Harvard’s presence in Hollywood is nearly as old as Tinseltown itself, yet the uneasy alliance between the country’s most prestigious academic institution and the nexus of mass entertainment is fraught with a singular tension: Can a highbrow university and a pop culture world just get along?
A generation later, another Harvard outsider, Joseph P. Kennedy, followed in Hearst’s footsteps. Having made a fortune in bootlegging, and eager to go legit after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Kennedy snapped up several studios, plus a chain of movie theaters. He was well aware of the class differences between Hollywood and his alma mater. “The Cabots and the Lodges wouldn’t be caught dead at picture shows or let their children go,” he reportedly told his mistress, Gloria Swanson. “And that’s why their servants know more about what’s going on than they do. The working classes get smarter every day thanks to radio and pictures.” The working classes, Kennedy also knew, constituted a far larger audience than the Cabots and the Lodges. But by acting as a self-appointed liaison between Harvard and Hollywood, coordinating the 1927 lecture series at HBS, Kennedy curried favor with both sides.
Though Harvard was generally aloof, Hollywood certainly wanted to forge relationships with the university. The studio moguls, though wary of Ivy League gentiles conspiring in Wall Street boardrooms to steal away their industry, craved their approval. Most of the studio heads hadn’t finished high school; their garment-industry roots had given them keen commercial instincts and an intimate understanding of their audience. Yet the executives, most of whom were Jews, took great pains to distance themselves from their Eastern European beginnings. Louis B. Mayer of (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) actually changed his birthday to the fourth of July. In search of the Harvard imprimatur, Zukor would donate 500 prints of his films to Widener Library in 1936. Hollywood’s courtship of Harvard wasn’t only about personal validation, though. The pioneers of the new industry wanted cultural legitimacy, and they believed Harvard could give it to them. Around the same time as the HBS summit, several producers were negotiating with Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum to develop a film archive and an annual awards ceremony, according to Peter Decherney, author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American. Troubled by the rise of unions among “below the line” movie laborers, the producers hoped to curb unionization among actors, directors, and writers by placating them with highbrow awards. When negotiations with the Fogg broke down, the moguls established their library at the University of Southern California and quickly formed the Academy (a carefully chosen word) of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presented its first Oscar awards in 1929. “The Academy does what Harvard would have done—convey elite status and give a sense of film artistry,” Decherney explains. Had negotiations with the Fogg proved fruitful, the Academy Awards, broadcast to hundreds of millions globally, would carry a Harvard brand.
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