Question of the Day: College Campuses in Film

~ Laura

Question of the Day: What college campuses have appeared in movies? Was the campus identified as something else in the movie? Name the movie, the real campus, and what it was called in the movie.

"When Harry Met Sally"; University of Chicago; University of Chicago

"Thomas Crown Affair"; Bronx Community College; something else, but can’t remember what

"Hannah and Her Sister"; Columbia; Columbia

Your turn.

Published by Laura

26 thoughts on “Question of the Day: College Campuses in Film”

  1. I think USC appeared in Forrest Gump and in a bunch of other things. We certainly had crews on campus a lot. It’s LA area and college-y looking.

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  4. Duke:
    Handmaid’s Tale: The Duke Chapel was some other thing, something to do with hanging? (never saw the movie)
    The Program: The quad was some generic college quad
    Cornell: The Sure Thing (some shots of the quad)
    That’s all I got.

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  6. In Philadelphia, there was a scene that was supposed to take place at University of Pennsylvania’s Law Library that was actually filmed at Penn’s Furness Building (the fine arts library).

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  8. The Human Stain – Williams College.
    I saw Anthony Hopkins, who was nice to everybody; and Nicole Kidman was reportedly a bitch about town…

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  9. Also: The very low budget and bizarre “The Norming of Jack 243.” Filmed at SUNY, College at Purchase, my undergraduate alma mater. Go heliotrope and puce! (yes, the school colors – in the 70s at least).

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  10. UCLA stood in for the University of Chicago in some Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason movie (Ah, IMDB to the rescue: “Nothing in Common”!). They matted in a lake where at UCLA there’s really a field. UCLA is used for a lot of stuff but that’s the only one I can identify. The University of Richmond turned up in, um, some teen drama, I think? Sigh. They used the hallway where my office is and everything…(Wikipedia tells me it was “Dawson’s Creek,” and that they also used the campus for the Geena Davis show, “Commander in Chief,” as well as a low-budget film, “Cry Wolf.”) I wonder if I had a better memory before imdb and wikipedia made it irrelevant?

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  11. Sleeper. One of the buildings on the Busch Campus at Rutgers New Brunswick – it was new back in the early 1970s and very futuristic.
    Educating Rita. Trinity College, Dublin, which stood in for an unnamed British university.

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  12. Oh dear, now I’m dating myself: St. Elmo’s Fire. Supposed to be Georgetown, actually University of Maryland (I think).
    Shadowlands filmed on location at Magdalen College, Oxford.
    There have been a number of movies filmed at Oxford, in various colleges, the most famous of which right now is:
    The Great Hall in the Harry Potter movies, actually the dining hall at Christ Church, Oxford.

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  13. The Exorcist has Georgetown locations.
    Old School is set near a college campus. Some shooting was done at Harvard.

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  14. True Colors (minor John Cusack/James Spader film, but may have been seen by readers of this blog): set (in part) at University of Virginia, actually filmed at University of Virginia, but they pretended that the law students would have been on the original campus.

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  16. The University of Toronto has appeared in many movies, sometimes as another university but never as itself. The list includes but is not limited to “The Paper Chase” (Harvard Law School) “Cocktail”, “Cinderella Man” (Central Park shantytown), “Good Will Hunting” (Harvard) “Searching for Bobby Fischer”, “Ice Princess” (Harvard), “Skulls” (Yale), and “Mean Girls”.

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  17. The final scene of “Great Debaters” takes place at Harvard, and Harvard actually (this is apparently rare) allowed them to film in Sanders Theater.
    Remembering that reminded me of Legally Blonde, set in Harvard, but the IMDB page says the law school quad was really a church in Pasadena.

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  19. In the 80’s, the only time I can recall Caltech being portrayed as itself was Real Genius, and even then I think they made up another name for the college. They used some of us as extras.
    The most fun we had with filming was Eddie Murphy in the Beverly Hills Cop movies. Someone stole one of the Harrow Club signs for the first one, and for the second one he played pool in one of our lounges and donated $5000 to the house when he found out the administration was keeping all the money. We took a ski trip.
    There was also a Domino’s commercial with at least 40 carefully hand-degreased and blow-dried pizzas that were handed off to students after each take.
    Oh, and the time a Penthouse Letter showed up with way too much inside information to be faked. Am I falling off-topic?

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  24. Columbia University is in Spiderman 1 at the beginning for the field trip where he gets bitten, and in spiderman 2 when he’s supposedly a student there.
    The ghostbusters scene with all the library cards flying is in Columbia’s Butler Library stacks, and lore goes that the royalties still help pay for the re-sodding of the main lawns.
    Mona Lisa Smile (with Julia Roberts) was filmed at Columbia inside an old amphitheater style classroom that is still used to teach general chemistry lectures. Apparently the same room was used in Barbara Steisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces, although I’ve never seen that one myself.
    Here’s one of the stranger ones: Columbia’s Lerner Hall, the student center which is new age architecture with a lot of glass, was shot in the Adam Sandler movie Anger Management as the mental clinic where he goes.
    Columbia’s campus also shows up in 13 conversations about one thing.

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  25. There’s a campus scene in Cocktail? My brain did not retain that. Flashy city bar, check. Cruise, as a bartender, reciting poetry, check. Lovers under the waterfall, check. Campus scene? Nope, not retained.

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