Students and Stars Share Spotlight in CBS Movie

Forget a few details and for the month of June Melissa Sue Anderson, America's favorite corn queen from "Little House on the Prarie," was a regular Harvard freshman. Ignore the fact that her dress was a little flamboyant, her language a little flamboyant, her language a little cliched. Don't worry that her make-up was thicker than Rustoleum, or that her blue eyes could stop you like a rabbit in front of headlights. So what if she made no move without two directors, three camera operators, light men, sound men, make-up men, script supervisor, innumerable assistants with blaring walkie talkies.

For 20 days of shooting at a $2 million tuition, CBS put her through a Harvard "Freshman Year" in a made-for-television film. The TV movie, which will be aired next fall, is about a girl from Nebraska who comes to Cambridge on hefty scholarship. Struggling for grades to keep her scholarship, toughing out the competition for the Crimson. Anderson asks it all in a found affair with Joel "Silver Spoons" Higgins husband of her expository writing teacher, Loretta (M A S H) Swift.

Some might question the accuracy of this picture of Harvard undergraduate life. But Anderson and her encourage did give the University a glimpse of what television life was like. An army of 40 crew members, 500 extras, five camper vans, six trucks and a catering service appeared throughout the Yard and the Square (Harvard did not allow the network to film interiors so CBS was forced to reconstruct classrooms and dorm rooms at other schools). More than 50 Harvard students got to play pedestrians or crowd members, and several hundred more gawked from the sidelines.

What they saw was an intricate, finely co-ordinated process where a 30-second segment could take several hours of filming. The directors insisted on absolute quiet--which meant, for example, that after closing down Plympton St on Monday for The Crimson scene, they ordered the Adams House construction workers to take a break. They insisted on authenticity--which meant that extras wilted in their sweaters and down jackets in the 90-degree heat pretending it was late fall And they demanded thorough coverage and perfect expression. Which meant, then, that each scene had to be filmed at three or four angles, and that each angle required three or four takes (Even these were skimping on what a theatrical feature might entail.)

One typical scene was filmed last Thursday in mid-afternoon. It seemed simple: Anderson was entering Harvard Yard for her first time; Charles Lang, an interested sophomore showed her to her dorm. But from rehearsal to master shot to the several "coverage" shots, the process stretched out to two hours.

"OK, rolling!" the director shouted. Whatever he said echoed around the neighborhood on the crew's walkie-talkies. Workers stopped digging; gawkers stopped talking; the make-up man stopped waving a fan over Anderson as if she were Cleopatra. Someone drew chalk lines around the actors' feet to mark their positions.

"Background...OK, background action." The extras march by the gate peeking at the camera trying to look casual, "Action."

Anderson: Excuse me, do you know where Holworthy is?

Lang: Yes, it's right over there. Do you need help?

Anderson: Thanks.

"Cut! Cut!" yelled the director. He took Anderson aside; assistants yelled "Cut! Cut!" into their walkie-talkies.

"Melissa, you're an actress," he scolded, "Be nervous here Remember, let's have feeling on this."

Then again "Rolling! background action! Action!"

Anderson EXCUSE me' (Eyes pleading) Do YOU know where HOLWORTHY is'

Lang Yes, it's right over there Do you need help?

Anderson (Looks around anxiously--then a timid smile of relief) THANKS!

Director Good That's nice We'll do it once more

What the principals stressed about their work for the screen was not art--or accuracy Anderson, who is 20-years old, is a veteran of nine of these tele-movies in her 12-year career. Her reason for doing "The Freshman Year" is simple: "The fact is, it's very commercial, and I knew I would be foolish not to," she said, dangling a cigarette between takes last week.

"It's a love triangle, and people like that--or like it or not, they watch," Anderson said.

"It lends itself to an audience," director Gus Trikonis said "You know, Valley Girls are big now, young people, their troubles in school. This is basically entertainment, and if you can slip in a few little slice of life on them, you're lucky."

In fact, few people on the set saw their work as fine art. "This script is moronic," whispered one crew member, as Anderson and Lang rehearsed one scene.

"Radcliffe girls...too serious," said Lang. "I'm kidding, really. Honest, I like serious girls. I won't even go out with Wellesley girls--too rich, no...content."

"You're funny!" gushed all blonde Anderson, wide-eyed and smiling."

"She's perfect!" marvelled Erica Van Wagener, a New York import with a bit part. "They want corn-fed sweetness, and she fits in the hole. She can play all the teen-age girl roles until she's 25." Van Wagener complained that her own career was impeded because she could not be stereotyped so easily. It is those stereotypes that TV uses to build its picture of life.

"Freshman Year"'s approach to Harvard is a perfect example. "Remember," Mary Lou Zuelch, Anderson's stand-in, said, "this is Hollywood's Harvard. Don't let anything surprise vou."

Hollywood's Harvard, to the professional eye of costume designer Josephine Ynocencio, is "an east coast preppie college--button down shirts, you know, and rag sweaters." For the wardrobe, "I shopped at Bloomingdales, to tell you the truth, and Brooks Brothers," she said.

The characters dressed like L.L. Bean paper dolls. Extras were told to "wear layers" and carry squash raquets and lacrosse sticks. A typical line which Lang intoned to Anderson when editing one of her news stories was: "This is Harvard; you can assume a high comprehension level."

"It's a track," claimed Judith Parker, who wrote the script. "Most people at Harvard, most people, come from prep school, they've been to Europe each summer, they have the family contacts. This is the story of someone (Anderson's character) who didn't have that priviliged environment, and must come to grips with it."

Also critical to Parker's theme were the latest network demographic surveys. Originally, she had planned a theatrical film for actresses Kristie McNichol and Jane Fonda. But because the movie audience is "a kid's audience"--15 to 22--that feels threatened by the Harvard mystique. Parker said. The studios suggested the University of Chicago as a more "fun," "collegiate" environment.

When her project moved to television, the target changed. Parker said surveys showed the TV audience to be "older people" with a different view of college and "grass roots, midwestern demographically," who would enjoy watching a girl struggle to cope with eastern values and the Eastern Establishment. Harvard became the setting again.

Even the director must abide by the priorities set by audience surveys. "The themes were set before I entered the project," Trikonis said. "I can only assume that there are trends that run through a society, and the people who are choosing the work will make choices based on those trends."

"We don't do things because they're major themes. That's where we'd like to be, but we're not," he said. The television powers imposed other aspects that Parker was not so amenable to. The choice of Anderson, for example, was one she was not pleased with. "It's a matter of sensitive and intellectual versus superficial and a intellectual," she said. "They're more likely to bring in somebody for TV appeal, whether or not it's right."

"When Parker and I got together, we did think about getting an unknown for her role, you know, making a star. But the network said. 'We want somebody with name value,'" Trikonis said.

"With an unknown, your're more vulnerable to their experiences," he said, "but with somebody who's been on TV for years, you already know how she's going to react."

Trikonis added that he might have liked a little "more sex" in the film. "In a theatrical you might get away with more skin than this. There are some scenes in dorms when I would have liked to have had more, but the networks don't want girls in panties or bras," he said with a straight face.

But ultimately, participants ascribed the product to the bureaucratic process which marks TV. Said Kim Delaney (Jenny on "All My Children"), who played Anderson's Harvard roommate. "It goes into so many people's hands, it's turned over so many times, you have to try to do what you have to do, and that's all."CrimsonJI H. MinMELISSA SUE ANDERSON star of Freshman Year, filmed entirely in Massachusetts, stands in the Harvard Yard.