I’ve often wondered where fictional English professors get their awful clothes. Donald Sutherland gives me the name of his tailor above.

I’m a little obsessed with English professors in movies. I don’t care how bad a movie is, if there’s an English professor in it, I watch it. Even if that movie is Some Kind of Beautiful, which takes bad film-making to the point where it’s almost so bad it’s good, but not quite. It’s just so bad it’s bad.

Most films with English professors are lousy. I watch them because I have this sick fascination with the cliche professor in movies. He’s almost always a white man, slovenly, flighty, and sleeping with a student. At the end of every movie, I daydream about writing a book about these slanderous portrayals and calling it Bumbling Sexual Predators.

I was talking about this with a buddy of mine, Mike Plante, a few months ago. Mike published the long-running film magazine Cinemad. He still does a Cinemad podcast. A couple of weeks ago, Mike interviewed me about being an English professor and films about professors for his podcast. You can listen to it here.

While you’re at it, spend a little time on the Cinemad site. There’s a lot of good stuff there.

And, for what it’s worth, my award for the best (and most realistic) English professor in a film goes to Regina Hall’s character in People Places Things.