Mancini attended USC’s film school alongside classmates such as George Lucas, John Carpenter, Ron Howard, and Robert Zemeckis.
Among his better-known guests: Cher, Sean Penn, Stanley Donen, Michael York, Henry Mancini (no relation), Carpenter and Zemeckis.
In the midst of a California budget crisis, West Los Angeles College (where Mancini had become a full-time professor) decided to cut back its costly cinema program.
Mancini also points out that extensive readings worked fine for students in the early 1900s, when newspapers, dense with words, provided the news and books were still the principal medium for acquiring knowledge and for storytelling.
Mancini also designed and staged the AAA Travel High School Challenge, a national competition on travel-related geographic knowledge.