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?
The artistic rebellion of the 1950s became physical rebellion in the 1960s, culminating with the student takeover of University Hall in 1969. Largely because of the violence that followed the takeover, the incident made front-page news: The country’s most revered university had succumbed to the same kind of turbulence dividing less-hallowed campuses across the nation. The following year, two watershed events would reinforce Harvard’s assimilation into mainstream culture.
Classics professor Erich Segal, who’d been on campus for most of his adult life, first as an undergrad and then a doctoral student, had decided to moonlight as a screenwriter. Love Story, the novelization of Segal’s screenplay, was published on Valentine’s Day 1970 and became an instant best seller. The movie was in theaters by Christmas. A devastating tearjerker for audiences of all demographics—Harvard rebel (Ryan O’Neal) defies family, falls for girl (Ali MacGraw) from the wrong side of the tracks, girl dies—Love Story encapsulated the class and generational tensions familiar to any contemporary Harvard student. (It’s no coincidence that Segal himself is Jewish.) For the first time, Harvard was the subject of a pop culture phenomenon. The university could no longer shun pop culture; it was pop culture, and would continue to be in films ranging from The Paper Chase to Legally Blonde. Like any modern celebrity, Harvard had lost control over its own image—and would, in time, hire consultants and press secretaries across the university in hopes of recapturing that control.
Also in 1970, Lampooners Henry Beard, Rob Hoffman, and Doug Kenney found another way to translate the university into mass culture: Their new National Lampoon became one of the top magazines in the country, with a readership in the millions. National Lampoon’s nothing-is-sacred humor dovetailed perfectly with post-Watergate satire, and its Lampoon Radio Hour featured new and rising comedians such as Christopher Guest, Chevy Chase, and John Belushi. The quick-sketch format on that show paved the way for Saturday Night Live, where many Lampooners would find work as writers. Indeed, beginning in the late ’70s, Lampoon alumni would come to populate the TV comedy world as writer-producers of late night TV and sitcoms. Kenney would go on to co-write Animal House, one of the most profitable comedies of all time. Harvard was changing from a bastion of elitism into a manufacturer of mass entertainment.
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