Rally ’Round the Cannon: Hooray for Hollywood

I always told Hitch that it would have been better to put seats around the set and sell tickets. — James Stewart ’32

Of the thousands of ways that the undergraduate experience is now different than in Ages Past (like, you know, 2005), Princeton’s approach to the arts is still, for my money, among the most qualitatively striking and substantive. Formalized by President Shirley Tilghman and Peter Lewis ’55 in the complex that bears his name and surrounds the new Wawa and train station, the strategy which can be best expressed as “every student her own artist” in fact extends across the campus from there, ideally into every dorm room and study carrel.

There are over a dozen film courses given at Princeton each year now, some more technical, some more philosophical — and we’re just counting the minutes until the first “AI in fictional filmmaking” class convenes at 185 Nassau St. and becomes virtually successful, as it were. None are prerequisites for anything, because media studies isn’t a department, but the opportunity to get a visual studies certificate alongside your history or environmental science or SPIA degree leads to intriguing self-examination of why the undergrad might be studying something as distinct from the intellectual content itself. This was recognized as early as 1932 by none other than our buddy James Stewart ’32 (above), who had a Princeton architecture scholarship lined up for his postgraduate year before deciding instead to join Henry Fonda, Margaret Sullavan, Myron McCormick ’31, and their acting crowd in the pursuit of the Great White Way, and beyond that the silver screen.

So as we all sit down with our Orville Redenbacher for the Academy Awards, let’s take a look at the extraordinarily longstanding involvement of Princeton in the commercial movie biz (given a complete century of ignoring it academically) and figure what that might mean to the artists, the producers, and, of course, to those wonderful people out there in the dark. (Thanks, Norma)

There are four-ish different ways we can consider Princeton’s involvement in Hollywood. There’s the physical image of the University for one, a highly defined sense of a place that the audience identifies with Real Collegiate ideas and activities that border the stereotypical. A Beautiful Mind was shot in Princeton so it would look like everybody’s presumption of what Princeton looked like. Also true of (for better or worse) Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, a truly awful movie. Caveat emptor. Second, there’s the identification of a fictional character with Princeton, very often as a shorthand way of establishing the individual’s intellectual capacity, social standards, or legitimacy in fulfilling a function in the plot. Meg Ryan’s graduate student cred and relationship with Albert Einstein in IQ legitimizes the gravity of the romantic plot complications, while also lending degrees of desperation to Tim Robbins’ pretense as a physicist, even with Einstein’s help. The third consideration is the onscreen talent itself, some of them veterans of Triangle like Jose Ferrer ’31, some veterans of the football team like Dean Cain ’88, even some prior veterans of the movies like Brooke Shields ’87, whose ability to convincingly inhabit the lives of others (while undergoing constant rejection in the real world of screen tests) makes them star material. The conversation over this facet at Princeton suffers generally from the dominance of one person across the decades, who may well have inspired as many acting hopefuls as Einstein did physicist hopefuls: Jimmy Stewart, the aforementioned architect gone astray. All you need to do is sit with Orville and watch a double feature of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Vertigo to see the amazing level at which the bar is set; he appears somewhere on virtually any credible Top 20 list of screen actors ever assembled under any criteria. For this reason, discussion of the many other Princeton acting alums, from Academy Award- and Tony-winner Ferrer to the wonderful unbreakable Ellie Kemper ’02, will take a little backseat today. The fourth group we will focus on more pointedly as we examine symbolism and meaning: the producers, directors, writers and skilled off-screeners who combine (or in some cases, perhaps collude?) to turn those Princeton locations, characters, and actors into cinema. Ironically, one of the groundbreakers was a close mate of Stewart’s, director Joshua Logan ’31, who actually studied with Stanislavsky before taking the U.S., both Broadway and Hollywood, by storm in the 1940s and ’50s. He won Tonys and was nominated for Oscars and made a lot of money for a lot of producers, but it may be more to the point that he won a Pulitzer for co-writing South Pacific, including pivotal Princeton character (and tortured soul) Marine Lt. Joseph Cable.

What is most striking among the Princeton alum production types is how crazily diverse they are. Bo Goldman ’53, a Triangle president, became a TV drama producer and writer, then segued to feature films, where he won Oscars for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Melvin and Howard. The universal favorite Jeff Moss ’63, co-founder and imposing mind behind Sesame Street, was another Triangle stalwart and English major whose thesis compared Troilus and Cressida with Antony and Cleopatra (not Bert and Ernie). His effect on children’s TV and movies has been as profound as, say, Lorne Michaels in adult comedy. Robert L. Johnson *72 of SPIA founded BET, the first TV programming service aimed at Black viewers, and then became the first Black-controlled company listed on the NYSE. David E. Kelley ’79 had more series bouncing around all four major TV networks in the era of expansion in the late ’90s than anybody else, and wrote very smart stuff by the carload to fuel his 12 Emmy Awards (L.A. Law, Picket Fences etc.), never mind fixing up his fictional boy genius Doogie Howser MD with a Princeton degree. Kelley had been the captain of the men’s hockey team (quite a combo with retired Gen. Mark Milley ’80…) and his history thesis examined the social struggles of West Virginia miners in the early 20^th century; he then became a Boston lawyer before going Hollywood. Rose Pinkney ’86 (who studied sociology) is a veteran TV production executive who before age 30 developed both In Living Color and The X-Files, starring David Duchovny ’82, for Fox.

Which brings us to Ethan Coen ’79, younger half of the fabled Coen Brothers along with Joel, who have been delighting movie audiences with their quirky (Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, Fargo — ya think?) co-produced, co-written, co-directed, co-edited pieces for 40 years, picking up four Oscars and a bushel of nominations along the way. If you were to guess that Ethan’s approach to college involved being a loner who majored in philosophy and wrote a thesis on Wittgenstein, plus much time on the phone with his similarly-film-obsessed brother, you win.

So what then of Osborne (Oz to his friends) Cox ’73? A creation of the Coens for Burn After Reading in 2008, he occupies a very rare Princeton niche in their world, while pointing up and reinforcing some Princetonian aspects to filmmaking in general. First, he stands slightly apart from his peers. He wears nice bow ties and vests, and has a restless curiosity portrayed by the eternally edgy John Malkovich; that seems not to otherwise be a thing at the CIA, the stronghold he is in the midst of being thrown out of as the film begins. They say he’s being separated for drinking too much, but just about everybody drinks plenty throughout the film, so that could be just an excuse. He is active with his Princeton class, attending a dinner in Washington, D.C., (pre-35^th Reunion?) during personal crises, complete with a rendition of Old Nassau and a lovely carved-paneled club room for atmospheric emphasis. And while he has a brutal temper, his various foils throughout the story are either strikingly shallow, lacking vision, inept and/or self-delusional, inflaming his derision at every turn (if not mayhem, which does regrettably arise). If he is set up as a flawed Princeton exemplar, he may well still be the one-eyed man in the valley of the blind. Besides Cox, only a removed but rarely seen CIA higher up (J.K. Simmons) seems to have any realization of the Greek-tragic aspects of the plot, although still powerless to avert any intentional or chance catastrophe that ensues. What we need to keep in mind through all this (and astonishing acting: Pitt, McDormand, Swinton, Clooney, a dozen more) is that Oz (the little man behind the curtain?) is the only one whose college backstory we know, so there’s a purpose to the inclusion. But in Coen movies, good people get waxed and bad people amble scot-free all the time, so we can’t tell by his fate. Or by that of the CD-ROM that may be the most obsessional MacGuffin since Hitchcock’s death. Is Oz another Barton Fink, or another Jeffrey Lebowski, and if so which Lebowski?

Perhaps we should sneak into professor Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt’s course on “American Representations in Film and Television,” and try to find out.