FAMOUS— IF FICTIONAL— HOYAS ON SCREEN

Stanford has Chelsea Clinton. Yale has Barbara Bush. Harvard has Malia Obama.

Georgetown has Zoey Bartlet .

The fictional first daughter of President Josiah Bartlet on the TV show West Wing graduated from Georgetown in 2003—a scene shot on Healy Lawn in the first on-campus filming since The Exorcist in 1972.

Zoey Bartlet is one of many fictional Georgetown alumni you’ve seen in TV shows and on film. They are characters who desperately want to attend Georgetown, who enroll, meet, fall in love and graduate, especially in a popular 1985 film in which the plot hinges on recently graduated “alumni” suffering great angst about their post-college fates and encroaching adulthood.

Why do producers choose Georgetown? What does the university represent in the public’s imagination? Why is pop culture drawn to Georgetown?

“I think that Georgetown appeals to Los Angeles-based producers because it is East Coast, old and prestigious, but not an Ivy,” says Bernie Cook, (C’90, G’91), associate dean and founding director of Film and Media Studies in the College. “Both LA and DC are company towns,” Cook adds. “LA is fascinated with DC, its opposite.”

John Glavin (C’64), professor of English and himself a screenwriter, says, “Georgetown— neighborhood and school—is a code word in the larger world for ‘elite.’ So if you want to suggest a story with an elite edge, Georgetown is a much more likely place to do that than almost any comparable school.”

Elite, but not snobbish, Glavin adds. “Georgetown manages to come across as both elite and accessible, apparently a winning combination.”

Horror Classic

Georgetown doesn’t have a history of allowing filming on campus, so The Exorcist and West Wing are rare exceptions. John Glavin says what he’s heard is that The Exorcist filming on campus was a special favor to the film’s screenwriter, William Peter Blatty (C’50), who developed the screenplay from his bestselling horror-thriller novel of the same name.

Blatty, who died in 2017 at age 89, always told the story that in a New Testament class in White-Gravenor he heard about a case in the DC area of a boy who seemed to be possessed by a demon. After months of rites of exorcism by priests—including Georgetown priests—the demon appeared to be expelled. Blatty never forgot.

The film, which was released in 1973, is a horror classic. It’s set in Georgetown, both neighborhood and campus. With an official go-ahead, the fall 1972 filming included several campus scenes—Healy Hall, Lauinger Library, Dahlgren Chapel, the upper tennis courts and the Medical Center campus—and used hundreds of student extras.

As noted in a university history written by now-professor emeritus of history Emmett Curran, “the film crew virtually took over campus for two months in the fall of 1972, and many faculty and students had walk-on parts in the various campus scenes.”

The Exorcist and its university connection still resonate on campus. In the film’s shocking climax, the protagonist, Father Damien Karras, takes the demon Pazuzu into his own body and hurls himself to his death down a steep set of steps near campus, making them an instant landmark. The eerie and dark stairway, once known as the “Car Barn Steps,” famously became the “Exorcist Steps.”

Graduation Day

Let’s rerun that episode of West Wing, filmed on campus 30 years after The Exorcist

First daughter Zoey Bartlet didn’t suddenly show up at graduation; she had been written as a Georgetown student since season one, graduating in season four. Her attendance at Georgetown had been a recurring story line in West Wing scripts.

“We wanted to tell a story about how [Zoey] starting college would affect the president and first lady,” West Wing producer Lou Wells told Hoya reporter Justin Dickerson (F’06) at the time of the filming. “We picked Georgetown because Bartlet is Catholic and Georgetown is a great university and a great place to send [Zoey] to school in our fictional world.”

“Commencement” was filmed on Sunday, April 27, 2003, with the show’s crew constructing the set in front of Healy Hall starting the Thursday before. The mock graduation set was smaller but similar to how the university stages real graduations.

With the set ready, cue the extras.

Hania Luna (C’06) can’t quite remember how she heard about the chance to be an extra. (A Hoya article in university archives reported that the campus Lecture Series conducted a lottery.) She does remember spending most of a hot day sitting in front of Healy.

That morning, she and some friends reported on set and picked up their cap-and-gown costumes and a time to come back later. “They suggested that we try to create a character different than ourselves,” Luna recalls. Back in her dorm room, she straightened her curly hair.

Luna’s appearance mattered far more than straight or curly hair. She lucked out as one of a few Georgetown extras able to find themselves in the two-minute segment that the day of filming yielded. When the camera pans, Luna is in the same shots as Zoey Bartlet, played by Elisabeth Moss. Luna says the crew purposely placed her near Moss. “They were looking for Zoey to be surrounded by a diverse group of students,” says Luna, a Mexican-American.

Luna wasn’t much of a West Wing watcher, so the fun of being an extra with friends was the draw. But there were plenty of fans on campus. “Many of us were poli-sci and foreign-service nerds who came to Georgetown to be in DC and be part of political activism,” Luna says. “Zoey Bartlet was indicative of the kind of student you’d run into on campus.”

‘I WANT YOU TO WRITE THAT LETTER’

While Zoey Bartlet was the type of character any school would be proud to call its own, Tracy Flick is another story.

In the 1999 film Election, a dark satire on politics, Reese Witherspoon portrayed Tracy Flick, a high school striver with few friends but tremendous drive and ambition. She knows what she wants—and that includes admission to Georgetown, her dream school. To round out her overflowing list of high school extracur- ricular activities for her college applications, she runs for student body president against a popular but dim jock, a campaign that turns dark and absurd—and serves as sociopolitical commentary.

Georgetown didn’t turn out to be Tracy’s dream. She’s ostracized by her fellow Hoyas, even as she ingratiates herself in Washington, DC’s halls of power. “A lot of them were just spoiled little rich kids who didn’t know how lucky they had it,” Tracy complains.

In contrast to the darker themes of Election , 2008’s College Road Trip mines the college-admission process for laughs. It features an ambitious Melanie Porter, played Raven-Symoné Pearman, whose college-selection process serves as a proxy battle for independence from her overprotective father. Melanie is eagerly looking forward to a girls-only road trip from Chicago to the East Coast to check out colleges—including an interview at Georgetown, her top choice.

Comedy ensues when her father makes his own plans—mostly to detour and visit Northwestern University, only 30 minutes away from home, and convince Melanie to attend. There’s a lot of movie wackiness along the way: Melanie ends up skydiving onto “campus” (not filmed at Georgetown) to make her interview in the nick of time. And yes, she gets in.

Meadow Soprano’s parents, by contrast, are dying for their daughter to attend Georgetown. In season two of the HBO classic The Sopranos , Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco)—wife of mob boss Tony Soprano—asks their neighbor to approach her sister Joan, a Georgetown alumna, about writing a letter of recommendation for Meadow.

CINEMA CARROLL CONNECTION The film plots in this article are contemporary, but at least one film starring a fictional Georgetown alumnus has historical roots. In the 2004 National Treasure, historian and amateur cryptologist Benjamin Franklin Gates, played by Nicholas Cage, has an American history degree from Georgetown. Gates is searching for a legendary lost treasure trove—its location to be revealed in a coded map on the reverse of the Declaration of Independence. Whoever steals The Declaration first and decodes the map will find the “national treasure,” hidden by the Founding Fathers.

The first clue was given to one of Gates’ ancestors by Charles Carroll, the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence. In real life, Charles Carroll, indeed the last signer, was a cousin of Georgetown founder John Carroll.

When Joan declines, Carmela stops by her office unannounced with a pineapple ricotta pie, Meadow’s school transcripts and a thinly veiled threat—“I don’t think you understand. I want you to write that letter”—knowing that Joan is well aware of the Soprano family’s Mafia connections. The letter gets written.

Forever Friends

St. Elmo’s Fire, released in 1985, is an era-defining, time capsule of a film about a group of seven recent Georgetown graduates, played by Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Mare Winningham, struggling over their young lives, often in St. Elmo’s Bar, which has a decidedly Tombs-like vibe. With the university’s restrictions on on-campus filming, St. Elmo’s Fire, though explicitly about Georgetown, was filmed at the University of Maryland.

The movie was the breakthrough success for Carl Kurlander, who co-wrote the script with director Joel Schumacher. Kurlander based the script on his short story of the same name, a fictionalized account of his infatuation with a young woman. Kurlander won an internship at Universal Studios and began turning the story into a screenplay. Schumacher was his boss; he read the screenplay and saw its potential.

With Schumacher on board and the film greenlighted, the story needed a location. Kurlander suggested DC. It wasn’t for a backdrop of politics, but for love: He had reconnected with the object of his infatuation, who was living in the DC area.

Kurlander said in a telephone interview that once Schumacher agreed to set the screenplay in Washington, “it had to be Georgetown. It really fit the story.”

The crew filmed in Georgetown for nine days, including the neighborhood and a few campus exteriors. While St. Elmo’s Bar is based on The Tombs, it too was shot elsewhere. “The Tombs people were very helpful and friendly” as he tried to learn what made for a good college bar, Kurlander says.

“I didn’t know a lot about Georgetown when I pushed for it to be the movie locale,” Kurlander says. “I knew its academic reputation,” he says. “I knew the alumni were ambitious.”

No matter why Kurlander picked Georgetown to center St. Elmo’s Fire, no matter that it wasn’t was filmed on campus, Maria Devaney (SLL’90) says what he got right about Georgetown was the strong sense of community. An early line in the film is, “All I can remember is the seven of us, always together.”

“It all comes back to friends,” Devaney says. “St. Elmo’s Fire was only a little about romance—it was about friends, a place and bonds that are special, not just while you are there, but that grow stronger and stronger after you graduate,” she says. “In that way, they really got Georgetown.”

Devaney can’t say that she knows anyone who came to Georgetown because of the movie, but everyone had seen it. “I had seen the movie between the time I’d applied and been accepted. I remember hearing the theme song on the radio again and again, and I so desperately wanted to go to Georgetown.”

Actor Kerry Washington may have graduated from George Washington University, but Olivia Pope, the character she portrayed on Scandal, is a Georgetown Law alumna. Dennis Haysbert plays U.S. President David Palmer, in 24. President Palmer was a political economy major at Georgetown. The storyline of The Good Wife featured two Georgetown Law “alumni.” Julianna Margulies played Alicia Florrick, who remains close to law school friend Will Gardner, played by Josh Charles (left). Chris Noth played Alicia's husband, Peter.

Avoiding The Trap

Georgetown Law has its share of significant screen mentions, too. The Law Center is called out many times in The Good Wife , an award-winning CBS series that ran from 2009 to 2016. The show starred Julianna Margulies as “alumna” Alicia Florrick, the wife of a disgraced politician, who returns to the practice of law to pick up the pieces of her life. Law alumnus Will Gardner, played by Josh Charles, is Alicia’s law partner and a good friend from law school—and maybe more.

Ted Humphrey (C’91) is an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated writer, producer and director in film and television. He is also the writer for many episodes of The Good Wife , starting with the first season. In a summer class newsletter, Humphrey says he might have influenced the character’s academic chops “perhaps indirectly,” adding, “Truthfully, that was Robert and Michelle King’s idea.”

The Kings are the co-creators and executive producers of The Good Wife. “We made Alicia and Will Georgetown Law alums for a couple of reasons,” Michelle King told Georgetown Law magazine in 2010. “We wanted to highlight that they were smart, highly successful people without falling into the every-bright-fictional-character-went-to Harvard-or-Yale trap. The fact that Georgetown was in the national consciousness because of remarkable alums like Bill Clinton was also a plus.”

Humphrey adds, “Of course, I was happy to add context and verisimilitude to [the show]. I have a fondness for setting things in DC that comes from living there, both during college and after.”

Political Animals

Of course, it’s logical that any movie or show about the highest echelons of power in the government would feature Georgetown alumni or faculty. Here’s a representative sample: Charlie Young, personal aide to President Josiah Bartlet in West Wing ; Olivia Pope, White House director of communications and fixer extraordinaire in Scandal ; David Palmer, U.S. president, 24 ; theology professor Henry McCord, husband of Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord, Madame Secretary

Like her friend Hania Luna, Laura Dziorny (C’06, L’11) was an extra in the graduation scene in West Wing in 2003. Unlike Luna, Dziorny was “a huge fan” of the series. “I was an idealist and believed the government was a force for greater good, which was consistent with the show,” she says.

During the long, hot day of filming, the student extras cheered when the West Wing cast came onto the set, and Dziorny was especially thrilled to see President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen. It wasn’t the last time she saw Sheen at Georgetown. A few years later, Dziorny was worshiping at an 8:00 p.m. Mass in Dahlgren. She couldn’t stop looking at a fellow worshiper. “He looked just like Martin Sheen,” she says. It was indeed Sheen, who is a Catholic, in DC for a location shoot.

“He signed my prayer card and added ‘Peace,’” she remembers.