Mehrjui has said of his educators, “They wouldn’t teach you anything very significant… because the teachers were the kind of people who had not been able to make it in Hollywood themselves… [and would] bring the rotten atmosphere of Hollywood to the class and impose it on us.” He switched his major to philosophy and graduated from UCLA in 1964.Mehrjui started his own literary magazine in 1964, Pars Review. The magazine’s intention was to bring contemporary Persian literature to western readers.