Scholar Stories: Fanning's Post-Grad Path Goes Through Hollywood
4/4/2018 11:00:00 AM | Rowing, Features
Continuing the popular series that began in 2016-17, each Wednesday MGoBlue.com will highlight a Michigan student-athlete and their academic pursuits. These are our Scholar-Athlete Stories, presented by Prairie Farms.
With just over a year left until graduation, the University of Michigan rowing team's Rachel Fanning has a pretty good idea where she's heading.
She's going to Hollywood!
OK, so she's probably going to Hollywood, but not as an aspiring actor or singer. The film and television industry is changing -- and she wants in on it.
In her application essay to the Ross School of Business, Fanning wrote about the growing demand for diverse films and how major studios have largely failed to capitalize. She wrote:
"There are so many untold and unfunded narratives that have the potential to become society-making material. People fail to see that the media we consume and praise influences how consumers engage with the real world. … There is potential for profit in films that break away from existing and overproduced viewpoints."
That was written more than two years ago in March 2016, but much has changed since then. In the last calendar year alone, "Black Panther" and "Wonder Woman," superhero movies with an African-American man (Chadwick Boseman) and an Israeli woman (Gal Gadot) in lead roles, grossed a combined $2 billion worldwide.
The financial and cultural successes of those movies have helped prove Fanning's point. There's an audience there.
"Representation in media can help people understand each other," said Fanning, majoring in business. "I could create a movie that has a diverse cast that resonates with all audiences and connects bridges between people. With streaming services, in particular, so many audiences don't see themselves represented on screen. Representation is empowering."
If that's half of Fanning's passion, the other half is rowing.
On the west side of the state -- Fanning is from Ada, near Grand Rapids, Michigan -- the sport of rowing is not immensely popular. Fanning was a year-round swimmer from age 7, but gave it up after suffering bulging discs and stress fractures in her back. She also played basketball in the winter, but not very well, as it turned out. As she said, "Basketball was the sport that humbled me."
She turned to rowing as a freshman at Forest Hills Northern High School on the recommendation of family friends. Fanning's first inclination was to follow teammates and play water polo. Her mother, Jenny Fanning, said, "You're doing rowing."
"After the first year, I knew she was right," Fanning said. "I loved the cardio aspect of swimming and the team aspect of basketball. Rowing was the merge of that for me."
Fanning's creative side has been around since middle school when she started her own book blog. Each week brought a new book, sometimes from the publishers themselves. She'd stay up all night at times, neglecting math or science homework in favor of these books, flipping through pages until her eyes couldn't take it anymore.
She would even get grounded because she read too much. Imagine that. A child getting grounded over reading.
"I was an aggressive reader," she said. "I've always loved stories. Take 'Game of Thrones.' There's enough baseline knowledge there that you can go up to someone and talk about this week's episode and what they think will happen next week. There's something about being a part of a community that connects you with all sorts of people."
"I came from a place where a lot of kids are on set paths. They're doctors, lawyers, businessmen. Michigan opened my eyes up to anything being possible."
That's where the road to Hollywood began. During her second semester as a freshman, Fanning took Intro to Media Industries. She figured that to go into film or television, she had to break in on the creative side. But it was the business of it that caught her eye.
Last spring, Fanning spent countless hours emailing every talent agency in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Boston, desperate for someone to take a chance on her. She estimates that she applied for anywhere between 60 to 80 different positions.
Through all the rejection letters, Fanning found one company to take her on: Legendary Films. She spent eight weeks from June to August working in the marketing department.
"I've never applied to so many jobs in my life," she said. "It's hard to break into an industry with no work experience. I got lucky."
Fanning describes it as "a summer of learning." She sat in on licensing meetings for the upcoming Netflix reboot of "Lost in Space." She assisted in launching of an in-world promotional trailer at San Diego Comic-Con for "Pacific Rim: Uprising." She even had the chance to read scripts for upcoming movies.
At the end of the internship, Fanning put together a 90-minute, 132-slide presentation that looked at what competitive movies did to market themselves. She examined each movie's timeline, how each movie resonated with press and consumers, and what their engagement levels were on social media.
Fanning is still trying to figure out what she's going to do this summer once rowing ends, but there's a good chance it will fall somewhere between her dream job (creating diverse content at a major studio) and what she spent last summer doing (business marketing).
She is still searching for internships, but also wants to start developing her senior thesis. She is also looking at taking a screenwriting class, something Fanning cannot do during the academic year due to rowing.
Her goals are ambitiously big, but reachable. If being a student-athlete at Michigan has taught her anything, it is to not give up.
"If I had stopped applying for internships, I would never have gotten what I got," she said. "In rowing, you spent nine months to train for one big event. You fail every day, but you have to keep getting back up. I've failed so many times in rowing that doing this one thing that's scary and uncertain seems so logical to me.
"Anything is possible. Take small steps and do the hardest thing. Most of all, trust the process. The payoff is always going to be better than you imagined."
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