Evanston has been gaining some national fame the past couple weeks courtesy of Hollywood.

Box office hit “Cheaper by the Dozen” came out on Christmas Day and is set for the most part in Evanston.

In the movie, Steve Martin’s character, Tom Baker, lands his dream job as head football coach at his alma mater, the fictional Illinois Polytechnic University in Evanston. Tom and his wife Kate, played by Bonnie Hunt, uproot their family of twelve children from rural Midland, Ill., to Evanston, where the children have a hard time adjusting to school and life.

Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that produced the movie, approached Northwestern during fall 2002 to see if they could use NU as the school where Tom Baker coaches.

However, NU did not authorize permission to the studio to use the school name, says Vice President of University Relations Alan Cubbage.

“We just felt that not all of the references to the university were as we might have liked. There were a couple parts of the script we were concerned about,” says Cubbage, who declined to specify which parts.

NU or not, the Bakers decide to move into a spacious mansion in Evanston. According to a New York Times review, “the film portrays (Evanston) as a hypercompetitive yuppie enclave out of sync with the Bakers’ homier approach to life.”

“That sounds more like Lincoln Park,” says Katie Jones, a real estate agent who has lived in Evanston for fifteen years. “Evanston is more Birkenstock — very earthy, down to earth. It’s a very highly educated community.”

Though she has yet to see the movie, Jones is not concerned that it will have a dramatic negative impact on prospective Evanston house buyers. She says people will do their own investigations about Evanston and will not rely solely on the movie’s portrayal.

“I think people realize it’s a movie and it’s the media putting it out,” she says.

Former Evanston resident Nathan Wallace, however, agrees with the New York Times’ assessment of Evanston as a yuppie culture.

“The gentrification everywhere is obvious,” said Wallace, who grew up and attended high school in Evanston but now lives in Alaska.

“There are condos everywhere. I think it’s disgusting. It’s financial segregation. Evanston now is really tunnel-visioning itself to serve a specific part of the community.”

Julie Kundert disagrees. She says Evanston is a diverse place both with yuppies and other types of people.

Having raised three grown sons here, she says Evanston is “a destination for many people who want to avoid parking problems in Chicago and raise a family.”

“I don’t know too many families with twelve children in Evanston,” Kundert says, though “there are some people who could afford twelve kids.”

Marika Lindholm, a senior sociology lecturer at NU, also says Evanston is a good place to raise children. She recently saw the movie and says she feels it did not accurately portray the schoolchildren, who are shown in the film as bullying the Baker children.

Lindholm, who has two children of her own, says, “I know the kids [here]. They’re diverse and talented. [The movie] didn’t depict kids here very well.”

She also says that the yuppie culture was inaccurate. While there are yuppies in Evanston, Lindholm says, there are also yuppies who have social concerns and those who vote.

“It seemed more like New Trier,” she says. “They depicted this town as if it were Los Angeles or Beverly Hills.”

Medill freshman Yuxing Zheng is a writer for PLAY. She can be reached at [email protected].