Blog post author: Doug Johnson

In 1960, Catholic priest Ellwood “Bud” Kieser founded Paulist Productions in Westwood, with the idea of producing television shows that would communicate Christian values in an engaging and ecumenical manner. He developed the program Insight, which would be syndicated nationwide, enticing broadcasters with free programming that would satisfy the rather vague “public interest” requirement dictated by the FCC.

Amongst the various issues Insight would address was premarital sex, and, naturally enough, Kieser looked to his neighborhood institution of higher learning for inspiration. The hormonal hotbed of UCLA’s coeducational campus offered a perfect setting for an exploration of a young couple’s yearnings. The script for “The Perennial Problem” (1962) identifies UCLA by name, and stages its characters’ courtship amidst some of the campus’s most recognizable buildings.

Happily, they find a way to maintain control, and are able to graduate with their virtue more or less intact.

The next year, Paulist Productions would return to campus for “The Sophomore” (1963). This time, though, the setting was supposed to be generic, a symbol of a large university rather than a specific place. In the screenwriter’s initial conception, the school is a vast, overwhelming place, where all the professors are men—brilliant, brilliant men. Fortunately, someone thought better of that last point.

Though UCLA was going incognito, it remains recognizable to anyone familiar with Royce Hall, at least.

Eagle-eyed viewers unfamiliar with the campus might still spot evidence of its identity on a bulletin board.

In “The Sophomore,” the title character is a football player named, curiously, Jim Brown (the great Cleveland Browns running back of the same name had joined the NFL in 1957) and he is played by James MacArthur, who would go on to play Dan (as in “Book ‘im Danno”) in the original Hawaii Five-O. His problem is not sex, at least not directly. Rather, the free exchange of ideas and pressure from his frat brothers lead the once-devout Catholic down the road to agnosticism. His subsequent (unfilmed) licentiousness is merely the natural consequence of his loss of faith.

Jim Brown waits for a date at an eerily deserted dormitory. (Hedrick? Sproul?)

Jim Brown contemplates Pascal’s wager or something.

Fortunately for his soul, Jim meets a young woman named Jeanne (you may have noticed that in the earlier script, the couple’s names were Jim and Jean; the naming of characters was clearly not Paulist Productions’ strong suit) whose grace in the kitchen and devotion to God help restore his own belief. Jeanne is played by Marlo Thomas, who would soon begin her iconic television role in That Girl. In the 1970s, she would become the mastermind behind the epoch-defining Free to Be… You and Me, which sought, in part, to dismantle gender stereotypes similar to the ones on display in this film. Jim meets Jeanne after college, so their scenes are not photographed on the UCLA campus. But, come on, it’s Marlo Thomas!

This photograph was taken from a vantage point between Powell Library and the Humanities Building. In the background you can see the library that would become YRL under construction. But look at the small trees to the left of the walkway. Clearly, they had been recently planted at the time this photo was taken, but there are no trees there now. Where did they go? Did someone, at some point in the last fifty-odd years, think better about their placement? Were they uprooted soon after this, as saplings, or had they been given ten, or twenty, or more years to grow before being excavated out of the ground? Or were they downed by the wind, which happens from time to time?

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/gusty-winds-bedevil-ucla-campus-as-it-prepares-for-bruin-day

Perhaps the answer lies somewhere else in Special Collections, in another random photograph, or stray slip of paper, or in a folder clearly marked “Royce Quad tree removal.” In any case, the Paulist Productions Records (Collection 2300) have returned to Westwood, the place where they began.