When you’re first in your family to go to university, you tend to get your information on being a student from popular culture – and the 80s movie that got me interested in university was the 1985 Val Kilmer campus cult classic Real Genius.
Early on in the film there’s a montage in which “genius” high school student Mitch Taylor is shown getting to grips with becoming a student – carrying piles of books, trying to find a room on campus, spending time in the lab, that sort of thing – and there’s three little shots of him attending lectures.
In the first during welcome week, the room is packed out with students taking handwritten notes. In the second, a number of chairs have ghettoblasters on them rather than students, recording the lecture. Next we see a little device that the student who becomes his love interest has invented to automate turning the pages of a book so they can cram while tired.
