: Re: Should I create a fictional college if students go missing in my script? I’m writing a fictional drama/crime/mystery sceenplay. In my script, college kids go missing from a REAL University.

@Sent2472441

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If you use a real college, and you say anything that could be construed as bad about them, they might sue you for libel. Whether they would bother would depend on exactly what you said, how you said it, and whether they would win would depend on many more factors. But the possibility is there.

What is the advantage of using a real college? I suppose it could add a bit of realism to the story. But, as Thomas points out, if you're relying on any actual facts about the college, i.e. if you're thinking that you don't need to provide backstory about the college because you can rely on the real backstory of the real college, I'd just say, No. I mean, if you're thinking, "I don't have to tell the audience that this college has or does X because everyone knows that Foobar University does X", I don't think you can rely on that at all. Whatever college you pick, the vast majority of your audience did not attend, have never visited, and in general know little or nothing about. If it's one of the biggest and most prestigious colleges -- e.g. Harvard or Yale in the U.S. -- most of your audience will have heard of it and know that it's big and prestigious. And that's about it. Most of the audience probably won't even know where it is located or what majors they offer, never mind things like where the chemistry lab is located or what time lunch is served in the dining hall.

But if you do use a real college, than for the people who DO know something about the place, you have to get all the little details right. If you say that a character fell out the window of the science building and plummeted to his death, anyone who knows that in real life the science building is only one story tall is going to balk. If you need a scene where a character is walking past a newspaper kiosk and sees a headline, you're going to have to worry about just where on campus there are newspaper kiosks -- if any. Etc.

Just for example: I once watched a documentary about a murder that took place in Nevada. Of course there wasn't a camera crew filming most of the events as they happened, so they had actors re-create them. One scene took place in the parking lot of the high school. In the TV program, the parking lot was surrounded by a thick forest. Except my ex-wife used to teach at that school so I've been there. In real life the town is in the desert and there about ten trees in the entire town. The scene looked totally ridiculous and unbelievable to me. (I wondered why, if they were going to re-enact it, couldn't they have done it in the real town, rather than, apparently, someplace hundreds of miles away with a totally different climate?)

If you make a fictional college, than any details you need to make the story work you can just make up. (Well, as long as they're at least plausible.) If you need the frat house to be on top of a hill, you just say that's where it is. If you need a professor who won a Nobel physics prize twenty years ago, you just invent one. Etc.

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