It seems like yesterday that the University of North Carolina campus was torn up under the sweltering sun, with “Patch Adams” cameras and crews swarming around, blocking off areas. Students attending summer camps at Carolina or summer classes talked about sightings of Robin Williams on Franklin Street or autographs snagged between takes.

But now the campus is back to usual, with the blue-lit towers of the emergency call boxes and the no-longer broken red brick paths. In fact, “Patch Adams” is now in theaters, and besides being an enjoyable film, it’s really cool to sit there and recognize so much.

As the film starts, Patch Adams is in a mental hospital, but he soon finds he can get past his own problems and inadequacies by helping other patients. So he decides to go to medical school, a fictitious campus known as “Virginia Medical University.” In reality, that campus is made up mainly of UNC buildings.

Currently, UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication is housed in tiny Howell Hall. But over the summer and even now, renovations are being made to the immense, white-pillared Carroll Hall, which used to house the Kenan-Flagler Business School. This building was used as one of the main classroom exterior scenes in “Patch Adams.” I found it funny that the movie would show medical students streaming out of the building, when only weeks earlier, bright yellow signs barred entrance to students and faculty members because of concerns over possible asbestos.

Again and again, the movie shows scenes of the campus, with its green quad and the historical and familiar buildings. It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing all these buildings that I’m in every week of each semester, taking courses such as political science and economics. Here they are, on the big screen displayed all over the country in theaters.

I realized, sitting there, that the average person watching the newest Robin Williams flick didn’t have the foggiest clue about some of the little things that my friends and I knew that made the watching the movie so fun. For instance, several times Williams and fellow med students ascend the large front steps of Carroll Hall to attend class — only to emerge later from Saunders Hall.

Little things like that were amusing, but the real thing that struck me is how much effort went into so little screen time. This summer, I stood there, watching a scene in which a nurse brings Patch a letter. They filmed it over and over and spent hours setting up the cameras, and Williams must have walked the same few steps 30 times. The scene on the big screen was about 10 seconds long.

The same thing is true for the scene that caused a little bit of talk and controversy this summer — the two legs spread in stirrups from the doorway of Murphey Hall. My best friend and I saw them covered for days with black tarp to cover their true form, then revealed off and on for several days of shooting. Then a final day, they were seen being dismantled and trucked, piece after flesh-colored piece, off campus.

There’s also the fact that in every scene, there are countless people moving about the campus — extras. I never really took notice of this small but significant addition to increase realism tenfold. All those people were hired to walk countless times back and forth. I never really thought about it before, but here’s another example where people take days out of their lives to say they were a part of a film for relatively little compensation.

Overall, it’s just really cool to see something that I’m a part of, up there for so many people to see. It’s also a great feeling to kind of have an inside track and an angle that the general public doesn’t know.

The real Patch Adams was on the set a lot. Williams throughout the film is seen wearing very bright, wild clothes. Most people watching the film will pass this by. But at Carolina we saw that this was the way the real Patch dresses and that “based on a true story” meant more than a few names and events were borrowed. The story was certainly based on a true story and its setting based on a real place — a real place I call my home and my alma mater.

Originally posted at NandoNext.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 1998 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Film, Local (Raleigh Durham), Movie Reviews, Reviews, UNC-CH. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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