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Harvardwood Calling

by Seth Abramovitch
March/April 2008 , Page 43

Illustration by Laurent Cilluffo

There's an industry out there for people like me. A legitimate one! Not, like, porn."

Twenty-eight-year-old Mia Riverton has what people in the entertainment business refer to as “a face,” a harmonious blend of Eastern and Western features framed by shoulder-length brown hair. She also has presence. Pulling up a chair in a café in Silver Lake, a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood, one recent evening, she introduces herself with the targeted energy of someone who knows how to make a quick impression in casting rooms and producers’ offices. Over the next hour, she will recount everything from her multicultural childhood to her current work as efficiently as if she were pitching a project. She’s appearing in the secluded-lake thriller, Scaring the Fish, out this year; she’s developing Tiananmen, a love story; and she recently shot a TV pilot called Bottom Feeders, a comedy about an American Idol–like contest for strippers. So far, Riverton has kept her clothes on.

Riverton’s Hollywood career began in 1998. While interning at Goldman Sachs before her senior year, she realized that the only pleasure she derived from her job came from playing the part. “I imagined I was a character from Wall Street,” she says. “I loved putting on the power suits and hanging out with the boys.” The work? “I hated it. I just didn’t care about money.” So Riverton considered what she enjoyed at Harvard—writing, composing, acting in Gilbert and Sullivan productions—and realized, “There’s an industry out there for people like me. A legitimate one! Not, like, porn.”

Riverton grew up in Indianapolis, the daughter of a Chinese mother and an Irish-Cherokee father, both pharmaceutical scientists. Neither parent loved the thought of their Harvard-educated daughter absconding to Los Angeles for a life of insecurity, rejection, and waitressing. But Riverton was determined, and in the spring of 1999, ready to go west, she visited Harvard’s Office of Career Services looking for help. An apologetic counselor said, “This is all I have,” and handed her a list of 10 phone numbers. When Riverton arrived in Los Angeles that September, she called the numbers. “Four of them didn’t even work,” she recalls.

She used one that did to call film executive Stacy Cohen and propose a Harvard-in-Hollywood networking group. Cohen, who suggested they call it “Harvardwood,” roped in acquaintance and TV producer Adam Fratto. The trio compiled an e-mail list of their Harvard friends in the biz and progressed from there. Soon alums far from the Cambridge mother ship were swapping apartment tips and job listings. Riverton even met her future husband, Dave Alpert, a partner at a management and production company, through Harvardwood.

As the group developed, so did Riverton’s career. A temp job at Fox led to a TV development position at the studio. A stage role in Bare: A Pop Opera landed her an agent and acting auditions. But as Riverton read for parts, she discovered a challenge most Harvard graduates never encounter: While her Cambridge education helped her network with other graduates, it hurt her with everyone else in L.A, where an Ivy League degree raises suspicions more than it opens doors. “My agent told me, ‘You’re a pretty girl, but don’t talk so much,’” Riverton explains. “I was going in to read for the pretty ingenue, but I’d come off sounding like Janet Reno. So I started dumbing down my vocabulary in the [casting] room.”

Seeking more control over her work, Riverton headed back east in June 2004 to produce and co-star in Red Doors, an indie comedy about a dysfunctional Chinese-American family in the suburbs of New York. Named best narrative feature at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, Red Doors was a quintessentially Harvardwood project, produced by Riverton and Jane Chen and written and directed by Georgia Lee, a filmmaker mentored by Martin Scorsese.

Eight years after co-founding the group, Riverton remains Harvardwood’s driving force. The 2500-member nonprofit (on the web at www.harvardwood.org), hosts mixers, film screenings, and lectures in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston and has chapters around the world. Recent programs have included seminars with TV writer Jeff Melvoin (Alias, Army Wives, Northern Exposure) and casting director Lisa Beach. One of this year’s first events was Harvardwood 101, which offered 24 undergrads the chance to spend their post-exam January break in Hollywood.

When Riverton greets young aspirants at Harvardwood 101 and other gatherings, she knows not all of them will make it and that the ones who do will have to adapt to the L.A. culture. “Directors and producers see ambition and greater intelligence as a threat,” Riverton says. “Some of these students, they’re used to [challenging] famous professors—they have that Harvard sense of entitlement. They come here with big plans and big egos.

“Harvard doesn’t rule you out,” she says. “But it is something to overcome.”