Shot on/Shown on Campus- August 30th 2010

Every year, the Crimson Key society, a student organisation at Harvard that conducts campus tours and otherwise promotes college spirit, runs X strictly for laughs for first-year students during their orientation. This year’s two screenings take place on Aug. 30.

That involves Crimson Key’s nearly 100 members sitting in the rear of the auditorium of the Science Center building and jeering the proceedings. Just before Ms. MacGraw utters the deathless catchphrase Y, Crimson Key members loudly implore her, “Don’t say it!” At the conclusion, when Mr. O’Neal repeats her bathetic utterance, they shout, “Plagiarist!” And so it goes.

Crimson Key’s hallowed tradition apparently began in the late 1970s. They regard its presentation as a bonding experience. “Most people have a soft spot for X, ” said Eeke de Milliano, the group’s president. “It is sentimental hogwash, but the freshmen are, I think, secretly proud to see their university on the screen.” That sentiment eluded Raymond Vasvari, a Cleveland-based lawyer who underwent his X indoctrination in 1983. “You take all these people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who are suddenly stamped with the Harvard imprimatur and marched into this big, brutalist, antiseptic space with 1,600 other geeks to watch this girl die."

Identify X. Bonus points for the quote Y.