An Amazing Shared Experience

Sure, there was the usual stuff: classes, sports, clubs, drama productions, fun, camaraderie. Throw in the filming of a movie on your campus, though – and a movie starring Robin Williams, no less – and, well, that’s an experience you’ll not soon forget.

 

Maybe you never will. Brian Leipheimer surely won’t. Liza Becker won’t either. That’s for sure.

 

Brian is Collegiate’s director of college guidance. He’s been on board since 2001. He and his wife, Dr. Vienne Murray, have two children who are students here.

 

Liza, the guidance counselor at Bettie Weaver Elementary in Chesterfield County, is the wife of Frank Becker, Collegiate’s Lower School director of instructional technology. They have three children, one a Collegiate graduate, the others current students.

 

Brian and Liza were classmates at St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware, about a half-hour south of Wilmington.

 

During the fall of 1988, their junior year, the crew that would film Dead Poets Society descended upon their idyllic campus and into their world.

 

Brian, who hails from Middleburg in Loudoun County, VA, where his mother Mary Lou Leipheimer served from 1989-2014 as head of Foxcroft School, picks up the story.

 

“The director of Dead Poets Society, Peter Weir, had appointments with several heads of school (to identify suitable venues for filming),” he said. “He was actually driving down I-95 to meet with my mother when he decided to stop by this little school called St. Andrew’s that he’d heard of. Long story short, he never kept the appointment with my mom.”

 

Turns out the picture-postcard scenic 2,200-acre campus, much of which is a nature preserve, provided the ideal representation of the fictional Welton Academy, an elite Vermont boarding school in the late 50’s that was the setting for the movie.

 

The filming took several months and disrupted normal routines. The positives, including contact with Williams (in assemblies, numerous chance sightings, and occasional visits to Founders Hall to hang out hold court with the guys) were well worth the inconveniences.

 

“It was an amazing experience,” Brian said. “It was remarkable to be able to spend time with somebody who we were instantly in awe of because he was a movie star.”

 

A movie star with well-documented issues.

 

“He talked very openly about the impact that substances, specifically illicit drugs, had on his life and his family,” Brian said. “He did that without lecturing. Somebody that we automatically admired talking from personal experience had a remarkable impact on us. He talked about things like losing his best friend, John Belushi, to cocaine. What he was able to do was say, ‘Look what I did. Look at how it hurt my life. I almost lost my family. I don’t think it was really worth it.’

 

“He was an incredibly friendly guy. He was known throughout any interactions as being incredibly quick (of mind and speech). You actually had to struggle to follow him because he was fantastically quick and funny. Absolutely alive and alert.”

 

One moment stands out.

 

“I distinctly remember our headmaster John O’Brien,” Brian continued. “He was a wonderful fellow but a very formal man. He was standing up introducing Robin Williams in an all-school assembly. Mr. Williams walked onstage to shake Mr. O’Brien’s hand, then to address us.

 

“As he put out his hand, he had in his other hand a pair of scissors, and he just cut Mr. O’Brien’s tie right off halfway up. The audience went bananas. Clearly, Robin Williams had done his homework. Mr. O’Brien would never have wanted to be seen with a shorn-off tie, but he handled it well.”

When Dead Poets Society appeared in theaters, the action moved seamlessly from scene to scene, venue to venue. If you knew the actual layout of St. Andrew’s, though, you found yourself scratching your head.

 

“For example,” Brian said, “there’s a whole scene in a cave where the boys are dancing around reciting poetry. That cave doesn’t exist. It was a movie set. Similarly, the headmaster’s office in the movie was actually my hall master’s apartment. The way they filmed scenes as they walked up the stairs to the headmaster’s office…you actually walked up those stairs to an athletic closet.

 

“In the movie, there were these gorgeous landscapes of leaves. The leaves were actually falling off the trees too fast for the construction crew to handle. We woke up one morning seeing entire crews out there on cherry pickers with masking tape taping leaves back onto the branches. You realize that Hollywood does a lot of manipulation behind the scenes.”

 

The most enduring memory, though, was time in the presence of Robin Williams. By the late ‘80’s, he had already starred on the television show Mork & Mindy and in several movies, among them Popeye, The World According to Garp, The Best of Times, and Good Morning, Vietnam.

 

In Dead Poets Society, he played John Keating, a brilliant, charismatic English teacher who urged his students to challenge convention, think freely and creatively, and seize the day, much to the dismay of the school’s hidebound administration. He earned both an Academy Award and Golden Globe nomination for his performance.

 

“Robin Williams’ talent was unbelievable,” Brian said, “but he was also a very real human. Any time you’re around famous people, you realize they put on their pants just like you do: one leg at a time. Robin Williams was a real person with unreal talent. Spend five minutes with the man, and you realize he’s a true comedic genius. His mind never stops working.”

 

Liza, who grew up in Charleston, WVA, actually had a bit part in Dead Poets Society.

 

“I was in the chorus in the (St. Andrew’s) musical,” she said. “Some of us who were in the play had the opportunity to be extras for the scene where they were shooting A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

 

“I was in the audience. They filmed us at the end giving a standing ovation. It (that portion of the filming) took about three days. We got paid really well. It was super fun. It felt like a windfall.”

 

Like Brian, Liza quickly figured out that the film crew took numerous liberties with the setting.

 

“The classroom (where Keating taught) was actually a sound stage,” she said. “It was designed to look like a room on our campus. And there’s one part where he’s looking into a trophy case and talking to the boys about ‘Carpe Diem.’ That’s not in the main building (as it appears in the movie). It’s in the gym. It looks perfectly natural, but knowing how things were laid out, they weren’t in the right place.”

 

The news of Robin Williams’ death by suicide on August 11, 2014, was stunning.

 

“When he passed away,” Liza said, “It was like losing somebody that was part of my life. I think we all had an affinity for him and for what he did for our school. It felt like a privilege to see him perform and even be there during that time. It was an amazing shared experience.”

   -- Weldon Bradshaw