In college, Tiffany majored in filmmaking at UC Berkeley. “They didn’t have any production courses there, so I took a class on Woody Allen!” Tiffany laughed, “...and early cinema so I knew about the first women filmmakers. I remember I took that class on Woody Allen and my father was like ‘I’m not paying for you to take a class on Woody Allen!”
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The most important class Tiffany took at Berkeley was one she taught herself with another student. “We were like twenty years old, we put up a sign ‘We’re teaching a film production class.’ We had only just learned how to make movies the summer before. So we’d be looking in the book before the class then go and teach it. One hundred kids showed up that day and we could only let in fifteen,” Tiffany said.
It’s Okay to Fail
At University of California Berkeley she had won the highest honor in art, The Eisner Award, for filmmaking. When Tiffany was only twenty-one she started making a feature called Zoli’s Brain. It was in all the papers, but she eventually ran out of money and had to stop filming. “Life punched me in the stomach,” she said, but she learned from that and went on to do many great things. She said the other day that she ran into somebody who had worked on the feature with her and they decided to try and finish it. Tiffany now says that “It’s okay to fail; we are only human, failing is part of life.”