John Harvard's Halftime Show

If you watched Harvard defeat UMass last week on TV, you might have seen a new halftime film that, according to Harvard University News Office Director David Rosen, "brings Harvard out of the Stone Age" of promotional technology.

Trans-World International, the firm producing Ivy League football broadcasts, asked each Ivy school to supply a short promotional piece.

And thanks to the Harvard News Office, a local production company, and a Boston news personality, Harvard now has a slick 3-1/2-minute video telling the world what a great place it is--not only for students, but also for athletes.

According to Rosen, Harvard's previous halftime promos had been 30-second pieces featuring someone standing on the Widener library steps reading from a script about Harvard's need-blind admissions policy.

To make the sophisticated new Harvard video, the News Office wrote a script and enlisted the aid of Howard Nielson, former WNEV-TV reporter and currently a CNN producer.

Nielson referred the News Office to Charlestown's Jaguar TV Productions, a company known for its 6-minute "infomercials" about such corporations as Gillette and Motorola. Jaguar had never made a film about a university before, but it was eager to try.

So for two fun-filled days in late August, Jaguar director Steve Feldman and his three-man crew wandered around Harvard--filming stairs, stadiums, and statues, as well as crews rowing serenely down the Charles against the Boston skyline.

The Development office donated some old footage of hockey fans cheering, famous professors--such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Oscar Handlin--lecturing, and Commencement commencing.

The office also lent some historical drawings of Cambridge and the yearbook mugshot of John F. Kennedy'40.

Feldman taped an interview with President Bok discussing the role of athletics and other extracurricular activities in Harvard life.

Feldman also filmed interviews with football captain Brent Wilkinson '86 and soccer goalie Tracee Whitley '88.

For the background sound, Nielson read the script and Rosen chose some stock tracks of flourishing trumpets.

Two days of post-production work and $4000 of the News Office's money later, the film was complete. Well, almost complete; it was missing one thing: students.

So Feldman went back to Harvard on freshman registration day and filmed the bedlam in the extracurricular activities tent outside Memorial Hall. He also rounded up a group of students and a teaching assistant and staged a classroom discussion