HARVARD MAN

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Director: James Toback
Screenplay: James Toback
With: Adam Grenier, Rebecca Gayheart, Joey Lauren Adams
Release Date: 1 August 2001
Length: 99 minutes
Genre: Drama
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Sarah Michelle Gellar in Hrvard Man
Cindy Bandolini

Beth Pinsker wrote in The Alumni: "The story of Harvard Man is a tale of the Sixties moved forward 30 years: a strung-out student athlete throws a basketball game. 'The main character's involved in a deep sexual relationship with his philosophy professor and also with a Boston College cheerleader, who is the daughter of a mobster he owes money,' Toback says. It is obsessive, quirky, and drug-addled--so much so that no producer would dare touch it. Like all of his other projects, the script is loosely inspired by his experiences, this one dating back to an LSD trip at Harvard; it's about his flirtation with the brink and how other people reacted to him. 'I lost my sanity for eight days,' he says. 'I had a cataclysmic blow-out and an equally sudden retreat back into the self.' In the end, Toback was fine, except for his lingering insights about insanity. 'I was functioning, but I had learned more in those eight days than in any other period,' he says. 'I have not been high since that episode. I have literally not had even a single near-drug experience since I was 19. And yet that experience remains the seminal emotional, psychological, intellectual experience of my life.'"

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Rob Mackie wrote in The Guardian: "A straight-to-video release from writer-director James Toback. As usual, it's semi-autobiographical: he went to Harvard and, like his lead character here, Adrian Grenier, flipped out on acid there. But this is no self-indulgent nostalgia trip: it has great pace, a lovely sense of fun and rapid-fire cynical banter close to Howard Hawks quality. Like Toback's last film, Black and White, it involves an attempt to fix a basketball match, but this is far more focused and aims for fun, not shock value. An intellectual lowlife, Toback's subject-matter always centres on sex, drugs and gambling; but also on existentialism, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. The only star name here is Sarah Michelle Gellar, as a nicely brittle bad girl"

Then Senator from Minnesota Al Franken and his daughter, Thomasin Franken, portray themselves in this film. They both attended Harvard.

Leonardo DiCaprio was supposed to play Alan Jensen, but was all tied up with filming GANGS OF NEW YORK. (Sarah Michelle Gellar turned down the role of Jenny in that film, a role that went to Cameron Diaz.)

The film can be streamed on Peacock TV, and is available on DVD.

CAST

TRAILER

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Harvard Man dvd cover