It’s hard to think of a more disparate connection than Tinsel Town and the ancient college on the Thames, Oxford University. But believe it or not, there is one, a quarter-century old, that has yielded numerous stars, Academy Awards, hit films and hit-film makers. And I have some little personal knowledge.
Now, this goes back till the baby boomers were all still in college. While I was studying in New York, my friend Billy Levy headed off to Oxford, the ancient market town that, since the Dark Ages, had been home to a number of colleges that collected themselves into what we know as Oxford. Of course, in those days they were more interested in studying Latin or Greek than Hollywood, but that would, 800 years later, change.
Not without some trial and tribulation, naturally -- as Bill explained, in the 1200s, merchants, angry at the haughty attitude of too many professors strolling around as though “entitled” in those hooded snuggies they wore to keep warm, descended on the colleges, killing students and professors and driving others off. Some fled 60 or so miles to the East and found a nice spot without an annoying town around it at the base of a bridge over the Cam River, which became England’s other great university, Cambridge.
For the hearty scholars who stayed at Oxford, however, fame and fortune soon arrived in the sons and daughters of the landed gentry and, eventually, their survival was assured.
Cut to the late 1970s -- America is in crisis, there are no jobs for graduating college seniors. (And kids today think the economy is rough -- try 19 percent inflation and 20 percent unemployment!)
I once asked my classmate, the legendary filmmaker Ric Burns, how he came to be a documentary maker. As he pointed out, he never planned it -- with no jobs, he decided to take a Fulbright scholarship to Oxford and return three years later, hoping things would be better. With students from around the world -- not to mention hot chicks, like the late Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, then a teenager driving an MG around the Bear pub looking for parties) what better place to ride out a recession?
Likewise, at the same time in the Midwest, a young farmboy named Michael Hoffman, and in Seattle, a young history student named Rick Stevenson, had similar ideas.
Ric was luckier -- by the time his fellowship ran out, his brother Ken had started the New York film company where they would produce the legendary PBS series “Civil War” that changed the face of filmmaking.
Michael and Rick Stevenson, as they told me years later, weren’t so lucky. As their fellowships were about to expire, they still had no idea what they wanted to do, other than continue their idyllic lives as foreign students. How to find the money to stay?
As I understand it, they came up with a brilliant idea: bring stuffy old Oxford into the modern era! After all, how could it call itself a world-class University with no film program? And what did the English know about film -- their last big hit had been “Lawrence of Arabia” two decades before?
Anyway, as I heard it, they came up with an idea to stay in Oxford -- convince the ancient Dons of Oxford to put up $100,000 to finance something called the Oxford Film Society (later, the Oxford Film Company) to produce a film about rich kids at Oxford to be directed by, surprise, Michael Hoffman and produced by Rick Stevenson.
