, this event promises to entertain and engage you with possibilities in the industry from multiple cultural and global viewpoints.

From a global standpoint, Hollywood 3.0 hopes to reach out to Chinese students with their “The Best of Both Worlds: Co-Producing Films for the US and China” which hopes to bring Chinese entertainment and US together through film as a collaborative medium.

“We are actually marketing this panel really hard to a lot of the Chinese student organizations. The thought behind it is there are student from China coming to America and having filmmaking be that kind of mirror of their path,” said McHugh. “Also, there is the professional relationship between the China and US from an entertainment perspective as well.”

Ultimately, Hollywood 3.0 allows students to not only see the future of media and entertainment, but also find themselves and where they fit as both media and entertainment continue to advance.

        “I love Annenberg as a building and it’s a really cool place to host this event,” said McHugh.
“I hope this event will be a good experience for everyone who comes. I know it will be.”