‘The Line’ tackles fraternity culture and hazing. The film has surprising ties to USC and Clemson.

Though it’s set at a fictional university, the movie has multiple connections to South Carolina.

Purdo attended USC. Mitchell is from Aiken. Three actors were cast straight out of USC’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. The team even spent a weekend immersing themselves in the fraternity world at USC.

But it’s not a story about South Carolina.

It’s a story, they said, that can happen anywhere.

“Hazing, whether it’s physical or mental or verbal,” Purdo said, “is something that everyone has dealt with in one way or another.”

How time at a USC frat inspired ‘The Line’

Shortly after Berger and Purdo moved in together, they sat down with Alex Russek for an eight-hour interview. Purdo rehashed his whole life story on a camcorder.

In 2012, Russek and Berger wrote a draft, editing it back and forth for years to come.

Berger, a Los Angeles native, had watched “Animal House” and “Old School.” But he didn’t feel like those happy-go-lucky partying films represented what he heard from Purdo, or what he saw as a student at Wesleyan University.

There, he lived next to a fraternity, where they would play “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eiffel 65 on repeat during pledge week.

Purdo said he didn’t want to create a film that exonerated frats, but he didn’t want one that bashed them either.

His aim was to acknowledge the complexities of fraternity life, the loneliness it can cure in teenagers away from home for the first time, the brotherhood it created and the dangerous hazing it permitted. 

“I wanted to show a movie that really was in the gray,” Purdo said, “where there’s bad things, there’s good things and it really was up to the audience to make their mind.”

As they pitched the film and raised funds, real-life events confirmed Berger was on the right path.

Most notably, in 2014, Clemson University student and Sigma Phi Epsilon member Tucker Hipps died in Lake Hartwell after a pledge run. A decade later, his death is still clouded in mystery.