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?
MGM/NEAL PETERS COLLECTION
Reese Witherspoon as HLS student Elle Woods.
The Hasty Pudding's century-old tradition of cross-dressing was already the sort of subversive, channeled rebelliousness-from a club independent of the university-that tweaked Harvard's stuffy, paternalistic culture.
In the spring of 1927, second-year Harvard Business School students were required to attend a lecture series featuring Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Marcus Loew, Harry Warner, Cecil B. DeMille, and other powerful heads of film studios such as Paramount, Fox, and MGM. The studio chiefs were men from immigrant, working-class roots who were making millions on 25-cent picture shows, and Harvard had never seen their like before. Brokered by Joseph Kennedy, the lecture series was the first university-sponsored event of its kind.
“When I entered this business 20 years ago, men from college despised motion pictures,” Adolph Zukor said to start his address. “To work for such a company was far beneath them. But within the last few years, they have seen the tremendous future [in] motion pictures … The future of the motion picture industry will depend on college men.”
Zukor was only partly right. Although the world of movies had already become too powerful a cultural and economic force for Harvard to ignore, the university’s elitist discomfort with Hollywood’s democratic qualities would never disappear, not even when the cozy studio system eventually gave way to corporate conglomerates that were more conducive to business school types. Nevertheless, New York magazine recently named Harvard the “best industry-networking school” for film careers. And today, Harvard-educated executives run four of the multimedia companies—Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., NBC Universal, and Viacom—that dominate Hollywood. Those executives recently fought a writers’ strike led by Writers Guild of America, West president Patric Verrone and lead negotiator John Bowman. Harvard talent has helped produce some of the most successful, well-reviewed, and longest-running shows on television, including Saturday Night Live, The Cosby Show, ER, and The Simpsons, as well as newer hits such as Lost, The Office, and 30 Rock. A-list stars with Harvard degrees include Tommy Lee Jones and Natalie Portman. (Matt Damon dropped out just a few credits shy of his diploma.) All told, films and television shows generated by Harvard alumni have topped $100 billion in revenue.
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