No, I couldn’t have gotten in here but I did grow up here. I grew up in the neighborhood in the shadow of this imposing place. My brother Kyle and I and my friend Ben Affleck, brilliant guy, good guy never really amounted too much. We all grew up right here in Central Square, the children of this sometimes rocky marriage between this city and its great institutions.
To us, MIT was kind of like the man, this big impressive impersonal force, at least that was our provincial kneejerk teenage reaction anyway. And then Ben and I shot a movie here and one of the scenes in Good Will Hunting was based on something that actually happened to my brother Kyle. He was visiting a physicist that we knew at MIT and he was walking down the infinite corridor. He saw those blackboards that lined the halls. And so my brother who’s an artist picked up some chalk and wrote an incredibly elaborate totally fake version of an equation. And it was so cool and completely insane that no one raised it for months. This is a true story.
Anyway, Kyle came back and he said, “You guys, listen to this. They’ve got blackboards running down the hall, because these kids are so smart they just need to drop everything and solve problems”. And it was then we knew for sure we could never have gotten in. But like I said, we later made a movie here which did not go unnoticed on campus. In fact, I’d like to read you some actual lines, some selected passages from the review of Good Will Hunting in the MIT school paper. If you haven’t seen, Will was me and Sean is played by the late Robin Williams, a man I miss a hell of a lot.
So I’m quoting here. “Good Will Hunting is very entertaining but then again any movie partially set at MIT has to be”. But there’s more, in the end the reviewer writes, “The actual character development flies out the window. Will and Sean talk, bond, solve each other’s problems and then cry and hug each other, after sad crying and hugging, the movie ends. Such feel good pretentiousness is definitely not my mug of eggnog”. Well that kind of hurts.