Wheaton plays Harvard on Hollywood's screens

Wheaton's proximity to Boston and the college's Ivy League looks make it a natural stand-in when the gates of Harvard Yard won't open to Hollywood filmmakers -- fortunately for the producers of films "Prozac Nation" and "Soul Man."

The Boston Globe today featured Wheaton as one of the schools with a campus that rivals Harvard's for its beauty, bricks and ivy. Other schools that have been what the Globe calls "understudies" include the City College of New York, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and the University of Southern California (which imports fall foliage as needed, according to the Globe story)..

Typically, when filmmakers use a campus other than Harvard's to represent it, up-close scenes are augmented with actual shots of the Charles River, Massachusetts Avenue and Cambridge area. Located in Norton, Mass., just south of Boston and Cambridge, Wheaton is convenient for its compelling Georgian architecture and it geographic closeness to the real thing.

Anna Fitzgerald, the college's associate director of communications, told the Globe that Wheaton doesn't mind the comparison to Harvard. "It's a nice opportunity for us in terms of letting people see how attractive our campus is," she says. "It's about exposure."

The big screen will next feature Wheaton-as-Harvard in next year's release, "Prozac Nation," a film based on Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir of her depression as an undergraduate at Harvard.