21 | Marsh Plaza, Boston University — The Campus That Played MIT

Every corridor, dorm room, gymnasium and alumni reception that the film calls MIT was shot a mile and a half west, on Commonwealth Avenue. MIT declined to let the production onto its campus, so Boston University handed over its buildings and let Ben Campbell's whole student life be built inside them. MIT's own news office said so plainly the week the film opened: the movie was made at BU, at the Christian Science Center, and in Las Vegas.

Marsh Plaza is where that substitution is easiest to feel. The chapel's limestone tower rises off a small brick plaza, Green Line trolleys grind past a few feet away, and students cut across the Hoodoo sculpture at the center on their way to class with headphones in. It looks like a university that has been photographed a thousand times and never quite noticed.

That is the useful thing to know standing here: the film's Cambridge is a costume, and BU wore it. Order a coffee at the corner of Bay State Road, watch the trolley pull away, and look for the lecture-hall windows behind the plaza — the ones where a professor is telling a room full of undergraduates about variable change.