UCLA film student Reed Van Dyk didn’t come up with the story for his Oscar-nominated short film, “DeKalb Elementary.” The story found him.
He was already writing a feature script about a mass shooting incident, and eager to make the story as true-to-life as possible, he went looking for recorded 911 calls to get a better sense of how dispatchers handle these kinds of incidents.
“I just needed to know how a 911 dispatcher answers the phone,” the filmmaker said in an interview this week.
“I just needed to know what the protocol was.
What do they say when they pick up the phone?”He googled “911 call” and found what he was looking for.
“This call that my short film is based on happened to be the first one that popped up,” he said.The call that Van Dyk found was from a 2013 incident at an Atlanta, Georgia elementary school, in
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