When Val Kilmer Went to College

In “Homer Goes to College,” a classic episode from the fifth season of The Simpsons, Homer is mandated to study nuclear physics at a local university after he causes a meltdown during an inspection at the plant. (“We’re still not sure how he caused the meltdown. There wasn’t any nuclear material in the truck!”) Written by Conan O’Brien, the episode scores off the ingenious conceit that everything Homer thinks he knows about college he learned from ‘80s campus comedies like Animal House and Porky’s. Crusty deans. Bra bombs. Frathouse keggers. And then, of course, there are the nerds, those pocket-protected pariahs who are tormented by their Greek counterparts. The irony is that the dean of Springfield University is a chill dude who once played bass for The Pretenders and nobody makes fun of the nerds, including the trio of goobers who help Homer pass a big exam. 

There’s no doubt that O’Brien’s research included a look at 1985’s Real Genius, a campus comedy that ticks many of the requisite boxes for the subgenre—there are nerds, parties, pranks, and other juvenilia, along with perhaps the crustiest dean of them all—but pointedly stands apart from it, too. To say that the film transcends its lowbrow predecessors would be a stretch: Though the script was heavily rewritten, it started life as another comedy by Neal Israel and Pat Proft, who’d written Police Academy and Bachelor Party, and whose fingerprints wouldn’t take a forensic team to uncover. Yet it’s a film that, at bottom, respects the ingenuity and creativity of wedgie/swirlie recipients while wanting them to party with student beauticians, too. Life is about striking a balance. 

It’s also a wonderful early showcase for Val Kilmer, who passed away last week after an incredibly accomplished 40 years in Hollywood, where he worked with directors like Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, John Frankenheimer, Michael Mann, David Mamet, Werner Herzog, and Francis Ford Coppola. (The diaristic 2021 documentary Val, on Prime Video, is whittled from 800 hours of footage that Kilmer himself had shot over the years.) Real Genius was only his second screen credit after his brilliant debut as Nick Rivers, a rock ’n’ roll idol turned WWII adventurer in Top Secret!, a spy movie spoof from the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team behind Airplane!. For Leslie Nielsen, the breakout star of Airplane! and the Naked Gun movies, being in a ZAZ comedy was the abrupt end of a career as a serious actor. For Kilmer, it was the beginning of a journey that went far beyond comedy. 

And yet it didn’t go that far beyond, in that Kilmer seemed to recognize that his comic gifts were too prodigious to suppress. But the Kilmer of, say, 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, where he’s the straight man playing off the more manic Robert Downey Jr., contrasts sharply with these early roles, where he got to be the manic one. While many of the gags in Top Secret! require him to be the deadpan center of a silly situation, Kilmer’s Nick Rivers breezes through the grim East German backdrop like Elvis Presley in a beach musical, happily pranking the stiff-necked Nazis in his midst. He carries himself with movie-star confidence but shows a willingness to make himself look like a fool. He had the marquee handsomeness to be a lot more vain than he was. 

When Kilmer makes his first appearance as Chris Knight in Real Genius, he’s meeting future business acquaintances in an “I [Heart] Toxic Waste” t-shirt and a silver martian headband, part of an initiative both to troll self-serious eggheads and get them to loosen up a bit. (When asked, “Why is that toy on your head?” he responds, “Because if I wear it anywhere else, it chafes.”) Chris is a senior at Pacific Tech, a Caltech-like home for super-geniuses where his intellect has made him a star in the field of laser physics. This year, his new roommate is a 15-year-old brainiac Mitch Taylor (Gabe Jarret), who’s so promising that his renowned professor, Jerry Hathaway (William Atherton), has personally recruited him to work with Mitch on a special project.