In 1965, the BBC produced a film, How to Be First. Denis Postle, who made the film, gave us permission to display it here for our class. Some from the classes of 67 and 68 have already been spotted. Perhaps you'll see yourself. Thanks to Denis for sharing it, and also to Rick Lufkin for tracking it down and providing the following introduction.
MIT has recently, early 2012, posted on various sites some historical movies, mostly "recruiting" videos from the admissions office, and some going back decades. I saw one of these early last year and this reminded me of the How to Be First movie which I remember being filmed spring semester of our freshman year and shown our sophomore year in 26-100 prior to an LSC movie, or so I believe was the specific context. How to Be First was a BBC documentary made for use in Britain, we got to see a copy since it was of us.
The only two details I remember were the actual filming, they panned the camera across a humanities recitation section I was in and I remember the camera as being right in front of my face, and I also remember the uproarious laughter we shared when the movie was actually shown of these "young gods" who were being educated to conquer the world. Therefore, with that inspiration, last year I Googled the movie title, which I did remember, and found the web site of its producer, Denis Postle, who has now retired but had a long successful career in the film world in Britain. I reached out to Denis and after many exchanges of messages he finally tracked down the movie in his basement, converted it into digital format and sent it to me. I have told him that the only use of the movie was for non-commercial purposes our our entertainment and that there would be no compensation but that he would receive credit for providing the movie to us. We have had no explicit discussion as regards formal legal rights.
On further research, I found the following paragraph from the September 17, 1965 issue of The Tech:
"A letter from Denis Postle, who directed the BBC film made about MIT here last spring, reports that the film will be shown over the BBC network on September 21 in "the top documentary slot of the week." The title of the film is "How To Be First"; doesn't that make your heart swell with school spirit?"
Thats about all there is for now. The film is 56 minutes long, and the image quality and production values are far short of what we see today, thus it can be difficult to watch for an extended period. Most of the panning group shots are in the early part of the film and it is probably best watched on-line since that makes it easy to rewind and watch again and again to see if you can spot yourself or a friend. There is quite a "cold war" feel to the movie which gives it an interesting historical flavor - it makes the 1965 setting seem a really long time ago - and yet there we are. Looking very young! Are we THAT old?
The complete movie in mov format is over 850MB. A Flash version in a smaller format is shown here.