Behind the Scenes

Branded Content Presented by Santa Barbara City College Office of Communications

Most of us don’t actually grow into the futures we sketched out on our 1st-grade vision boards — the ones where we boldly declared our dream professions: astronaut, veterinarian, doctor, and imagined ourselves 10, 20, even 30 years down the line.

But Rosalie Sangenitto did. “From the moment I could form a thought,” she said, “I wanted to work in movies.” 

Many years after that first declaration, however, when she started Santa Barbara High School, she found herself on a more traditional academic path, loading up on AP classes to stay competitive for college admissions, her love of cinema lingering in the background.

“I just knew that getting into college was competitive,” she realized. “So I thought the best thing to do was to take AP classes. But in my heart of hearts, I really wanted to go to film school.”

Because there weren’t many opportunities to study film in high school, Sangenitto sought out another avenue: Santa Barbara City College (SBCC). She enrolled in summer classes, starting with a film studies course and later a screenwriting class.

It was in the film studies class that she encountered the canon of classic cinema for the first time: Casablanca, Citizen Kane, and the films “you’re told that you should watch if you want to be a cinephile,” she mused. The class didn’t just introduce her to titles; it opened up a new way to think about film history and storytelling.

The impact rippled beyond the classroom. She began renting more films from the long-ago, now-closed Santa Barbara video store Video Schmideo, and dug into her father’s LaserDisc collection, discovering movies such as Jaws and The Rocky Horror Picture Show that she “just hadn’t seen before.” 

Before her screenwriting class at SBCC, she said she didn’t even know what Final Draft was, “or what a screenplay even looked like.” The course gave her a concrete foundation: understanding story structure, act breaks, and the basic elements of screenwriting. 

After high school, Sangenitto attended Northwestern, where she applied for early admission and majored in Radio/TV/Film, a degree that blended film theory and practice. During her senior year, she completed a directing sequence and made a short film titled Underwater, which was later screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2012. 

College, for Sangenitto, was a process of figuring out where she fit in the vast ecosystem of the film industry. Through trial and error — writing, directing, and studying the craft from multiple angles — she slowly realized she didn’t want to be a director in the traditional sense, even though she valued what she learned from the experience.

What ultimately clicked for her was the film set’s organized chaos. She describes a set as its own “utopia,” a place where almost any skill can find a home: costume designers, hair and makeup artists, set designers, Teamsters, mechanics, special and visual effects teams, editors, cinematographers, grips, and more. “I think anyone could find a place for themselves on a film set if they wanted to,” she said. 

She felt drawn to the Assistant Director (AD) position. In her words, an AD is someone who “captains a film set”— the “nucleus” that connects and coordinates all departments. “ADs act as a liaison between the director and the rest of the crew,” she said. “We create the schedule, manage the set, coordinate between every department, and set the background for each scene — my favorite part.” On most sets, she clarified, it’s actually the first assistant director who calls “Action.” 

Sangenitto’s path into the industry started at the entry level as a set production assistant (PA). One of her very first sets was Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Licorice Pizza, where she worked for several days. From there, she moved on to other major productions, including King Richard, Ambulance, The Gray Man, and many, many more. 

Today, Sangenitto is a member of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and works as an assistant director in Los Angeles, steadily building her career in film and television. She continues to work on large-scale productions, move up through the DGA ranks, and contribute to the complex choreography of sets that bring stories to life. 

Sangenitto’s life is now firmly rooted in the industry she long dreamed of joining, but she’s quick to trace the line back to Santa Barbara City College. Looking back, she sees her experience at SBCC as the time when a once “theoretical” dream — to work in the film industry — began to feel real. 

 “It was really the film studies class,” she said, ”that opened a big door for me.”

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This article was paid for by Santa Barbara City College. For more information on Santa Barbara City College and the hundreds of programs they offer, visit sbcc.edu or call (805) 965-0581. If you are an SBCC alumnus, please join SBCC Alumni Connect at sbccfoundation.org/alumni.