Hollywood films have presented audiences with stories of campus life for nearly a century, shaping popular perceptions of our colleges and universities and the students who attend them. These depictions of campus life have even altered the attitudes of the students themselves, serving as both a mirror of and a model for behavior. One can only imagine how many high school seniors enter college today with the hopes of living the proverbial Animal House or PCU Greek experience, or how many have worried over the SAT and college admissions after watching more recent movies like 2004's The Perfect Score. This book explores themes of college life in 681 live-action, theatrically released, feature-length films set in the United States and released from 1915 through 2006, evaluating how these movies both reflected and distorted the reality of undergraduate life. Topics include college admissions, the freshman experience, academic work, professor-student relations, student romance, fraternity and sorority life, sports, political activism, and other extracurricular activities. The book also includes a complete filmography and 66 illustrations.

Hollywood films have presented audiences with stories of campus life for nearly a century, shaping popular perceptions of our colleges and universities and the students who attend them. These depictions of campus life have even altered the attitudes of the students themselves, serving as both a mirror of and a model for behavior. One can only imagine how many high school seniors enter college today with the hopes of living the proverbial Animal House or PCU Greek experience, or how many have worried over the SAT and college admissions after watching more recent movies like 2004's The Perfect Score. This book explores themes of college life in 681 live-action, theatrically released, feature-length films set in the United States and released from 1915 through 2006, evaluating how these movies both reflected and distorted the reality of undergraduate life. Topics include college admissions, the freshman experience, academic work, professor-student relations, student romance, fraternity and sorority life, sports, political activism, and other extracurricular activities. The book also includes a complete filmography and 66 illustrations.

Tracing the collegiate film genre from the first silent offerings starting around 1915 to the realistic recent critical portrayals of college life, this study examines how collegiate films have reflected our changing tastes and values. An extensive filmography is also included.

Every generation of college students, no matter how different from its predecessor, has been an enigma to faculty and administration, to parents, and to society in general. Watching today’s students “holding themselves in because they had to get A’s not only on tests but on deans’ reports and recommendations,” Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, author of the highly praised Alma Mater, began to ask, “What has gone wrong—how did we get where we are today?” Campus Life is the result of her search—through college studies, alumni autobiographies, and among students themselves—for an answer. She begins in the post-revolutionary years when the peculiarly American form of college was born, forced in the student-faculty warfare: in 1800, pleasure-seeking Princeton students, angered by disciplinary action, “show pistols . . . and rolled barrels filled with stones along the hallways.” She looks deeply into the campus through the next two centuries, to show us student society as revealed and reflected in the students’ own codes of behavior, in the clubs (social and intellectual), in athletics, in student publications, and in student government. And we begin to notice for the first time, from earliest days till now, younger men, and later young women as well, have entered not a monolithic “student body” but a complex world containing three distinct sub-cultures. We see how from the beginning some undergraduates have resisted the ritualized frivolity and rowdiness of the group she calls “College Men.” For the second group, the “Outsiders,” college was not so much a matter of secret societies, passionate team spirit and college patriotism as a serious preparation for a profession; and over the decades their ranks were joined by ambitious youths from all over rural America, by the first college women, by immigrants, Jews, “townies,” blacks, veterans, and older women beginning or continuing their education. We watch a third subculture of “Rebels”—both men and women – emerging in the early twentieth century, transforming individual dissent into collective rebellion, contending for control of collegiate politics and press, and eventually—in the 1960s—reordering the whole college/university world. Yet, Horowitz demonstrates, in spite of the tumultuous 1960s, in spite of the vast changes since the nineteenth century, the ways in which undergraduates work and play have continued to be shaped by whichever of the three competing subcultures—college men and women, outsiders, and rebels—is in control. We see today’s campus as dominated by the new breed of outsiders (they began to surface in the 1970s) driven to pursue their future careers with a “grim professionalism.” And as faint and sporadic signs emerge of (perhaps) a new activism, and a new attraction to learning for its own sake, we find that Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has given us, in this study, a basis for anticipated the possible nature of the next campus generation.

The struggles and achievements of today's college students are thrown into stark relief in this fascinating account of how such students make meaning of their lives. Author Mary Grigsby uses the voices of students themselves to discuss how they view, adjust to, and participate in the college student culture of a large midwestern university and to explore what they think of their educational experiences. Topics include a look at a typical day on campus, student subcultures and the lifestyles they engender, whether college life conforms to the images and scenarios of popular culture, and student approaches to making it through college. Going to college has become the major coming-of-age experience for many people in the United States, and Mary Grigsby has provided a compelling, readable, and up-to-date account of this formative period.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Maverick Movies tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters's Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 2001, the company competed with the major Hollywood studios and reached global box office success with the Lord of the Rings franchise. Blurring boundaries between high and low culture, between independent film and Hollywood, and between the margins and the mainstream, New Line Cinema epitomizes Hollywood's shift in focus from the mass audience fostered by the classic studios to the multitude of niche audiences sought today.