Hollywood couldn't build a better school than Harvard. It has a legendary brand and storied past; witness the joy of its graduates when they let you know they attended it. And then there's the campus, the most classically college-looking place in America: The Charles River, with water the quality of diarrhea but beautiful vistas at sunrise; Harvard Yard, with its stately brick buildings, maintained by an endowment that sneezes million dollar bills; and the sliver of metropolitan life that slouches around Harvard Square.

But a strange thing happens when the school ends up in a movie: With maybe one exception-- The Paper Chase (1973; dir. James Bridges)-- every film ever made about Harvard has been awful. This applies to lame-brained comedies, schmaltzy romances and formulaic coming-of-age stories alike. They all stink.

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And none of these films is even flattering. Deliberately or not, each becomes a mockery of everything Harvard stands for: The students turn into snotty blow-hards, the teachers are maniacs, and the "prestige" morphs into "elitism." Why does Harvard put up with it? Is it for the free screentime that other schools would kill for? Or do they hate how they're exploited-- and if so, why don't they stop it? Why does what is supposedly America's Best School bring out the worst in everything that comes near it, and why can't someone make it stop?

Before we get to the answers, let's take a look at the problem. It starts in the 1890s, the dawn of filmmaking, when movies were so new that people would sit through anything-- including Harvard Crew, an 1897 non-fiction short about Harvard's only real sports team. It might have been a double-feature with Cornell-Yale-Harvard Boat-Race, which came out the same year. The Internet Movie Database also lists classics like Yale vs. Harvard (1927; dir. Robert F. McGowan), plus three different versions of Brown of Harvard. Moving into the age of talkies, there's Harvard, Here I Come! (1941; dir. Lew Landers), with the gusto-chocked tagline: "'Slapsie' Takes Over Harvard... and every gal in sight!"

But let's to skip ahead to 1970, to the epochal Harvard flick. Love Story (1970; dir. Arthur Hiller) was a schlocky weeper with a grating cast and treacly script. Ryan O'Neal played a rich Harvard legacy who bucked his dad's authority to marry a penniless Radcliffe girl, Ali McGraw, whose flaring nostrils and wooden quippery were so excruciating that she had to die of leukemia to get our sympathy. The hippie-lite script-- like when they wrote their own (sickening) wedding vows-- felt creaky and dated, and we were bluntly hit by the contrast between the bright, Ivy-endorsed future they looked forward to and the "tragedy" that befell them. (Your parents probably cried through the whole thing, though.)

And that is nothing compared to the ludicrous and reviled Soul Man (1986; dir. Steve Miner), perhaps the most embarrassing film ever connected to the school. Rich white kid C. Thomas Howell gets into Harvard Law, only to have his dad cut off his money. Then, instead of getting a loan or a paper route, he scores a race-based scholarship by pretending to be black. Howell gets an "education in discrimination" as a minority on a lily-white campus-- and maybe this was meant as a satire, but the good intentions vanish in the pain of watching Howell change his race by overdosing on tanning pills.

There have been plenty of other turkeys over the years. But just recently, Harvard has come under attack by a slew of lame fish-out-of-water comedies. In Stealing Harvard (2002; dir. Bruce McCullough), Jason Lee has to send his niece to college but he's thirty grand short; A-list jackass Tom Green helps him steal it. The film itself barely features Harvard-- in fact, it was shot as Stealing Stanford and had to be redubbed when that school backed out. But like Soul Man (and Love Story), it hits on the theme that Harvard is so great that people will do anything to pay for it.

Compared to that, Reese Witherspoon's star turn in Legally Blonde (2001; dir. Robert Luketic) was passable, and not any dumber than it was supposed to be. Witherspoon plays a ditzy sorority girl who charms her way into Harvard Law to be with her stuffy, blue-blood boyfriend. By the time she gets there, however, he's already hooked up with a frigid Jackie O-like preppy, played by America's latest "the other girl," Selma Blair. To match those stereotypes we also see an angry lesbian activist. Since the 60s, the flip-side of Harvard's stuffiness has been its P.C. leftism; no movie is complete without both.

And that's why rappers Method Man and Redman mix it up with both chisel-jawed crew jocks and Marxist reactionary professors in the stoner comedy How High (2001; dir. Jesse Dylan)-- including Spalding Gray's cameo as a self-hating white man: "You should lynch me!" The satire, especially when it's racial, gets laughs, but end-to-end, the film comes off half-assed and limp. It's also the best example of how little Hollywood actually cares about the school. To list a few of the errors in How High: There are no frats at Harvard; Al Gore's daughter went there, but she isn't black; and there's no big stone sign on the campus announcing, "HARVARD UNIVERSITY - EST. 1636." (At least they got the date right.)

From just these films you get a consistent portrait of Harvard. And it doesn't look good. The same few messages keep coming up: Harvard is elitist, snobbish, uselessly leftist, expensive, and hard to get into. None of these is flattering, and being called "elitist" must especially strike a nerve. Private schools like Harvard struggle to look inviting to kids who aren't rich and white: They want the inner city geniuses more than they want the last thing shat out by the Kennedys.

Chris Ahearn works for the News Office at Harvard University and describes himself as the guy to talk to about filming for documentaries or news programs. According to him, nobody's allowed to make movies at Harvard. "Harvard does not grant permission to commercial productions to film on campus or to use names or insignia," he explained.

In 1970, Love Story used shots of its stars sitting by the stadium or crossing the Yard, Harvard scarves around every neck. But Gerald Peary, in the Boston Phoenix, determined that A Small Circle of Friends (1980; dir. Rob Cohen), a period piece about 60s radicals, was the last movie filmed on school grounds: According to Peary, the crew made a mess and tore up the Yard, and that was that.

How can a filmmaker get around that? You can shoot from the street, like they did for With Honors (1994; dir. Alek Keshishian), and film your stars walking in and out of the gate to campus. You can film in the park along the Charles River, like James Toback, director of 2001's The Harvard Man, keeping the school buildings close by in the background. Or you can go somewhere else. "A lot of schools promote themselves as doubles for Harvard or other places," said Ahearn. With Honors shot scenes at the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Legally Blonde was filmed at the University of Southern California, and UCLA. (How High looks like it was shot in front of a post office.)

But what about the use of the school's brand? Harvard's name and insignia are copyrighted: Technically, you shouldn't be able to use them without permission. Ahearn explained, "Obviously, studios have used the name, so it's more complicated than that. But that's the policy." And yet, Variety Magazine implied that the producers of Stealing Harvard got permission for its final title. Ahearn contradicts this: "The Stealing Harvard thing was a long, drawn-out process. They were rejected permission on many occasions." To the best of his knowledge, no one at Harvard ever gave them permission. "There are movies that have come out where they don't even ask for permission," says Ahearn. "It's amazing the range and breadth of things people think they can do even after you've had a formal conversation with them."

Could another department or part of the school circumvent the policy, then? Ahearn doesn't rule it out, but as he explained, "The bottom line is enforcement." Harvard's legal department could choose to take action, or at least throw their weight around, and they never have. And when you think about it, why would they? If you print sweatshirts with the Harvard logo and sell them in a store, you'll be in court the next day-- Princeton once sued Abercrombie & Fitch for using shots of their campus in a catalog. But if a Simpsons writer slips in a joke about his alma mater, why bother? A film is an artistic endeavor-- more commercial than a documentary or a news broadcast, but not an obvious target for litigation. Although no enforcement standard has been articulated, why would Harvard chase after these films just for using the school's name? Ahearn speculated that the less factual the film, the better. I'm speculating here, too, but How High is so ridiculous that it's harmless, though if you portrayed current Harvard president Lawrence Summers as an anti-semite, it might get you a phone call.

To get a better read on what would or wouldn't bother a prominent university, I called up Princeton. This fellow Ivy has had a charmed life on screen, with almost every film making it look great-- most recently, A Beautiful Mind, the story of Princeton professor John Nash. Lauren Robinson-Brown directs the Office of Communications, and like Ahearn, she handles all requests to use the name or to film on campus. If the project meets their requirements-- and most do-- she grants it permission.

Their policy states that Princeton reviews scripts "to ensure that the material is appropriate and would not reflect negatively on the University." And it turns out that "appropriate" doesn't mean it has to be nice. "We have a very good sense of humor," Robinson-Brown explained. "We don't necessarily reject something that spoofs us." Even stories with "axe murderers" could make the cut: "Things that make us more nervous would be [scripts that are] lewd or discriminatory... we don't need to associate Princeton with that." 152ee80cbc

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