Tullman points out an imposing brick structure standing in splendid isolation near the Chicago River. Once, it was a research kitchen for Sara Lee; today, the building houses Kendall College, an award-winning culinary school that Tullman rescued from near collapse in 2003. Named president of Kendall with a mandate to save it, sell it, or shut it down, Tullman pared the curriculum of subjects such as law enforcement and athletics, secured a lucrative contract to train Navy cooks, unloaded the dilapidated 70-year-old campus in suburban Evanston for $10 million, bought the state-of-the-art Sara Lee facility, and raised another $50 million to finance it all. The strategic and financial turnaround took 100 days; the renovation and relocation a further three months. In 2006, Tullman arranged the profitable sale of Kendall to Laureate Education, which operates campus-based and online universities.
Two blocks from Kendall, we pass the former site of Experiencia, Tullman's second education venture. In 2005, Tullman, Pollack, and a couple of investors transformed 20,000 square feet of industrial space into a miniature city for inner-city schoolchildren to operate. Every day for three years, 240 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders took over Experiencia's diminutive storefronts, its snack shops, its government agencies, and its newspaper and radio station to learn about real work in the real world. Another floor, devoted to science, featured 100 live animals and a special-effects-driven natural-disaster simulation. "I did it half because it was good for the kids and half because it was completely amazing to build my own city," says Tullman. But the Chicago schools couldn't support the program, so Tullman sold the space to the Girl Scouts, who use it for workshops and camps.
Which brings us to Tribeca Flashpoint Academy. The idea originated in 2007 with Landry, also an investor and serial entrepreneur. His son, an aspiring filmmaker, had enrolled in a four-year arts and media college and been disappointed. "He went to school for almost two years and never touched a piece of equipment," says Landry, who stepped down as chairman of Flashpoint last year. "I started looking for schools that really trained students to go to work in digital media and found a hole in the market." An education-industry novice, Landry sought out Tullman, whose resumé also boasts a stint as chairman of the Princeton Review, on the recommendation of a mutual friend. Tullman relished the prospect of preparing students for more lucrative careers than Kendall had generally provided. "Instead of chefs, they could become digital filmmakers and go to work for Pixar or Disney," Tullman says. "This time around, we would train people to be financial successes as well as doing things they were excited about."
While Paula Froehle, enlisted by Landry as Flashpoint's academic dean, recruited faculty and staff, Tullman chased students. Persuading parents to spend $25,000 on a school that didn't exist yet was no easy sell. Tullman figured the most likely targets were kids like Landry's son, who had gone the four-year route and regretted it. He created marketing material, writing and designing 57 ads in 57 weeks that ran in Chicago's free newspaper, The Reader, and other publications. ("If you're sitting at a college that's a mistake for you, now is the time to fix it," reads one ad. "Sending my son to a traditional four-year school is a waste of his time and my money," goes another.) That first year, 107 students, most in their early to mid-20s, took a leap of faith.
In late May 2007, Tullman and Landry—who had raised $10 million from angel investors—took over three floors in a stately, century-old office building across from Daley Plaza. The space, a former domestic-violence court constructed with Kevlar walls to prevent bullets passing through, was a wasteland: rubble-strewn floors, bins heaped with drywall, electrical conduits dangling everywhere. Cue renovation montage. Three months later, Flashpoint Academy (De Niro et al. were not yet in the picture) welcomed its first students to a facility equipped with technology so new, much of it wasn't yet on the market. "I didn't think Howard could move faster than he did at Kendall," says Paras, who was the IT director at the culinary school. "But this was faster."
Some of Flashpoint's technology—cameras, software, editing tools—comes courtesy of Microsoft, Canon, and other companies that are eager to test new products with the budding digerati who represent their next-generation customers. Some was developed specifically for Flashpoint. An interactive storyboard that also plays videos, for example, was designed by a company called PolyVision, with input from Flashpoint's staff and students. There are game labs and screening rooms and editing facilities. The live-music studios and sound-design suites, where recording majors create effects for other students' films and—as one of the school's outside projects—lay down tracks for the popular games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, are built on foam, and the ceilings hang on springs, to dampen the noise.
At this point, I have to address the paintings. Tullman, who is married to an artist and has two grown daughters, is a voracious collector of contemporary representational art. Hundreds of canvases—large, loud, challenging verging on pugnacious—adorn every wall in the school. They stand out against the otherwise-cool, professional décor like (I'm gonna steal from Raymond Chandler) "a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake." In fact, a painting of a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake would look right at home here. The art is meant to stimulate students, who at some point in their two years must choose an artwork and incorporate it into a story or video game. "I want them to understand that digital stuff can become sterile pretty easily," says Tullman. "There is excellence in analog."
