Campus Doubles

Months after a summer blockbuster used the campus of Penn as a stand-in for what appears to be Princeton, the makers of "The Social Network," affectionately known as "the Facebook movie," are pulling a similar campus switch. Unable to shoot on Harvard's campus, the movie's producers have decided to film three outdoor campus scenes, referring to Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg's time at Harvard, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.

When Transformers 2 director Michael Bay snubbed Penn last summer, some on campus took up arms and started an open letter of protest on Facebook. Though in the end, Transformers 2 references neither school, and it is just assumed Shia LaBeouf attends some unnamed [stuck-up] northeastern [safety] school with an orange and black crest.

It seems there is no similar outcry from Hopkins, where students and faculty may actually be excited about the project. In a Student Announcement from Dennis O'Shea, in Communications and Public Affairs at Hopkins, the school officially welcomes the film team, citing the boost such a project can bring to a local film industry struggling amid the recession.

But no way is any audience going to believe Hopkins extras for stand-in Harvard students. Good luck trying to procure enough J.Crew loafers and North Face backpacks to make that work. Though, come to think of it, this financial boost thing seems rather practical. Maybe Harvard should've started recouping endowment losses sooner by opening its gates to film crews.

Just not NYC Prep. Dear God, anything but that.

Photo by Lester Spence/Wikimedia Commons