[10][11] Beginning in 1942, Dean Baldwin Woods guided University Extension through the revisionist era of World War II and the postwar years.

[13] UCLA's Entertainment Studies program has graduated Emmy-, Grammy- and Oscar-nominated and winning alumni, more recently including: Gavin Hood (Ender’s Game, Tsotsi, Rendition, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and Darryl Swann (Macy Gray, Black Eyed Peas, Mos Def).

Award-winning instructors include Kirk Saduski (John Adams, The Pacific, Game Change, The Seventies), among others.

Joe: The Rise of Cobra; Australia; Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; 30 Days of Night; Collateral; Zoanne Clack, Grey’s Anatomy; Tucker Cawley, Parks and Recreation, Everybody Loves Raymond; Eric Jerome Dickey, Resurrecting Midnight; Doug Ellin, Entourage; Janet Fitch, White Oleander (Oprah Pick); Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction);[18] Gavin Hood, Tsotsi (Academy Award winner, Best Foreign Film); Randi Mayem Singer, Mrs. Doubtfire; Melissa Rosenberg, adaptation of Twilight; Dexter; Earl W. Wallace, Witness (Academy Award winner for Best Original Screenplay); Joseph Wambaugh, The Onion Field; Kevin Williamson, Scream, Dawson’s Creek; Iris Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima (Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay).

[19] Notable instructors and lecturers at UCLA Extension have included the Pablo Casals, Walter Cronkite, Steve Allen, Aldous Huxley, Henry Kissinger, Jascha Heifetz, and Peter Drucker, Giammario Villa, among others.