IOvUF: Real Genius Weekend

Ask me what my favorite movie is and I will tell you Real Genius without hesitating.

For those of you who weren't around in '85, or at least self-aware or with enough years to remember, the movie has become a cult comedy classic. But for me, at nine years old, it changed my life.

The story is of 15 year old prodigy Mitch Taylor, who is drafted for mid-winter term at Pacific Tech by Professor Hathaway. Mitch is assigned a dorm room with Chris Knight, a fun-loving senior with whom he will work on Hathaway's laser project, which is secretly part of a CIA weapons program. When the two of them discover Hathaway's plan, it takes their combined efforts, plus the help of hyperactive student Jordan and eccentric hermit Lazlo to set things right and avoid being detected by the professor or his lackey Kent.

The film barely spent any time letting the viewer relax from the barrage of clever dialogue and wisecracking, and it's message was simple: being smart is good. It showed that intelligence didn't have to be dry and dull, that using your mind creatively was not only possible, but preferable. The hijinx and humor in the film also echoed the real life antics of the students of Caltech, and there are plenty of references and homages throughout (see below).

Why bring all this up?

Rybot has friends at Caltech, and this weekend they're throwing a party. I don't normally get excited about a college party, but this is birthplace and inspiration for my favorite film, so going, as the film would say, is a "moral imperative".

Supercool trivia!
>A scene where Chris floats outside his classroom suspended in a lounge chair attached to several balloons appeared in the preview version but not the release version. This is a reference to a real-life 1982 incident.

>Reclusive supergenius Laslo Hollyfeld is yet another character inspired by an actual student, one who did live for an extended period in the basement beneath the South Houses.

>The coordinates for Hathaway's house are given in the film as "34D 10M 15.21S NORTH, 119D 7M ..." Assuming the longitude is in the western hemisphere, that's somewhere in an area of farmlands east of Oxnard, California. The script gave a slightly different set of coordinates: "Thirty-four degrees, ten minutes, fifteen seconds North; one hundred eighteen degrees, nine minutes, three seconds West." The building at that location is a mortuary in Pasadena, a few blocks north of Caltech.

>The recurrence of the initials "DEI" in the movie is no accident. The truck that is used to transport the popcorn to Dr. Hathaway's new house has "Drain Experts Inc." emblazoned on its side. The company Chris interviews with at the beginning (and which funds Dr. Hathaway's show "Everything") is Darlington Electronic Instruments. The initials are rumored to have been inscribed by Caltech alumni at (among other places) the summit of Everest, on the moon and on many satellites and space probes manufactured at Jet Propulsion Labs (which sits just up the hill from Caltech in Pasadena). There has long been an unofficial contest to see who could place the letters DEI into the most prominent public view.

>When Hollyfeld sends in a large number of entries to the Frito-Lay contest, he is mirroring the actions of Caltech students Steve Klein, Dave Novikoff and Barry Megdal, who, in 1974, used a similar strategy to win a McDonald's sweepstakes. Their entries came to roughly 1/5th of the total entries and won them a station wagon, $3,000 and $1,500 in food gift certificates.

>The writings on the walls in the steam tunnels ("light your way", etc) are references to the game "Wizardry" and it sequels, in which clues can be found scrawled on the walls of the dungeon. The ending credits contain: "Thank to Sir-Tech, for Wizardry". Alternatively, assuming that Real Genius is meant to represent Caltech, the writing on the walls of the steam tunnels could be representative of the real writing on the walls of the real steam tunnels at Caltech.

>The "liquid nitrogen" coins have baffled viewers for many years, and are considered by many to be a goof. However the very first draft of the script shows that it wasn't an error. The thermos contains liquid nitrogen, which in turn contains a column of super-cooled CO2 (dry ice), which is what Chris uses in the vending machine.

>At one point when Chris is accused of being a "slack", he mutters "moles and trolls". In Techer slang, a "Mole" is a resident of Blacker House, and "trolling" referred to intensive studying (since someone who trolls too much never gets the chance to see the light of day, like a real "troll"; an alternate origin is suggested by the fact that hardworking physics students would have to spend a great deal of time in the basement of the Bridge physics building, and would thus be living "under the bridge" like "trolls" do).

>The party Chris engineers is the "Tanning Invitational". A party with this name was held annually at a Caltech-owned off-campus apartment complex for students. The women at the party are students from "a nearby college", the "Wanda Trossler School of Beauty". While there is no such school near it, Tech is only a few blocks from Pasadena City College.

>In earlier versions of the script the Potassium-Cyanide laser, not the Bromide-Argon laser, used frozen fuel. This is why Chris tells the laser to "stay cool" before he goes off to take Hatheway's exam.

>The aircraft featured in the movie was a B-1B "Lancer". Today, a real-life analog exists in the United States Air Force's Airborne Laser (ABL) project, a collaboration with Boeing, involving a modified 747 cargo jet carrying a megawatt Oxygen-Iodine laser, whose purpose is to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles.

>In the scene where Hollyfeld walks in with his cartons of sweepstakes entries, the book Mitch is using as a pillow during his nightmare is "Gravitation" by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

>When Mitch rides the cart into the steam tunnels, the viewer briefly sees the quotation, "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain" scrawled on the left wall. These are the original words of German poet Friedrich Schiller. Relevant to the film, Isaac Asimov named three separate stories "Against Stupidity", "The Gods Themselves" and "Contend in Vain". He later combined them into a 1972 science-fiction novel about a conspiracy by aliens who inhabit a parallel universe with different physical laws than ours, and who are trying to turn our sun into a supernova in order to collect the resulting energy for their use.

>The song which plays during the opening credits (which are overlaid over plans for various weapons systems) is "You Took Advantage Of Me", which brings to mind the statement of the Caltech Honor Code: "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community."

>During the science fair scene, Dr. Hathaway mentions a 12-year-old student who was the youngest admitted to Pacific Tech, but who "cracked under the pressure". This was inspired by an actual student at Caltech.

>The campus looks nothing like Caltech's; many exterior and interior scenes were filmed at Occidental College, near Caltech, and Pomona, one of the Claremont colleges, in the L.A. area. Some dorm scenes were shot in Pomona's Harwood dormitory. The "Tanning Invitational" was shot in Oxy's Thorne Hall; some lab scenes used a nuclear physics lab in Oxy's Fowler Hall. The "Darlington Electronics" scenes were shot at General Atomics in San Diego. Rumor has it that Caltech didn't allow filming on campus because the film's obvious allusions to SDI research made the powers-that-be at the Institute uncomfortable.

>Caltech student extras appear in some scenes, especially the new student reception scene.

>The look of the dorm interior sets was inspired by that of Dabney House at Caltech. The walls of Dabney were in fact covered with graffiti; photos were taken of the graffiti in Dabney, set painters copied it from the photos, then Caltech students added their own touches. One graffito seen in the film ("Stills from the film: Gas") is a copy of a piece in Dabney which disappeared during the 1987 renovation of the House (the wall upon which it was drawn was knocked out to expand a kitchen).

>When Mitch is first walking through the residence toward his room, he passes a mural shaped like a man, wearing a bowler hat, facing away from the viewer. Written on the man's back is "Caltech vs. MIT".

>Chris and Mitch's room has a mural of a Voyager image of Saturn on one wall. This same mural existed in Dabney House room #50 at Caltech.

>Jordan, the "hyperkinetic" mechanical engineer, is another character inspired by an actual student (whose nickname was "Tigger").

>"Smart People on Ice" is similar to a Page House practice, discontinued around 1974, called "alley surfing", where one of the corridors (cement-floored) in the house basement would be flooded with a thin layer of soapy water and residents would practice skidding down the hallway.

>Kent tells Mitch his brain will turn to "tapioca"; saying that someone's brain had turned to or would turn to "purple tapioca" was a popular figure of speech among Caltech undergrads.

>The prank where Kent's car is "parked" in his room is similar to an actual incident where a car was disassembled, then reassembled in working order inside a room in Ricketts House.

>While there is no secret elevator system leading from students' rooms to steam tunnels, Caltech does have a relatively accessible set of steam tunnels running under campus. Also, some of the student houses are constructed so as to have a space between the outer walls and room walls, called "hyperspace", which can be clambered around in.

>When Dr. Hathaway administers his exam, he reminds his class that "we believe in the honor system here". Caltech's Honor Code has been referred to above, but the amusing point is that, due to the Honor Code, only a tiny percentage of exams at Tech were actually in-class and proctored - most were take-home.

>The exam books in the exam scene look very much like the blue books used for many Caltech exams, particularly the cobra which seems to be on the back cover.

>At one point we see an event called "Decompression", where students are screaming, beating on furniture, and playing with toys. This was an actual event at Tech held right after finals.

>When Kent is being chloroformed in his room by the conspirators, they are observed by a passerby who doesn't remark on their activities at all. This wouldn't have been that unusual at Caltech, where student pranks ("RFs") on each other were not uncommon occurences. (The passerby happens to be Dave Marvit, the Techer consultant to the director.)

>When the conspirators break into Dr. Hathaway's house, Chris is seen picking the lock. This in itself isn't unusual in the context of the story, but it's worth noting that the study of lockpicking enjoyed some popularity at Tech, especially in Blacker House. Also, Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate and beloved Caltech physics professor, was an accomplished lockpicker and safecracker.

The Fashion Of Chris Knight

I Love Toxic Waste
This is first of many fine shirts worn by Chris Knight throughout Real Genius. He wears this shirt while interviewing for a job at Darlington.