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Punchline: Secret History

by Michael Colton , John Aboud
March/April 2008

Harvard president <a href="/people/1296.html">Abbot Lawrence Lowell</a> immediately convenes a secret committee to determine how Harvard can dominate the nascent medium of film, just as it already controls the publishing and opium industries."

1893- Thomas Edison introduces the Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Harvard president Charles William Eliot immediately convenes a secret committee to determine how Harvard can dominate the nascent medium of film, just as it already controls the publishing and opium industries.

1895- Young Griffo v. Battling Charles Barnett, a staged boxing match, is projected in a New York storefront, becoming the first “movie” ever screened for a paying audience. Weeks later it is savaged, absolutely savaged, in a Hasty Pudding Theatricals “pun run.”

1903- Edwin Porter releases The Great Train Robbery, regarded as the first-ever narrative film. Several Harvard juniors immediately attempt to pirate and share the film but are thwarted because the technology to do so will not be invented for another hundred years.

1904- President Eliot pens the first-ever “spec script.” He describes it as “a scientific-fiction slash western—think Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory meets Native Woman Washing a Negro Baby. ”

1914- Audiences flock to a serialized epic called The Perils of Pauline, about a damsel in distress menaced by assorted villains. The serial is based on the true story of a Radcliffe student who wandered into the A.D. Club.

1922- Harvard president Abbot Lawrence Lowell announces a Jewish quota on campus. Jews respond by saying “Feh,” heading west to establish movie studios and trying in vain to bake a decent bagel in the Los Angeles heat.

1924- The college begins monitoring which students are assigned to Massachusetts Hall, the only Yard dormitory with a clock tower, to “crack down on this Harold Lloyd bullshit.”

1939- The Wizard of Oz achieves notoriety after viewers claim that in the background of the Tin Man sequence, one can glimpse a munchkin hanging himself from a tree after receiving a rejection letter from Harvard. (Sixty years later, enterprising stoners discover that the film corresponds surprisingly well when synced with the soundtrack of Michael Sandel’s second “Justice” lecture.)

1941- William Randolph Hearst, angry at his alleged portrayal in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, prohibits mention of the film in any of his papers. Hearst also excises a sequence from every print of the film in which Charles Foster Kane throws a party in the Harvard Lampoon Castle, steals the Crimson president’s chair and converts it into a sled, publishes a poorly received parody of the Advocate, and takes hits off a nitrous tank instead of writing his thesis.

1945- Female moviegoers flock to see “women’s pictures” or “weepies” like Now, Voyager, Dark Victory, and Mildred Pierce. The genre is created by the Harvard Admissions Office to distract female students from flocking to such subjects as history, mathematics, and science.

1969- Reflecting the national mood, morally ambiguous, violent films such as Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch are released, and Mather House is constructed.

1970- Al Gore reportedly inspires the character of Oliver Barrett IV in Love Story; audiences weep at the ending when Barrett’s wife, Jenny, succumbs to increased greenhouse gas concentrations due to the burning of fossil fuels.

1972- Harvard biologists announce a breakthrough in clitoral-epiglottal transplantation; Deep Throat is rushed into production.

1978- Universal Pictures develops Animal House, based on a diary found in the Fly Club’s poker room. William Weld lobbies to play himself, but the role goes to John Belushi.

1994- With Honors, directed by Alek Keshishian and starring Joe Pesci as Simon Wilder, a homeless man living in Widener Library, wins a record seven Oscars, including best Harvard picture. The admissions office is flooded with applications by students eager to meet the impish Wilder and have sex with him in the stacks.

1997- Swim Test: The Harry Elkins Widener Story is released under a new title, Titanic, with the role of Widener (Elijah Wood) reduced to a cameo in the Irish dance scene. Nevertheless, teenage girls infatuated with the Widener legend drive the film to record box office.

2005- After viewing Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Harvard president Lawrence Summers makes controversial remarks asserting that female Terminators such as the T-X are intrinsically not as powerful as male Terminators such as the T-800. As a result of the controversial remarks, Summers is swiftly terminated.

Michael Colton and John Aboud are screenwriters.