He scraped together funding with $10,000 his father, Ernie Anderson, had squirreled away for college tuitions, and supplemented that with some gambling winnings and his girlfriend’s credit card. Instead, he decided to make a short that would serve as his “film school”, so to speak. Unsatisfied with his education there, he enrolled in NYU’s film school, and he was there all of two days before he decided that the institution of film school in general held no benefit for him.
He was admitted to Boston’s Emerson College as an English major, lasting for 2 semesters (it seems like all the prominent Emersonians are actually dropouts). When it was time for director Paul Thomas Anderson to go to college, he naturally went the film school route, like so many other would-be directors did before him.
