Sunday, May 28, 2006

The Cruelest Cut

So, tonight I went to go see the new Terry Zwigoff film, Art School Confidential. (quick review: thumbs way down). Before the movie, there was a preview for some dreadful-looking movie called Peaceful Warrior.

The preview showed several scenes that were clearly filmed at UCLA. This is not an unusual occurrence, of course. Practically every university you see in a movie is either UCLA or USC. In fact, there were a number of scenes in Art School Confidential that were filmed in the patio outside of the graduate student library here--it's a little jarring to see a movie pretend that the spot where you eat lunch every single day is a parking lot. But you get used to that after awhile. My favorite such moment was in that horrible Katie Homes movie First Daughter, which had the pre-Cruised Katie living in a dorm that is actually the student government building. And there was the Gilmore Girls episode that tried to pretend UCLA was Harvard. (Not an easy task.)

So anyways, I can understand that movie people use UCLA to represent lots of different universities. However, in this preview for Peaceful Warrior, they had to gall to pretend that UCLA was UC Berkeley. And it wasn't just inference--they literally added a computer-generated campanile to the background of a scene shot in front of UCLA's library!

The nerve, I tell you.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They also used the music library in this movie....I came in one weekend and there was a "Cal" banner on our very own library at Schoenberg. I just shook my head....

sushipjs said...

You ought to see Higher Learning sometime. John Singleton spared no building on campus, from Hershey Hall, to the dorms, to, well, everything else.