As the theater faculty at fictional Riverbottom College brainstorm ways to shore up their department’s faltering budget, some interesting proposals emerge.
These include issuing a departmental meme coin, creating a faculty boudoir calendar, and selling blood plasma.
“You get $85 for plasma if you’re over 175 pounds,” says Burt (Seth Morris), who brims with not-exactly-welcome ideas in “The Cuts,” a new short film made by a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow at UC Riverside. (Morris was a scandal-prone congressman on “Veep” and voice of Greg Glaser on the animated series “Big Mouth.”)
A darkly humorous take on the money challenges confronting liberal arts programs nationwide, “The Cuts” premiers Aug. 11 at the 30th annual LA Shorts International Film Festival. The Oscar-qualifying festival will screen more than 400 short movies and expects to draw some 10,000 attendees.
Annika Speer, associate professor of theatre, film, and digital production at UCR, wrote the screenplay in the summer of 2025, as the Trump administration began aggressively targeting federal funding of the humanities and arts.
“It navigates the real crisis of valuing the arts amid the DOGE-ification of arts and humanities programs,” she said, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency, a controversial initiative of the Trump administration that led to the firings, buyouts, and retirement of hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
Noah Arjomand (MFA ’25), a chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow in media and cultural studies at UCR, directed the film. (Arjomand earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University in 2018.)
“There’s something specific to this moment, under the second Trump administration, that drew me to directing the film,” said Arjomand, who co-directed the Emmy-winning documentary “Eat Your Catfish.” “The administration has moved to slash the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, attacking disciplines meant to help us make sense of the human experience and to think critically ¬— things not valued by a real-estate-developer-turned-president.”
Academic parody
In addition to highlighting the financial woes of the arts in the U.S., “The Cuts” takes humorous digs at academic culture. Most of the film is set in a windowless conference room, where the tweedy department chair, Walter, played by Miles Anderson (“La La Land,” “The Tragedy of MacBeth”), runs a tedious faculty meeting. He informs attendees that their unit’s budget outlook is “dire” and that the dean wants college departments to come up with fundraising plans.
As ideas are floated, another faculty member, Diane (Bella Merlin, distinguished professor of theatre, film, and digital production at UCR), regularly suggests tapping the college’s endowment funds, which Walter explains are earmarked.
“Earmarked for what?” Diane asks.
“No one knows,” Walter replies.
Other cast members include Esther Banegas Gatica (MFA ’22) as a faculty member who spouts anticapitalist rhetoric; Rachel Millar (BA, ’24) as Cherry, a department administrator who is understandably leery about including some of the faculty’s remarks in the meeting minutes; Dan Jablons (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) as the vaping building custodian, Carl; and Josiah Alpherr (BA ’25; “Charmers”) as an actor who engages in some heavy-handed product placement.
Students learn on the set
The production crew includes current UCR students in a variety of behind-the-scenes roles, such as associate producer, script supervisor, and art assistant. Working alongside the filmmakers was an opportunity for students to network with working professionals as they build careers in the performing arts, Arjomand said.
Speer agreed. “It moves students’ learning beyond the classroom,” she said. “There’s something valuable about the intimacy of a set, where students can practice in real time what they’re learning academically.”
She added, “It’s one more thread in their pedagogical experience at UCR, and it shows them that this work isn’t just hypothetical or theoretical — they’re seeing and contributing to a project from start to finish, building their reels and their CVs in the process.”
(Photos courtesy of Annika Speer and Noah Arjomand)
