Vassar on Screen

For 100 years and counting, the College has served as a setting, a character attribute, and even a laugh-out-loud punchline for numerous movies and television shows—from the silent films of the 1920s to the TV sitcoms of today. And thanks to an amazing gift from David Ezer ’95, many of these segments can now be viewed on the new Vassar on Screen website.

In the more than 400 clips amassed so far—drawn from over 300 films, television series, radio programs, operas, podcasts, video games, songs, and musical theater shows—viewers can see Vassar turned into the fictional Essex College for the recent HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls; hear it name-dropped repeatedly as the alma mater of “Dharma” on the ABC ’90s sitcom Dharma and Greg; and watch a very capable young astronaut dispatch a pair of villains with a few well-placed punches and judo flips in the 1979 film Moonraker. (An astonished James Bond, played by Roger Moore, asks, “Where did you learn to fight like that, NASA?” The astronaut, played by Lois Chiles, replies, “No, Vassar!”)

So how did Ezer, a nonprofit event planner who majored in music, come by this amazing collection? He gathered it piece by piece, as “a fun pastime,” starting soon after he graduated. “Vassar had this very iconic kind of status in the way it was being used in or referenced in popular culture,” Ezer recalled. “It was always a nice element about being there. You know, it was a place that actually had some cultural resonance in a way that few other colleges do. And it was more than just a marker of, hey, it’s a good school, as you would get for Harvard or Yale, which show up in lots of lots of media but not necessarily in a way that’s very specific to them.”

Ezer and his spouse, Vassar classmate Sara Bensman ’95, would look out for College mentions and then add them to their Blogspot page in the early 2000s. “There were times when my obsessiveness was too much, and I would watch many episodes of a particular show to find a reference,” said Ezer. “I did that with Dharma and Greg, because that’s one where there’s a character who went [to the College], and it was a big part of her character, and it was clearly going to be in a bunch of episodes.” Of course, without the type of search capabilities now available for subtitles or quotes, this took considerable time. “You really had no way to do it except watch, and that was fun,” Ezer said. “They talk about tea in the Rose Parlor, things that are actually very specific.”

As word of the blog spread, Ezer started to get referrals from other alums. But eventually, the project outgrew Blogspot, and Ezer did not feel up to building and maintaining a website for the collection. So he approached his alma mater about making the gift and was received enthusiastically. “I was so pleased they wanted to really run with it and make it a pedagogical tool, and maintain the integrity of the collection,” he said.

Associate Professor and Chair of Film Erica Stein said the department was thrilled to receive the collection and has been working for over a year to build the Vassar on Screen site into the fully functional destination it is now—a resource that she sees as more than just a fun repository of trivia. In fact, there are many ways she envisions using the archive in class.

“We often teach filmmaking classes that focus on editing, and usually you buy a package of footage that the students can use to practice different editing techniques, but it tends to be really kind of anonymous stuff,” Stein said. “This enables us to have our own specific set for demonstrating reels, which is an important technique—to be able to put clips together end to end.”

Taken as a whole, the archive can also be useful in theoretical discussion, Stein said. “I think it concretizes something that a lot of people know intuitively, but that is really hard to pin down, which is the way that media creates and fixes cultural memory and the identity and meaning and persona of institutions, people, and places,” she explained. “You can say that, and I think students often feel it, but it’s something that’s actually hard to prove. This is an example where you can see it over the years, and you can also see meanings shift. You can see the public identity shift.”

The collection will also be useful to historical associations and even scientists, said Stein. “It’s historical footage, right? Even if we don’t necessarily think of, say, The Four Seasons, the Netflix series that just shot on campus last year, as a great historical document, if you’re a climate scientist or if you’re an architectural historian, and you want to know what a place looked like at a given time and moment, this is a really good way to access that.”

Theo Rollet ’29 works with Film Department Administrative Assistant Peter Rednour to input metadata on the site and help with quality control. “It’s great to be able to contribute to the preservation of Vassar’s history and explore the many footprints it has left on the film world over the years,” Rollet said. “I love that I get to discover material from different eras, all somehow linked to the place and community I’m in now. It has really opened my eyes to just how far-reaching Vassar College’s influence is and just how much that name means.”

Rollet is not the only one authorized to work on the collection. Just in case Ezer misses his old pastime, there’s a ready fix: “David also has back-end access to the site,” said Stein, “so if he finds new clips, he can add them.”