Elvis Mitchell: Times critic brings Hollywood to Harvard

Any students who flocked to Visiting Lecturer Elvis Mitchell’s film course this spring in search of a spectacle surely got what they were looking for.

First, the fame: Though many Harvard professors stamp their names on the covers of textbooks or bestsellers, Mitchell’s undergraduates could look forward to seeing their professor’s distinctive byline placed prominently in The New York Times several times a week.

Shuttling back and forth to New York, Mitchell weighed in on the silver screen’s triumphs and flops as one of three Times film critics until his resignation from the paper late in the spring.

Then, the treats: Back in Cambridge, Mitchell gave the students in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) 173x, “History of American Film Criticism,” a big-screen showing of a noteworthy film every Thursday at 1 p.m. and followed each screening with an hour or so of his thoughts.

If the dusty classic reels weren’t enough for any seasoned film buffs in the class, Mitchell also managed to furnish them with a special pre-release screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.

Mitchell’s array of novel offerings was rounded out by a suite of guests. The critic used his extensive connections to bring the distributor of The Passion of the Christ and then the director of The Yards to the Carpenter Center, culminating in a surprise cameo from star Bill Murray at VES 173x’s final meeting.

And then, by semester’s end, came the headlines. The man known for his idiosyncratic takes on others’ work turned out to make an irresistible story of his own, as his departure from The New York Times played out in the public eye.

In the flurry of speculation about where the charismatic critic would go next—to another newspaper? to a film studio?—few seem to have predicted what is, for the time being, the answer. Mitchell is coming back to Harvard, where he will again teach one course each in VES and in the Department of African and African American Studies in the spring of 2005. Mitchell did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.

The brick halls on the banks of the Charles might not seem like an obvious choice for Mitchell, whose departure from The Times was attended by suggestions from some observers that he never quite fit into its stodgy old New York environment—and yet who maintained a full-time job there while teaching his Harvard courses.

Then again, VES’ Le Corbusier-designed concrete complex on Quincy Street is not quite your average Harvard class space.

DOUBLE FEATURE

VES has long welcomed professional artists without formal academic backgrounds to its ranks as visiting faculty.

And VES Chair Marjorie Garber, who is also Kenan professor of English, says Mitchell and his day job fit squarely within this tradition of the department.

“All our visiting artists have another job,” Garber says. “This is just like that...the value, in part, of these folks is that they have another life in the world.”

Still, even VES has had problems with busy professors balancing non-academic careers in past years.

In 2001, then-VES Chair Ellen Phelan, a professional painter, was reportedly dismissed after concerns about the amount of time she spent in New York. And while Mitchell has earned what appear to be uniformly positive reviews from administrators and faculty, his celebrity perks did not come without a price.

J.D. Connor ’92, assistant director of undergraduate studies for film studies and a former Crimson editor, praised Mitchell’s teaching in an interview last month but said that the otherwise-successful film course “had all the initial administrative problems that one might expect from someone who is not by training an academic.”

And students’ generally positive remarks on the course have been tempered by observations that its workload was comparatively light and Mitchell’s lectures sometimes unstructured.

“There was concern about, let us say, the course’s free-flowing organization,” Germanic languages and literatures department Chair Eric Rentschler said last month. Rentschler has played a key role in the recent development of Harvard’s film studies program.

Gustavo S. Turner, the head teaching fellow for VES 173x, says the course has been “one of the most remarkable teaching experiences I’ve had at Harvard” in four years as a TF, but acknowledges the impact of Mitchell’s packed calendar this spring.

“It’s always tricky to work with professors with busy schedules, in or out of town,” Turner writes in an e-mail. “But it’s doable, especially if you have experience. Stock up on the Aleve, though.”

Michael Lawrence, VES’ undergraduate academic coordinator, says Mitchell has been “extraordinarily tough to get in touch with” as Lawrence prepared the course catalog, but he adds that this was not far out of the norm for VES’ many visiting faculty.

“It was a little bit rare that I didn’t even practically see him at all” this term, Lawrence notes. “But it was just a little tougher than normal.”

While VES is known for flexible scheduling, professors in Af-Am, the other department in which Mitchell teaches, have allegedly been held to other expectations.

The Af-Am department famously lost former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 to Princeton in 2001 after, West has claimed, University President Lawrence H. Summers questioned the amount of time the scholar had devoted to political work outside the academy and the recording of a spoken-word album, Sketches of My Culture. Af-Am faculty did not reply to requests for comment for this story.

In February, DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. said Mitchell’s unique career made him valuable to the department.

“We wanted to hire someone to teach film, but we also just wanted to hire Elvis Mitchell,” the Af-Am chair told The Crimson in an interview. “There’s nobody quite like him.”

There is no doubt that Mitchell’s unique position outside Harvard’s walls contributed largely to his course catalog appeal—most professors, after all, can’t get the star of Caddyshack and Lost in Translation to show up unannounced at their lectures. Students and faculty alike have raved about those guests, about his vast knowledge of the filmmaking world and about a unique, lively manner in the classroom.

Rentschler said last month that he hoped Mitchell’s popularity would make his film course next year a “feeder” for the VES concentration track in the field that will debut this fall.

PEANUT GALLERY

But while Mitchell finished teaching his class, his departure from The Times became the focus of considerable media attention.

On May 10, New York Magazine published a somewhat critical piece on the state of Mitchell’s career, examining his time at Harvard along with his Times experience.

Calling VES 173x “not an especially academic class,” the article also cited students who called Mitchell “extremely flirtatious.”

In the midst of a wide range of print and online pieces covering Mitchell’s resignation, internet gossip blog Gawker.com notably ran at least eight items on Mitchell between April 21 and May 14, including guesses as to his next career move and first-person accounts of Murray’s appearance in class.

On April 19, Gawker.com had published an item called “Film Critics Gone Wild: Ivy League Edition,” in which the gossip site reported a rumor about an unnamed “New York City film critic” involved in an impropriety with a student at the “prestigious school” at which he had been spending a semester.

One Harvard faculty member says this rumor had been taken seriously enough to provoke informal inquiries into its truth, but that these inquiries had concluded that the story was “simply fabrication” produced by “a person with a vendetta against The New York Times” and against Mitchell.

“They should call it Stalker.com,” the faculty member says of the site which reported the nameless rumor.

Carl Swanson, the New York Magazine contributing editor who wrote about Mitchell last month, says Mitchell’s now-abandoned position at The Times has made him a fascinating subject for many.

“Being one of the critics for The New York Times is a position that a lot of people pay attention to,” Swanson says. “Everybody knows who he is, everyone reads him.”

“As for the attention, well, I guess that’s what you get when you combine a very well-known journalist with the largest corporation in the Western hemisphere,” Turner writes.

All in all, perhaps it remains until next spring to see quite how Mitchell fits into Harvard’s complex academic structure. In the meantime, Turner cautions against wondering whether Mitchell’s successes mean that there are more faculty members like him on the way.

“Trick question: there is only one Elvis Mitchell,” Turner writes. “Maybe you should ask me again after cloning becomes widespread.”

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.