March/April 2008

When Harvard Met Hollywood

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?

by Peter Rader
March/April 2008, Page 49

Sissy Spacek in a scene from Badlands (1973), the debut film of the reclusive director Terrence Malick.WARNER BROS./ NEAL PETERS COLLECTIONSissy Spacek in a scene from Badlands (1973), the debut film of the reclusive director Terrence Malick.
Such rebellions from the Pudding and another autonomous group, the Lampoon, were still marginalized. Well into the 1950s, the attitude of the Brahmin establishment toward Hollywood still ranged from ignorance to ambivalence to outright disdain. Certainly the campus curriculum–makers never accorded much import to the visual arts, which were deemed more “professional” and less intellectual than traditional areas of inquiry. In 1956, the influential Brown Report, an investigation into the suitability of the arts as an academic discipline chaired by John Nicholas Brown, concluded that Harvard devoted woefully few resources toward instruction of the arts. Similar findings surfaced in the 1990s, but a 2002 dustup led to the dismissal of reform-minded Visual and Environmental Studies head Ellen Phelan, a working artist, and little has changed since then. Assistant Professor J.D. Connor’s courses on Hollywood films have been wildly popular but only one (The Art of Film) is included in the core curriculum. Since the 1920s, Yale’s drama program has produced gifted talents such as Meryl Streep, Paul Newman, Liev Schreiber, and Sigourney Weaver. Harvard didn’t even have a drama department until 1980, when it established the American Repertory Theatre (ART), which has yet to be meaningfully integrated into the undergraduate curriculum. When ART director Robert Orchard proposed such a step in the early 1980s, one senior faculty member reportedly retorted, “We don’t train butchers. Why should we train artists?”

They may have had to look hard, but mavericks passionate about film and the arts managed to find energy and ideas at Harvard. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the philosophy department’s Stanley Cavell shocked peers by writing scholarly papers about Hollywood. Film provides a unique window into the American psyche, he argued, and is thus a legitimate subject for academic inquiry.

Cavell’s teachings helped shape one of Harvard’s—and Hollywood’s—film legends, director Terrence Malick. Though Malick has made just four feature films—Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World—they, and he, are iconic and revered. The son of a Texas oil executive, Malick studied philosophy and film theory with Cavell. As a Rhodes scholar, he read Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, but withdrew from Oxford after a clash with his advisor. Malick taught briefly at MIT, but soon headed west and commenced a film career in earnest at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Transcendental and nonlinear, populated by archetypical characters, Malick’s painstakingly wrought quartet of films draws heavily on his philosophical studies at Harvard. (He is now working on a fifth film, Tree of Life, rumored to star Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.)

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