Although Scott said there was a lull in the movie scene on campus during his time as a student, he still found time to watch films when he was not studying, making it to the movies three or four times every week. Scott also remembered partaking in some of Harvard’s movie traditions, like watching “Casablanca” at the Brattle Theatre or watching “Love Story” during Opening Days as a freshman. “I got a pretty good movie education from the Brattle Theatre, different house film societies, and the Orson Welles Theatre,” he said.

Still, Scott’s education did not directly translate to a clear future career path. Henning cited Scott’s further ties to academia, noting that both of his parents are professors. “It was almost in his genes to do that,” she said.

After graduating, Scott spent a few years in a graduate program in literature at Johns Hopkins University before deciding to write book reviews for The Nation.

From there, he went on to the New York Review of Books and eventually worked as a book critic for Newsday and as a contributor to Slate magazine. When the New York Times read a piece he wrote on Martin Scorsese in 1999, they had discovered their next chief film critic.

“Writing careers are often a series of accidents or lucky breaks or decisions that someone else has made,” Scott said. “That I write about movies for a living happened by accident.”

Despite this, Katz said that even as a college student, Scott exhibited some characteristics of his future role as a critic.

“He’s a natural-born critic in the true sense of the word: He is an appreciator of things and likes to digest them and think about them and think about what it means in the world,” Katz said. “Although I never identified him with film in any way, I can see why he became a critic.”

The intellectual environment that Harvard and his friends provided helped Scott build the skills he would later need for a career in criticism.

“In a general way, what I learned as an undergraduate was kind of how to be serious and how to take pleasure in being serious,” said Scott. “More than any particular subject I learned in a class, it was that atmosphere of intellectual intensity and curiosity that helped me.”

This passion for literature and film still lives in the Scott family today. Scott is currently working on a few book projects of his own, and Henning has been involved in teaching and tutoring.

Their children, Ezra, 16, and Carmen, 14, have already been bitten by the performing and film-making bugs, according to Scott’s mother. Carmen has played lead roles in school theater productions, like Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet,” while Ezra, on the other hand, has taken a behind-the-scenes approach, aspiring to be a filmmaker.

Twenty-five years later and a new career path aside, his friends conclude that the intellectually driven Scott has not changed all too much.

“Tony to me is still the Tony he was when we hung out in college...except now he sees a lot more movies,” Katz said.

—Staff writer Cynthia W. Shih can be reached at cshih@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @CShih7.