Schools in Film

[Rudey]

University of Chicago:

•The University of Chicago Hospitals’ helicopter appears each week—don’t blink or you’ll miss it—during the opening sequence of the popular television drama ER. Sometimes, the maroon-and-white helicopter is even part of the plot!

•Harrison Ford ran through the Hospitals’ corridors in scenes from the 1993 thriller The Fugitive, based on the Sam Shepherd murder case and filmed in Chicago.

•In one of his most famous roles—as Indiana Jones in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark—Ford, says the film’s script, studied at Chicago under Professor Abner Ravenwood (perhaps modeled after the Oriental Institute’s James Henry Breasted). I think a lot of the U of C scenes were actually filmed at Duke which is pretty funny.

•The Gleacher Center played itself for a few brief seconds of fame when John Travolta’s wayward angel visited Chicago in 1996’s Michael.

•Hull Gate “starred” when Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan drove through it to begin their romance in When Harry Met Sally (1989).

•Chicago lent its campus—and Professor Nicholas Rudall—to the 1996 Keanu Reeves/Morgan Freeman flick Chain Reaction, directed by Andy Davis. Chain Reaction starred Reeves as Eddie Kasalivich, a U of C machinist who stumbles onto an international plot to foil a scientist’s plan to give the world clean, limitless energy. Filmed partly in Mandel Hall and on the quads, it included several hundred student extras—few of whom were visible in the final cut.

•U of C merchandise gets its screen time, too. Kimmy, the bride played by Cameron Diaz in 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, was a student in the College, which she proved by wearing a Chicago sweatshirt. (U of C alums know the secret reason why Kimmy couldn’t hold a tune in a nightclub scene—there’s no karaoke at Jimmy’s.) Chicago paraphernalia was seen briefly on the TV dramas Northern Exposure (Janine Turner’s Maggie O’Connell character was an alum), Sisters (Frankie was a U of C MBA), and Early Edition. What, no comedies?

-Rudey