Yale elitism shot on film, and shot to kill

By Robby O'Connor

I've been victimized by the Skulls. Not Skull and Bones, the most secretive of secret societies, but the Skulls, the fictional, Hollywood secret society from the film The Skulls coming out at the end of this month that so transparently apes the image and reputation of its Yale counterpart.

Cantab Director Cohen, with big shining star Joshua "Pacey" Jackson.

It all started this past summer with a mysterious e-mail. A friend of mine who was hanging around New Haven and working at the Student Employment Agency wrote, "They're shooting a movie at the Yale Boathouse with Pacey from Dawson's Creek. He needs a body-double and it pays $100 for the day." Why she thought of me I'll never know. I look as much like Joshua Jackson, the actor who plays Pa-cey Witter on the WB's teen drama Daw-son's Creek, as the next Caucasian male with brown hair and no missing limbs. But I didn't care. Notions of the fast-paced life of the body-dou-ble danced in my head, as well as the thought of "going career." After all, there are tons of brown-haired actors out there.

But things didn't work out, or "the gig fell through" as they say in the Biz. The woman on the phone was very nice and said she really believed that I looked just like Pacey, but they had decided "to go another way" (more Hollywood speak) and weren't going to do the shoot in New Haven anymore. And so I became a statistic, another small-town boy who dreamed too big and got eaten alive by the teen film industry.

I only mention this because I think the story of my brush with near-greatness as a stand-in for the The Skulls bears an eerie resemblance to the events of said film. The Skulls, which the director Rob Cohen describes as "The Firm goes to college," doesn't take place at Yale. Nope, just at another Ivy League institution in New Haven where athletes sport a white letter Y on their blue jerseys, yet somehow avoid referring to their school by name. Cohen, whose previous credits include the HBO movie, The Rat Pack, as well as films like Daylight and Dragonheart, put the decision to keep the school's identity a secret in layman's terms for me. "The lawyers told us exactly what we had to do and we did it." Writer John Pogue, MC '87, elaborated on this point: "The font of the Y is different and the blue is several shades darker so that the corporate lawyers will stay off our backs."

Regardless of where the film takes place, it's the story of Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson), a college senior who's finding out that to get into law school he needs more than good grades—he needs connections. "He's a kid from the wrong side of the tracks," Cohen explained. "He grew up in New Haven and ran with sort of a bad boy crowd, but he's naturally gifted. He's worked his way up from nothing and made it into this super-competitive school where he's done exceptionally well. Now what he wants is to go to Harvard Law, but that seems like an impossibility since already he has all these student loans that he has to pay off. When membership in the Skulls is offered to him, he accepts in a moment of weakness because it enables him to do this and anything else he wants."

Writer John Pogue, MC '87, was in a secret society, but he won't say which one.

Though wary of this elite world of obscene luxury to which the Skulls have given him a key, membership has its privileges, and Luke is not above enjoying them. It's not until things take a sinister turn that he realizes he's made a mistake. "He knows he's made a compromise," Cohen said, "but he didn't realize how far-reaching that compromise is." If only Luke were able to hear the tagline to his own movie—"If a secret society can give you everything you desire, just imagine what they can take away"—all his troubles could have easily been avoided. But he has to learn the hard way. Not until Luke decides to leave the sinister brotherhood does he begin his descent into blue-blooded hell.

"College is a great place to set a morality tale," Pogue said, "especially at a college like Yale where the secret societies represent an interesting contradiction. Yale preaches the value of a liberal arts education, but at the same time you have these institutions within the institution that preach the exact op-posite: secrecy and elitism. This is a film about choosing one value system over another."

But the question is—and far too many friends who had seen the trailer for the film asked me this over spring break—"How much of it is true?" Outside of the chosen 15 tapped each spring for membership, no one really knows what goes on behind those windowless walls on High Street. For every article on the In-ternet about their money laundering, drug dealing, and kinship with the Illuminati, there's another that chalks them up as being nothing more than the Waspiest kegger around.

"It's not an exposé," Pogue warned. "It's a piece of fiction. It's a real issue but it's not meant to be taken too seriously." Cohen added, "Many things in the film are pumped up larger than life. It's a movie made for entertainment. It's not a documentary. It's not a Learning Channel piece. But its roots point towards the truth."

To prove his point, Cohen mentioned the character of Judge Litten Mandrake (Craig T. Nelson of Coach) who is also a high-ranking member of the Skull council. "I think there's an element of George W. Bush's [DC '68] campaign reflected here. The man has so much soft money around him that he doesn't need a mattress to sleep at night. I see this reflected in the agenda to get Craig T. Nelson's character on the Federal bench and then the Supreme Court."

Where there are parallels to reality, Pogue said his script drew primarily on his own experience in a secret society during his senior year at Yale. Though he still won't admit which he was a member of ("It's the one rule I still uphold," he confessed), he admits that it wasn't Skull and Bones. "Because I was in a [society] and was at parties at other societies, I've been inside Skull and Bones and know a few of the rituals and what went on. In our film, though, we weren't copying, just embellishing. Our society, for one thing, is comprised entirely of white males, and generally it's just more arch."

Though not a Yalie, Cohen also drew on his own college experience of elitism in the Ivy League for the film. "At Harvard we have Eating Clubs and Elliot House, which is a dorm and pretty exclusive. Really if you haven't gone to Exeter or a school of that pedigree, you don't stand a chance of getting in. Between my knowledge of the Ivy League and John [Pogue]'s we pretty much had our research covered."

And while the film is a story about power, corruption, and lies, Pogue felt it was important to stress that this isn't a movie that condemns the Ivy League, or even secret societies for that matter. To Pogue the film is just trying to show that there is a very dark side to the sort of elitism practiced by these societies. "It's about one rotten apple in the barrel, not a rotten barrel of apples," he said. "Secret societies can really be fun. The idea of engaging in intellectual conversation with 14 people who you never met before, especially if the people are cool, can be really exciting. It makes senior year not a `here we go again' experience."

"I have mixed and complicated emotions around my Harvard experience," Cohen said. "I love Harvard. I love Cambridge. But my feeling in the film is that secret elite groups that are prejudiced against people for reasons other than merit—it's just undemocratic. The film was made with love towards our schools but negative feelings towards the elitism of certain institutions within them."

Well, what I want to know then is who the hell does Donald Jones know? That bastard stole the part of "Stand-in" right out from under me.

All photos courtesy of Universal Studios.

Back to A&E...