Blog Will Hunting wishes you a good day, Valentine’s, or otherwise. Have a bunch of caramels or something.
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Just as arbitrary as drinking coffee
Sunday, February 14th, 2010
Food for Thought
Monday, January 25th, 2010
While browsing at my favorite local bookstore, I flipped through Barbara Lynch’s new cookbook Stir. Check out this choice bit of jacket copy:
Lynch’s cuisine is all the more remarkable because it is self-taught. In a story straight out of Good Will Hunting, she grew up in the turbulent projects of “Southie”, where petty crime was the only viable way to make a living…. Through a mix of hunger for knowledge, hard work, and raw smarts, she gradually created her own distinctive style of cooking….
The publisher has betrayed a fundamentally flawed—and, I think, commonly held—understanding of Good Will Hunting. True, Barbara Lynch and Will Hunting are both from Southie (notice the publisher’s timid quotation marks). But while Lynch’s rise to fame from unlikely roots as a result of her “hunger for knowledge, hard work, and raw smarts” is admirable, it is hardly the same as Will Hunting’s story.
Will Hunting does not work hard. Will’s remarkable gifts are unearned; as he puts it, he could “always just play.” At the beginning of the movie, Will is an under-employed genius with little more than (presumably) a high school diploma. At the end of the movie, he is an unemployed genius who has turned down multiple job offers and rejected academia to “see about a girl.”
Good Will Hunting is not the story of an underdog going up against the establishment and, against all odds, making good. That’s Finding Forrester, a much less satisfying film. Good Will Hunting is the story of a lonely orphan boy who learns to love and be loved. Will’s remarkable abilities are nothing more than a plot device.
But I don’t think that story will help sell cookbooks.
What’s so great about apples, anyway?
Sunday, January 17th, 2010
One of the most-referenced sequences in Good Will Hunting is, of course, the “apples scene.”
As the boys stumble from the bar, crossing Bow Street, Morgan sees the ponytail jerk sitting in Dunkin Donuts. Will goes over and initiates a little confrontational wordplay through the glass. (In the screenplay it’s not a Dunkin Donuts, but another bar. We also learn that the original “Harvard bar” was intended to be the now-nonexistent Bow & Arrow Pub.)
EXT. BOW AND ARROW — LATER
Our boys are walking out of the bar teasing one another about their bar-ball exploits. Across the street is another bar with a glass front. Morgan spots Clark sitting by the window with some friends.
MORGAN
There goes that fuckin’ Barney right
now, with his fuckin’ “skiin’ trip.”
We should’a kicked that dude’s ass.
WILL
Hold up.
Will crosses the street and approaches the plate glass window and stands across from Clark, separated only by the glass. He POUNDS THE GLASS to get Clark’s attention.
WILL
Hey!
Clark turns toward Will.
WILL
DO YOU LIKE APPLES?
Clark doesn’t get it.
WILL
DO YOU LIKE APPLES?!
CLARK
Yeah?
Will SLAMS SKYLAR’S PHONE NUMBER against the glass.
WILL
WELL I GOT HER NUMBER! HOW DO YA
LIKE THEM APPLES?!!
Will’s boys erupt into laughter. Angle on Clark, deflated.
EXT. STREET — NIGHT
The boys make their way home, piled into Chuckie’s car, laughing together.
I was recently informed that in the new word game Appletters, from the makers of Bananagrams, a player going out must yell “HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES.” And so I’ve been wondering, beyond its popularization in Good Will Hunting, where does this idiomatic expression of smugness come from?
The Internet (Wikipedia) dates the phrase back to World War I.
It is likely that the phrase originated during the First World War, when allied soldiers used mortar shells known as toffee apples, because of their resemblance to the confectionery. After using them to successfully take out an enemy, soldiers may have yelled in a sort of victory cry, “How do you like them apples?”
Beyond its use in a John Wayne film and Polanski’s Chinatown, there’s not much of a pop cultural record of the phrase, though it has apparently been listed in idiom dictionaries since the 1920s.
It also seems that every newspaper or magazine article that discusses apples or Apple computers is required to use the phrase as its headline. (Though it is best used by respected news sources who possess a photograph of a squirrel eating an apple.)
Interestingly, a peek into Google Trends indicates that the phrase “them apples” has received a large percentage of traffic from the fair city of Boston (data has only been kept since 2007). In fact, our Commonwealth’s proud capital googles “them apples” more than any other city in the world. (Dublin, Ireland, comes in second.)
Yo Ireland, so, how do you like… oh — nevermind.
What a difference the past participle makes.
Friday, January 8th, 2010
According to Wikipedia (famous last words, I know — the source of this information has not been cited but Williams Goldman corroborated the details in a WGA seminar in 2003), Matt and Ben’s original story for Good Will Hunting was that of an FBI thriller. If this is true, it likely stokes the flames of rumors that Matt and Ben weren’t the “real” screenwriters. (But really, isn’t this sort of questioning of authorship innate in all collaborative, commercial works?)
Affleck and Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner’s request, noted screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film’s climax ought to be Will’s decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar (Driver) to California. Goldman has denied widely spread rumors that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.[1]
Everyone loves a good Brokeback to the Future-esque mashup, so here’s one for Good Will Hunted — a peek into what Good Will Hunting perhaps could have been.
Who Wrote Good Will Hunting?
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Everyone knows who wrote Good Will Hunting.
In fact, it’s a big part of the appeal of the movie and the mystique surrounding it: the story of two relative-unknowns who, through hard work and talent, would make it big and go on to achieve lasting fame and cinematic glory—the story of two guys sitting on a winning lottery ticket.
But who really wrote Good Will Hunting?
According to the credits, of course, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote the screenplay for Good Will Hunting. They would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1997.
So who wrote what? Popular belief holds that Damon did the lion’s share of the work, with Affleck making only token contributions and then taking credit from his pal in the end—the screenplay was, after all, supposedly based on one of Damon’s collegiate short stories. (This Family Guy clip parodies the idea of Affleck’s meager contribution.)
And then there are those who dismiss the idea that it written by either young man, suggesting instead that their names were simply shrewdly tacked on to the script for marketing purposes by publicity-savvy producers. It was even the subject of an off-Broadway play called Matt & Ben, in which the two young protagonists mysteriously stumble across the unmarked script and go on to claim it as their own. William Goldman and Kevin Smith have both been put forward as the “real” screenwriters at various points.
Admittedly, if it was a publicity stunt, it wasn’t a bad idea. It makes a good story, after all: two hardworking, handsome young men working their way to fame and glory and positing themselves on the brink of superstardom through a story that stemmed from their working-class beginnings.
For those who think it’s unlikely that two pretty-boy amateurs could have written such a polished and successful script on their first try, perhaps their biggest argument is the mysterious absence of further collaborations from this seemingly very promising start.
To be fair, both Damon and Affleck have amassed additional writing credits under their belts since Good Will Hunting—Ben Affleck for two screenplays he adapted from novels, Gone, Baby, Gone in 2007 and The Town, currently in production. And Matt Damon, interestingly, would go on to collaborate with another Affleck—this time Ben’s brother, Casey Affleck, in the 2002 drama Gerry.
But in spite of these further accomplishments, there was a decided lack of another Good Will Hunting—certainly never another screenplay that was as beloved and universally celebrated, and never anything that brought them the acclaim (or the Oscars) that the Good Will Hunting screenplay garnered them.
So why is that? Perhaps it was the collaboration between them that created the spark, something that they couldn’t recreate on their own or with other collaborators. Or perhaps Good Will Hunting simply exhausted their creative resources. Perhaps it was the product of a time and a place that couldn’t be recreated: two optimistic and ambitious young men who had set out to accomplish their dreams and see the prize within their grasp, who create a story extracted from their collective backgrounds and experiences, and present it to a world that eagerly receives it. Maybe once they’d already achieved everything they could have possibly hoped for, there was no need for another Good Will Hunting. Why would you need to? And how could anything else live up to it?
Perhaps, sometimes, we simply only have one Good Will Hunting in us.
Around The Town
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010This past fall found the streets of Cambridge lined by camera rigging and film crews as it once again became the setting for several upcoming feature films.
Scenes from the movie The Social Network, the story of the creation of Facebook in a college dorm room, were filmed in various locations throughout Cambridge—although apparently the Harvard University campus won’t have a starring role in this film, as Johns Hopkins has been cast instead. And alas, Justin Timberlake did not grace the streets of our fair city: locals were disappointed to learn that his face would be inserted post-production via CGI in scenes recently filmed on the Charles River.
In other movie news, Ben Affleck recently returned to his native turf to star and direct in The Town, a thriller based on the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan and adapted for the screen by Affleck himself (perhaps an argument against those who seek to discount his contributions to the Good Will Hunting screenplay?)
Ben Affleck and John Hamm on the set of The Town in Harvard Square.
Walking to work through the production crews, camera equipment and massive coils of cables during a recent filming brought to my mind a favorite scene in Good Will Hunting and a fixture that will be familiar to anyone who regularly passes through Harvard Square.
Spare Change News is a local alternative newspaper here in Cambridge that is produced and sold by homeless and formerly homeless volunteers. Locals will be familiar with the vendors who take up posts on the city streets to sell the paper to passersby.
One such post is located directly in front of the large Au Bon Pain situated in the middle of the Square. This just happens to be the location of a key scene from the movie in which we learn that, although he can’t paint, play music, or hit a homerun out of Fenway, when it came to math, Will could always “just play.”
Sure enough, in the background of this scene, you can see Spare Change News Guy.
(True Cantabrigians may also notice the incongruity between the coffee cups from Peet’s coffee, and the location, Au Bon Pain.)
It’s a great tribute to the city of Cambridge that so much of it is still recognizable and intact. It’s one of the things I love most about this movie.
I was reminded of this lately as I passed crews from The Town filming in almost the same location. Spare Change News Guy was nearby, as always. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he will be making what promises to be (as far as I know, anyway) his second major film role. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Update: I was mortified to learn that there was a mistake in my inaugural Blog Will Hunting post!
Peet’s Coffee was served at Au Bon Pain locations between 1995-1998, so there were actually no incongruities in that scene. Obviously, I’m not a true Cantabrigian (full disclosure: I’m actually from Rhode Island.)
I stand corrected.
Katherine once gave a high school film studies class presentation on GWH and showed a scene from the movie on a VHS cassette tape from the library. However, instead of the scene in the NSA office, she inadvertently showed the end of the masturbation scene.
This is Katherine’s inaugural Blog Will Hunting contribution.
I’m gonna pull a Good Will Hunting.
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009You should probably watch this episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — “The Gang Reignites the Rivalry” — particularly for its choice Good Will Hunting references. Charlie “pulls a Good Will Hunting” on some guys at a frat party they are crashing. At this frat party they have had their bodies painted by hot girls.
Listen to part of what you can look forward to.
Name something you’d like to be. What do you really wanna do?
Saturday, December 26th, 2009I wanna be a shepherd. I wanna move up to Nashua, get a nice little spread, get some sheep and tend to them. — Will Hunting, Good Will Hunting
… I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. — Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye
While Will’s response to Sean’s “what do you wanna do?” question is laced with bullshit, I always thought there was real sentiment in the ache for simplicity his statement suggests. “I wanna be a shepherd.” It always reminded me of Holden Caulfield.
Years ago, on an emotionally complicated evening, I found myself full of longing for the sort fantasy space Will and Holden speak of.
I wrote to a friend, in an email:
… [A]fter going on a nice long walk down to the Store 24 in JP at 3 in the morning to get a coke, in the strangely warm, windy, rainy evening… there I was, sitting on my balcony at 4am…. It was a very Catcher in the Rye feeling evening, with the walking, wandering, feeling of isolation, and as I looked down at the street the wind was blowing everyone’s discarded Christmas trees (as it was trash day the next morning) around, some rolling into the street, and I thought of how nice it would be to just save the Christmas trees and keep rolling them back into the sidewalk, staying up all night and directing traffic around the trees, just like the Catcher in the Rye would catch those [kids].
I’ll never forget the response I received:
If I were home, I would give you my biggest hugs, and we would probably fall off your balcony and then someone like Holden would have to catch us….
