Did You Know?
The campus scenes in the movie were shot at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. When the school offered their school for the campus scenes, they were not aware of the plot. Once notified that the movie plot contained Anti-Semitism, Middlesex had their name removed from all scenes and credits.
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Iselin Hall, where Greene says he will meet whoever made the sign with the swastika, is named after the Communist-hunting right-wing senator in The Manchurian Candidate, John Iselin.
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Matt Damon recollected director Robert Mandel trying to lift the spirits of the young actors by informing them that they were going to be "the next big thing... the next Brat Pack," referring to the regular ensemble that was often used by John Hughes during his films in the 1980s.
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Matt Damon's character is named Charlie Dillon. This is the name of one of the classmates of casting director Lisa Beach.
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At the end of the movie Matt Damon's character says "I'm still gonna get into Harvard, and you'll still be a Jew." Matt Damon actually did go to Harvard.
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The marching band in the film is the Westford Academy (Westford, Massachusetts) marching band. One of the bass drum heads from the movie is on display in the music department at Westford Academy, signed by the cast and crew.
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Several places in Groton, MA were given money to fix up their buildings in order to be in the movie.
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The Scranton Bus Depot scene was filmed outside Russell's Package Store in Leominster, MA. The building was used because it was a former train station and the exterior looked like an old bus station. The owners were compensated for its use with a complete interior remodel. To this day the Scranton PA Bus Depot decals remain in the front windows of the liquor store.
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The Hebrew prayer that David (Brendan Fraser) recites in the chapel is the "Avenu Malkenu" (literally, "Our Father, Our King), which is a series of petitions to God to grant atonement. The prayer is repeated throughout the High Holy Days (the ten days starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur). The holiday for which David misses services because of the football game was Rosh Hashanah (the New Year in the Jewish calendar).
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Ironically, given the antisemitism that pervades almost all of the students' attitudes, "Smokey Joe's Cafe," the song that the classmates enjoy (and which Mr. Cleary dismisses as being from the "jungle") was written by a pair of Jewish songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote many of the biggest radio hits of the 1950s and early 1960s. Many of the other songs heard in the movie and on the soundtrack were also written or co-written by Jewish songwriters, including "Rock Around the Clock," "Three Coins In The Fountain," "That Old Black Magic," "Isn't It Romantic," and "When I Take My Sugar To Tea."
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During the course of giving a very positive review to the film on his show, Gene Siskel recalled similar types of attacks on his own person when he went to college, and gave the example of once being handed piece of toast with the jam in the shape of a swastika.
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The French assignment that McGivern fails to recite properly is a French translation of the poem 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time' by John Keats.
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