#the Wendell Baker Story

[mr-heebie-jeebies]

[hughesybear]

“Elliotte talks about the struggling Elias Pettersson.” (21/10/2024)

transcript of 32 Thoughts segment below cut

Elliotte: I have a theory on Pettersson. I think number one, he’s wired a little differently than guys like Miller and Hughes, which is okay. Not everybody can be the same, so I think that sometimes the way he reacts to tough or challenging moments, or when things aren’t going that well, it’s not as emotional as them. We’re going to be interviewing Mats Sundin this week, and I always thought that was a thing that hurt Sundin a little bit in Toronto - it took people a lot of time to understand that just because you’re more of a stoic, as opposed to emotional, person, it doesn’t mean you don’t care or that you don’t want to win just as badly as anyone else. But I think people who are like that in sports sometimes get penalized for it, Kyle. And I think a little bit that happens with him.

You know, you’ve got to produce (…) but you know what the other thing is, and I’ve really thought about this and I think it’s true more and more, I think Pettersson is one of those guys that reads everything or he’s aware of everything that’s said about him. And honestly Kyle, I think that’s one thing that he’s going to move past. Because I think in moments like this, when you’re struggling (…) I always say about markets like Vancouver, the rewards are high but the risks are high.

Jamie Baker, the former NHLer, told me a great story of when he got treaded to the Toronto Maple Leafs, Wendell Clark pulled him aside and said “Understand this: you’re never as good as they say you are, and you’re never as bad as they say you are. You’ve got to ride a flat line as much as you can. You can’t go up and down, it can’t be peaks and valleys, you’ve got to ride the flat line.” And I suspect, this is my opinion, because I think Pettersson is well aware of everything that is said about him, I think he rides the peaks and valleys, and I think that is the thing that he has to get out of his system.

(…) I think Hughes is excellent at riding the line. I think he’s captain for a reason, because he knows what matters and what doesn’t. And I think the key thing for Vancouver is that I think they have players who weren’t like that before, but have gotten there. Like I think JT Miller, over the last year or so, has gotten a lot better at riding the line. Now I think it helps because they’re successful, I think when they’re losing it’s extremely hard for him, but I think he’s gotten better at riding the line. I think Brock Boeser is a guy who’s gotten a lot better at riding the line, keeping it calm. I think you can develop it, I think you can learn it.

But I think one of the things, and this is my theory on Pettersson too, is that when he’s struggling and it’s not going well, I think it really - it’s something he’s really aware of, what’s being said about him, and he has to stop that. And that’s my constructive criticism for Pettersson (…) You have to learn to weed it out. There’s a difference between constructive criticism, which we all need, and just pure savagery. So I think that’s one thing Pettersson’s going to have to get better at, is blocking that out, and I think it’ll really help him.

Kyle: I think back to a couple years ago, I remember asking a question about like “when you’re going through tough stretches, who do you lean on to help get you through?” And he said “you know, I’m a little bit of a lone wolf.” And that really stuck with me. This is a guy who’s - I mean, he’s only gonna be 26 next month, just over 400 career games in the NHL, so this is a guy who’s still very much figuring out life as a person.

I mean, I grew up [in Vancouver] when the Sedins went through “they’re too small, they’re too soft, they can’t survive in the NHL,” to being one of the great dynamic duos in the league for an extended period of time. And seeing how that market can be with players who really learn to thrive amidst the chaos that market can provide. So I hope he does find joy in where he wants to get to, because it can be a really great ride out there when you can find that balance.

Elliotte: If I was good enough to play, and we all know I’m not, but if I was good enough to play I would be all over a Canadian market (…) I really do love it. And you can see this, like a guy like Miller, who’s signed long-term, he sees that. He’s been through the wringer, and he’s grinded his way through, and now you see the videos that his family is putting out like when he scored the other day, last year in the playoffs when Natalie Miller put on Instagram the video of their daughter hearing them chant his name, like that’s what I mean about the rewards are high.

If you succeed in hockey in a Canadian market, your ticket is booked for ever. Forever and ever, amen.

[hooked-on-elvis]

"HOT DOG"

"THE DAY ELVIS BLEW HIS TOP!"

Elvis' photo shoot for "Loving You" (Paramount 1957)

Elvis Presley: Loving You album, released in June 1957

Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for Elvis' second movie score, "Hot Dog" was recorded at the Paramount Scoring Stage on mid-January 1957. According to Ernst Jorgensen in "Elvis Presley: A Life In Music", the song "lasted all of a minute and twelve seconds but took seventeen takes to record".

Recording it must have been tiring, but the hard work with this track wasn't over at the end of the recording session. It would follow to the filming of the movie (from January 21 to March 8, 1957).

(1) Elvis' during filming of "Loving You" (Early 1957). (2) Page from article for the Silver Screen magazine (1957)

HERE'S A LITTLE BIT OF HOW IT WAS FILMING THE COUNTRY FAIR SEQUENCE FOR "LOVING YOU" — THE "HOT DOG" PERFORMANCE — ACCORDING TO A 1957 MAGAZINE ARTICLE:

THE DAY ELVIS BLEW HIS TOP! When he's restrained by strict demand of movie-making, Elvis has got to explode somewhere, somehow - and explode he did! By Viola Swisher "Hot Dog!" That's how the lyrics go. Singing them, Elvis Presley spun into a forward lunge, one arm out-thrust, eyes afire. Hypnotized... hypnotizing. Hot dog? What did the words matter? Elvis exploded them as if some overwhelming earth force had hit him right in the heart. He hunched over to hug the sensation to himself. He swayed with the eternal rhythm of nature. Elvis was blazing through the action of his pre-recorded song "Hot Dog," featured in a country fair sequence of "Loving You," his new Hal Wallis picture for Paramount. Director [and co-writer] Hal Kanter called for a full rehearsal using about fifty extras bouncing and juggling to Presley's music at the fair. "All right" shouted an assistant. "Places, everybody." "Let's try it," Kanter nodded to the star. "Well, here's where I get censored," quietly commented Elvis in his understated, off-screen manner. But only a few alert ears caught the remark. He gave an experimental leg-quiver and looked at the director for an okay. Kanter shook his head in a pantomimed "no". What followed was a running series of dilutions, deletions and compromises for Elvis. Charles O'Curran, a top-rated dance director staging the routine, tried to make up some "typical Elvis Presley" action for the number. Only he kept getting nowhere. The more he struggled to gear the Presley-style to Hollywood's cameras, the more static and inhibited Elvis became. Things grew just a litle bit tense. Head lowered, the singer rolled his velvety eyes upward to level off at Charlie. Not a word exchanges. None was needed. Elvis remained quiet and courteous. No throwing his weight around. No acting big-big. Only his eyes making the polite plea: "Don't tell me how to do my stuff." Presley and O'Curran tried over and over again to get together on the routine. Elvis was aware of what he wanted, yet because it wasn't natural for him he couldn't get with it.

Excerpt from article on the Silver Screen magazine (1957 issue) , pg. 45.

More was written in this article about the filming of "Loving You", possibly something more about how the filming of the scene went on until the final result but I, unfortunately, haven't found the following pages online. I guess the most important story was told by this excerpt anyways. They got the scene. We know they did. I wonder tho how Charles O'Curran had imagined the number. What we see Elvis doing onscreen while singing "Hot Dog" is more Elvis acting like himself or something like Charles wanted him to look like?

Pictures of the outfit Elvis wore to perform "Hot Dog" and, below, the King performing the song in scene featured in his second movie, "Loving You" (1957).

Scene from movie "Loving You" (Paramount Pictures 1957), starring Elvis Presley, Lizabeth Scott and Wendell Corey. Directed by Hal Kanter. Screenplay by Herbert Baker and Hal Kanter. Story by Mary Agnes Thompson. Produced by Hal B. Wallis.

"HOT DOG" — LYRICS

Hot dog, you say you're really coming back Hot dog, I'm waiting at the railway track Hot dog, you say you're coming home for good Hot dog, I'm going to keep knocking on wood And baby, I can hardly wait I'm gonna meet you at the gate, hot dog I fell in love with you and then you went away But now you're coming home to stay Hot dog, soon everything will be all right Hot dog, we're gonna have a ball tonight I've got a pocketful of dimes It's gonna be just like old times, hot dog You went away and every day was misery But now you're coming back to me Hot dog, my heart is gonna go insane Hot dog, when you come walking off the train Oh how lonely I have been But when that Santa Fe pulls in Hot dog, baby, baby, hot dog

Lyrics by Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FURTHER INFO - WHAT DOES 'HOT DOG' MEAN?

I'm not American, and that's why I don't get slangs in English right away (and that's also why you'll find typos in my writing, sorry 'bout that). So, until this very moment, I never understood why the song was entitled "Hot Dog". I found it so silly... I thought about the food, not gonna lie, but I just googled the word and, in slang, it seems 'hot dog' can mean someone who's dangerous, a daredevil or something. So, the poetic persona in the song is calling out the lady for leaving him for a while. I guess that's it. Probably many already got it from the start (and if I got it wrong, please, correct me) but this note is here just in case someone needs an explanation. Oh, I also found an article about the meanings of "hot dog" as a slang, over the years. It's really interesting. Like I say, Elvis is always directly or indirectly teaching me something. Read more about the meanings for 'hot dog' here: today.com/food/hot-dog-meanings.

--

UPDATE - May 22, 2024: @thetaoofzoe and @lookingforrainbows helped us with this one. THANK YOU SO MUCH, BABIES. ♥ According to dear @thetaoofzoe, "I'm under the impression that 'hot dog' here means he's expressing delight or excitement about the girl coming back. Like a 'yay! I'm so excited'" and then I read @lookingforrainbows with: "hot dog in this case might mean ‘I’m so excited’. It was a saying in the 50s to mean something like ‘wow! that’s awesome’" -- There you go, friends! Solved!

[lightofraye]

All About Glen

I'm in the mood for something... easy.

Or, rather, I thought this would be easy. Then I went deep diving and have yet to surface. This post will likely edited a few more times in the next few days (maybe? I'll let you know either way), so keep an eye out!

So... who is Glen Powell? Besides a possible new rising star in Hollywood. (Certainly his upcoming projects say he's in high demand!)

Come with me, and I shall tell you!

Also, I had so much fun diving into his background! Learned more about this guy than I realized!

(And I also turned my daughter into a Glen Powell fan! I'll explain why/how in a bit!)

Raised in Austin, Texas, born on October 21, 1988, to Glen Powell Sr and Cyndy Powell, he's the middle child of three. And the only boy. He has an older sister named Lauren and a younger sister, Leslie. Named after his father, the Original Glen (no, seriously, that's his Instagram!), Glen was a child actor. He started performing with the Austin Musical Theater program when he was in the fifth grade, learning to tap dance--according to Leslie, there is video evidence--and appearing in The Music Man and 42nd Street.

Oh, he explored all sorts of extracurriculars' growing up. Football, lacrosse, all sorts. However, his passion and fascination were movies.

The actor recalled that he would be “picking dandelions” in the outfield while playing baseball as a kid, and his parents, Cyndy and Glen Sr., were ready to let him try something else.

“I played violin for a bit, and all of a sudden, I was like, ‘No, not into this anymore.’ They let me give it up,” he continued, noting they were supportive until Powell found something he “really loved.” That’s where his acting career comes in.

At the precious age of 5, his father took him to see Steven Spielberg's megahit, Jurassic Park, in the summer of 1993. Glen ended up watching the movie multiple times in theaters, and again on home video, trying to figure out the secrets of the film's special effects.

In an interview with Austin Monthly, Glen said he began making his own science fiction films growing up. He'd use a home video camera, computer, recruited his friends to be actors, and searched for props in his family's basement. Seeing this, his parents encouraged him to enroll in acting classes.

His second grade project was on Steven Spielberg's use of practical effects in Jurassic Park. In 2003, when he was 14, he got his first movie role as "long-fingered boy" in Spy Kids 3: Game Over. His location in Austin helped him land the role. Director Robert Rodriguez discovered Powell, then 14, while looking for "local hires" to accompany the primarily Los Angeles-based cast.

"You're just trying to find someone locally that won't get nervous, that'll give a performance that kind of measures up to the other actors. He walks in with a stature and confidence and just nails it," Rodriguez told IndieWire. "So now, it's no surprise to see [he made it as an actor], but he already had that quality at 14 and clarity of vision that that's what he was supposed to be."

Two years later, he played a paperboy in The Wendell Baker Story, a part that required him to get hit by a car, which he practiced with his mother in a church parking lot.

In 2006, everything changed. His mother, Cyndy, drove him five hours to Shreveport, La., to audition for Denzel Washington, who was directing and starring in The Great Debaters. Powell got the part--and a powerful agent: Ed Limato, who represented Washington.

Powell also starred in Fast Food Nation (2006), and The Hottest State (2006) over the next few years.

Still in high school at Westwood, Powell even considered deprioritizing his acting career until receiving a pep talk from Denzel Washington during the filming of The Great Debaters. In the movie, Powell played Harvard University student Preston Whittington and impressed the two-time Oscar winner. "Denzel Washington really pushed me out of the nest a bit and said, 'You should double-down on yourself. You should give [acting] a shot'," Powell said.

A year later, Limato called Powell in his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Ed said, 'If you're going to spin the wheel on an acting career, now is the time to do it'," Powell said.

Taking a chance, Powell dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles in 2008. “Ed always told me, over and over, that the definition of a movie star is somebody who guys want to grab a beer with — fun, not threatening — and who women want to date and bring home to meet their parents,” Powell said.

Limato had a history of helping turn actors into big stars--among his clients? Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, and Kevin Costner. Limato also gave Powell a crucial career tip: Don’t take on a role in a big franchise too soon, however tempting the paycheck; stars are built in smaller movies of varied genres.

Unfortunately for Powell, Limato died two years later, leaving him without an advocate.

It was a rough and learning time for Glen. He supported himself through coaching community sports and small acting jobs (a Dockers commercial, an episode of The Lying Game, a cable series).

Not long after Powell moved to Los Angeles, Limato introduced him to Lynda Obst, a fellow Texan and a producer of hits like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Contact, and Sleepless in Seattle. She hired Powell as an intern, a job that involved reading scripts and giving feedback.

It helped him learn how Hollywood ran.

Obst recalled, "He was adorable--charm off the charts. But that is not what impressed me, and it's not why he's succeeding." She went on: "Actors can turn on charm, but they can't turn on intelligence. Glen is smart and learned about developing scripts and the structure in movies. It made him independent and wily."

He eventually got dropped by the William Morris Endeavor talent agency. He began to question whether superstardom was even achievable anymore. He took to writing scripts and sold several to help keep himself afloat during his shaky start.

Glen took Washington's advice and gradually began appearing in more prominent titles, including the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, in 2012 as an unnamed Gotham Stock Exchange Trader. He also appeared in the ensemble movie, The Expendables 3, in 2014, appearing alongside action stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2016, he played astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures. Glen was cited as saying that upon viewing a rough cut of the film with unfinished special effects, he was critical of his performance. "I just remember being like 'I ruined this beautiful movie, the legacy of these amazing women'," he explained in an interview with Variety.

Fortunately, critics and the audience disagreed--the movie made more than $230 million at the box office and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.

He took a detour into comedy for his next roles, including the teen movie Everybody Wants Some!! (2016), and the Netflix rom-com Set It Up (2018).

In between all that, he went onto a recurring role on Scream Queens (Ryan Murphy's show on Fox), and appear in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society. He's even done voice roles, such as the Netflix cartoon, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, and an episode of Rick and Morty.

How he got the huge leap to everyone's attention was something he nearly turned down. He lost out on blockbuster roles including Captain America, Han Solo in Solo, in addition to pieces in films ranging from Friday Night LIghts to Cowboys & Aliens and The Longest Ride.

His break was something he nearly missed out on.

When Miles Teller beat him out of the part of Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick, and Tom Cruise and director Joe Kosinski offered him the role of Hangman instead.

The problem?

"If I were editing this movie, I would cut him out immediately," Powell said to British GQ. The original version of the character was a lousy pilot who made it to Top Gun through nepotism, a storyline Powell thought did the film a disservice.

Luck was with him. Cruise and Kosinski decided to hear him out and ended up convinced, rewriting the character based on Powell's notes.

“What we were talking about is, how can Hangman service the story and give the flavour of the original Top Gun that you need?” Powell said.

“I said my piece to Tom about what I do and what I do well, and he listened. Tom’s a listener. He listens to the crew members, he listens to his collaborators, and he hears people.”

And good thing he did — Top Gun: Maverick went on to become a box office phenomenon, and Powell’s career got the kickstart he had waited so long for.

2022 was his year. He appeared in the war drama Devotion, the Netflix animated comedy Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, and Top Gun: Maverick. The latter, the sequel to the 1986 vehicle--became the biggest movie of the year, grossing nearly $1.5 billion at the global box office.

Powell underwent extensive training for the film, including underwater escape simulations and flights in F-18 aircraft to prepare for the G-forces he would experience on camera. Cruise even paid for the actor to complete flight school as a Christmas present, allowing Powell to earn his pilot's license.

We all know what happened after this. His role with Sydney Sweeney on Anyone But You brought him even more attention. His future projects will keep him busy for at least a couple of years. (He did tease he has a start date for Top Gun 3, but has refused to say more than that.)

He's been romantically linked to Nina Dobrev in 2017, Australian TV host Renee Bargh from 2018 to 2019. He began dating model Gigi Paris, starting in 2020. We know in April of 2023, they broke up for good.

Glen Powell Sr, his father, was an executive coach. His mother? A stay at home mom. Leslie is working on her career as a singer, and was fortunate enough to have had a song be used for the Olympics!

Both parents have trolled the hell out of Glen during the premiere of Hit Man. In a way, his family is what keeps Glen grounded.

Amusingly, Us Weekly described his parents as the first ever nepo parents.

“The greatest gift that my parents gave me is never making me sit in things I didn’t want to sit in and letting me chase the passions I wanted to chase, no matter what,” Powell, 35, told Us Weekly exclusively while promoting his new movie Twisters. “I am really grateful for my parents for not trying to deter me from a job that has such a low success rate.”

As his fame continued to rise, his parents have made various cameos in his movies over the years.

His Instagram is full of photos of behind the scenes, with family, and of course, Brisket.

There was a rumor that Glen was opening a restaurant in Austin. This has been researched and debunked. I did go into detail about his future projects here.

--

So how did I convert my daughter into a fan?

Because I was talking to her about the gossip regarding him and Sydney Sweeney. I showed her the photos, then I showed her how he was with his other female costars.

With Adria Arjona from Hit Man.

With Daisy Edgar-Jones from Twisters.

And her first thought: "He makes them comfortable. He's safe. That's why they're so relaxed."

In that instant, she became a fan. That's all it took.

So yeah. Got fans here.

We're looking forward to more about this green-eyed Texan!

--

BONUS: Glen also is rather hilarious on Twitter! Check this out!

Hilariously, he decided to run with it!

We love a star who can make a joke like this!

Sources (with blatant lifts when possible): New York Times (using web archive due to paywall) Entertainment Weekly Us Weekly Biography Los Angeles Time Variety *I freely admit/acknowledge I relied on existing writing to put all this together. I added, rearranged, edited, as necessary. I am grateful to the access of this information that allowed me to compile this biography!

[pxmun]

Cleo slowly came to her senses; she remembered being at Tidmouth sheds with everyone and hearing Percy arrive then, nothing.

As her vision began to clear, Cleo could see her brothers standing over her.

"I think she's coming too, everyone give her some room." Came the voice of Sir Topham Hatt.

"Darius, what happened"? Cleo asked.

"You got a bit over excited and passed out." Darius said.

"A bit? Bro she was a rocket ship fueled with sugar that failed to launch." Romeo retorted.

"Not now Romes." Darius warned.

"Over excited? About what"? Cleo asked confused.

"I'm afraid it was my fault my dear." Came a voice.

Wendell cautiously puffed up towards the three siblings.

"Wendell." Cleo said shocked.

"Hello young Cleo, sorry to have caused you to pass out. Are you alright"? Wendell asked.

"Yes, yes I'm fine but, how are you alive and where have you been"? Cleo asked surprised.

Wendell smiled.

"It's a long story my dear, why don't I tell you all about it during teatime? Guessing on how much time has passed this is Tidmouth if I'm correct"? Wendell asked.

"Yes, this is Tidmouth sheds, it's been here for a very long time." Percy piped in.

The silly engine laughed.

"My goodness, Tidmouth sheds is considered old now?! I remember when Ethan drew up the first draft for this place, poor man didn't know how many engines it should house or how spacious the berths should be." Wendell remembered.

He looked over to Gordon, Flying Scotsman, and Spencer.

"But I can see he made the right choice. By the Arc it's amazing how large the new generation of engines have become"! Wendell said astonished.

Gordon grinned with pride.

"Biggest and best, and we pull the express"! Gordon boasted.

"Except when you fall into a ditch." Snickered James.

"And lose your dome." Continued Henry.

"Or need my help getting up your hill." Added Edward.

Gordon blushed out of embarrassment and being crossed; he wasn't expecting Edward to join in on the teasing.

Wendell held back a chuckle.

"No hard feelings my friend, we all get into our mishaps. Why do you think they call me the silly engine"? Wendell grinned.

By teatime, Patty had arrived with some baked goods and tea for the engine crews and her friends. Patty was amazed to see Wendell in the steel and steam, Romeo invited her to stay so the young baker could hear the silly old engine speak.

"So, Wendell I have to ask, what was life back then for you and Dinah? Tidmouth sheds didn't exist back then, so I'm guessing things were probably pretty wild back then"? Romeo asked.

"In a way it was, but it was more of an organized chaos. Before the realms were separated, Ethan and the other controllers had hardly any say on how the railroads were run. Instead, we were commanded by the overseers, and they were in control of everything. Where the engines were allowed to go, which one would pull which train, when we were allowed breaks and for how long." Wendell answered.

"That sounds horrible! Why didn't you and the other engines use your magic to fight back against these overseers"? Thomas asked.

"Well, back then we didn't have magic." Wendell revealed.

Everyone in the sheds gasped in shock.

"No magic?! Then how in the name of Sodor did we rebel against these overseers or are even sentient for that matter"? Scotsman asked bewildered.

"Sodor does provide its own magic, enough for us to be sentient, but we engines were unable to utilize Sodor's magic in such a way like the overseers could. It wasn't until the magic railroad was built that the engines finally had access to magic." Wendell explained.

Cleo was busy writing down what Wendell said into her notes, meanwhile Romeo had a question to ask.

"So, the magic railroad didn't just appear out of nowhere and with it the engines of Sodor could finally use magic and use it to defend themselves against these overseers. Then, who built the magic railroad and who or what split Sodor off the rest of the world"? Romeo asked.

"The magic railroad was constructed by the king and queen of Sodor of course"! Wendell peeped.

"Huh"? Everyone responded in confusion.

"Well, that is how Dinah refers to them. I forgot what their actual names were, but I do remember our interactions. We would see them around Sodor from time to time and the two seemed to have some influence in curbing the overseers abuse towards the engines for the better. Anyway, one day they approached us with a proposal. They would construct a railway capable of giving engines magic while Dinah and I would be placed as the magic railroad's protectors and use our new found magic to reform the railway to be an inclusive and friendly place for all. As for the realms splitting, things got very heated between the overseers and the island of Sodor, so on that fateful night the overseers attacked the island in an attempt to have full control of it." Wendell told.

Everyone was silent, what they heard was horrifying. How could anyone attack Sodor and its residents? For what reason did these overseers feel the need to take over the entire island when they already had so much control over Sodor already? Meanwhile, Wendell removed his headlamp in the same manner a person would remove a hat at place it over their heart.

"In an attempt to save everyone, the king and queen sacrificed themselves by using every ounce of magic they had to split the realms and separate the enraged overseers from Sodor, thus saving all of us " Wendell said solemnly.

[disappointingyet]

Hit Man 

Director Richard Linklater Stars Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Retta USA 2023 Language English 1hr 53mins Colour

A load more fun than your average Nietzsche-quoting movie 

There’s a bunch of people in the media who reckon Glen Powell is on the verge of proper movie stardom. I learned long ago that I have no talent for picking winners, so I won’t offer an opinion on that, but he’s certainly co-written himself a blinder of a role here.

Gary Johnson (Powell) is a geeky lecturer in philosophy and psychology in New Orleans. As his students point out in the opening scene, there’s a huge gap between his full-throttle philosophical positions and his meek lifestyle. 

But Gary has an improbable side hustle (and, as it happens, there was a real Gary Johnson who did both these jobs.) He helps the police with stings on people who are trying to hire a hit man. Initially, he’s one of the crew listening in in the van, but then there’s an an emergency and he gets ‘promoted’ to the person playing the killer for hire. And, to everyone’s surprise, it turns out he has a flair for acting and improv.

For a guy currently best known for appearing in Top Gun: Maverick, the chance to go full Peter Sellers and do a wild variety of looks and accents must have been pretty irresistible. Of course, that can be a recipe for something truly terrible but, fortunately, Powell is very good and very funny in these scenes.  

One of the tricky bits for a movie like this is settling down from a series of entertaining set pieces into a main plot that has to keep us interested. So often, the need to tell a conventional story makes everything very plodding. I won’t spoil what happens in this one but Richard Linklater manages the transition smoothly, aided by the chemistry between Powell and Adria Arjona.

Beyond that, nailing the tone in a crime comedy is something that trips up filmmakers all the time. Is it OK to be silly when murder is a possibility? How do you balance a feeling of peril with good jokes? When is something dark comedy and when is it just sadistic? The post-Tarantino 1990s, in particular, were rife with films that got that balance horribly wrong and ended up both glib and nasty.

Linklater has made some of my favourite movies, but he likes to try a lot of things and doesn’t always succeed. His last three films are generally considered to be not up to scratch. The two I’ve seen have been disappointing but in very different ways.

With Hit Man, though, he’s got it absolutely right: it’s the good kind of daft but with some interesting ideas being discussed, the casting is great (from Retta and Sanjay Rao as Gary’s police colleagues to all people trying to hire a cheap assassin) and it rattles along.

Powell has actually been around for a very long time – he first worked with (his fellow Texan) Richard Linklater way back in 2006* – but if his time in the spotlight has come, this film makes an extremely good case for him.

*I first remember him from Linklater’s 2016 movie Everybody Wants Some!!, but the first thing I would have seen him on screen in was 2005’s The Wendell Baker Story. That film – which I think was unfairly dismissed – was made by the Wilson brothers, and Powell certainly has a touch of both Owen and Luke in Hit Man.

I saw Hit Man at the  BFI London Film Festival 2023

[pitchingnknocking]

Sorry I couldn’t figure out how to work this for a min, But its Wendell baker story

I like him a normal amount.

Pls help this is one of my most extreme fixations ever and I don’t think it’s leaving anytime soon.

Oh and I don’t know if anyone remembers him but I was indeed friends with the Cartman shrine tiktoker

[frogs-and-oscar-brainrot]

Maybe I'm late but I've just found out that Owen Wilson starred in a movie made by his brothers. But the funny part is that the movie was produced by company named Mobius Enterteinment. Like Mobius M Mobius. That's sus

[just-a-leech-boy]

Owen Wilson in The Wendell Baker Story

Bonus Luke cuz he's very cute in it

ALSO!!!!! The gift of prophecy:

[nicks-corner]

https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Wendell-Baker-Story-DVD-WIDESCREEN-Comedy-Action-Adventure-Romance/173547023172?hash=item2868356b44:g:STwAAOSwzUJbpGzN

[disneytva]

Disney Junior And Disney+ Set A New Imagineering Age Of Fun With Eureka! On June 22th.

If you can dream it, you can do it 💡🦖 

Imagineering a new era of fun she’s a big thinker who’s ahead of her time. Way, way ahead of her time - in fact, she invented the wheel.

The series is set to premiere Wednesday, June 22 at 7:30 p.m. EDT/PDT on Disney Junior. An initial batch of 5 episodes will also premiere the same day on on-demand platforms and streaming on Disney+ USA.

Additionaly a album featuring the first songs of the first season will be avalible at Walt Disney Records on June 24th.

Set in the fantastical prehistoric world of Rocky Falls,  Eureka! follows the story of Eureka, a young girl inventor who is way ahead of her time. She designs inventions and contraptions in the hopes of making the world a better place and moving her prehistoric community into a more modern era.

The series stars Ruth Righi (Sydney to the Max) as Eureka, Renée Elise Goldsberry (Hamilton) and Lil Rel Howery (Free Guy) as Eureka’s parents, Roxy and Rollo, and Javier Muñoz (Hamilton) as her teacher, Ohm.

Rounding out the voice cast is Kai Zen (Amphibia) as Pepper, Devin Trey Campbell (Broadway’s Kinky Boots) as Barry, Fred Tatasciore (Marvel’s Moon Girl And Devil Dinosaur and Hit Monkey) as Murphy, Cree Summer (Voltron:Legendary Defender) as Verna, Kevin Michael Richardson (The Owl House) as Dima, Aydrea Walden (The Mandalorian) as Olive and Groopy, Connor Andrade (We Baby Bears) as Clod, Cade Tropeano (Raising Dion) as Bog, Madigan Kacmar (Chuggington) as Julia, Vivienne Rutherford (Seal Team) as Lark, Judah Howery (Uncle Drew) as twins Spruce and Cypress Stoneland, Dee Bradley Baker (Phineas and Ferb) as Ptero and André Sogliuzzo (American Dad!) as Link.

The cast in recurring guest roles are Ellie Kemper (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) as the school librarian, Chee; Jack McBrayer (Wander Over Yonder) as a pet kanga bird; Ryan Michelle Bathé (The Endgame) as Barry’s mom, Sierra; and Wendell Pierce (Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan) as Barry’s father, Cliff.

Eureka! is produced by Academy Award-nominated animation studio Brown Bag Films (Doc McStuffins) in association with Disney Junior Educational Resource Group. Emmy Award winner Norton Virgien (Doc McStuffins) and award-winning children’s book author/illustrator Niamh Sharkey (Henry Hugglemonster) are the series’ creators and executive producers. Emmy nominee Erica Rothschild (Sofia the First) developed the series with Virgien and Sharkey and serves as co-EP and story editor. Writer and director Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood) and Emmy-nominated producer Donna Brown Guillaume (Happily Ever After: Fairytales for Every Child) are consulting producers.

Christiana “Chee” McGuigan, a science educator who has worked at the California Science Center, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, serves as the series’ science education consultant. Biomedical scientist, social entrepreneur and former senior policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. Knatokie Ford, advised on the original series development. Engineering experts from Disney’s world-renowned Imagineering team advised on the early development of Eureka’s inventions.

Multitalented singer, songwriter and producer Kari Kimmel (Spirit Riding Free) is the series’ songwriter, and Emmy winner Frederik Wiedmann (All Hail King Julien) is the composer.

[wolfpup026]

Owen Wilson in The Wendell Baker Story (2005). 

[llynwen]

it's funny cause at the start of this i was completely like "i'm not watching owen's entire filmography. that man has been in too many terrible movies i won't do that to myself" but i'm like 69% of the way through according to letterboxd. i still won't watch a few of them but.. we made it a lot farther than i ever would have thought....

some of them sure are,,,,, something *ekhm ekhm* the wendell baker story *ekhm ekhm* but most of them are just stupid and/or bad, with the occasional hidden gem

and like i really don't watch them for the plot or anything, i mainly just focus on objectifying the old man, like I've seen the big bounce at least 3 times and i still don't know what's it about 🤠

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

Black Movies Tags Masterlist

Black Movies | Blaxploitation | Movie Compilations | Movie Characters | Full Movie

A

Abby | Across 110th Street | Akeelah and the Bee | All About the Benjamins | Almost Christmas | Amazing Grace | American Fiction | Atlantics/Atlantique | ATL |

B

Baby Boy | Babymother | BAPS | Barbershop | Beasts of the Southern Wild | Beauty Shop | Belly | Beloved | The Best Man, The Best Man Holiday | Blacula, Scream Blacula Scream | Black As Night | Black Belt Jones | Black Gunn | Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever | Black Samson | Black Shampoo | The Blackening | Bones | The Book of Clarence | Boomerang | Boyz N The Hood | Brotherly Love | The Brothers | Brown Sugar | Bucktown

C

Candyman (2020) | Carmen Jones, Carmen: A Hip-Hopera | CB4 | Chi-raq | Cinderella (1997) | Cindy (Cinderella in Harlem ) | Class Act | Claudine | Cleopatra Jones | Coffy | The Color Purple | The Color Purple (Musical Movie Reboot)  | Coming to America | Coming 2 America | Cotton Comes to Harlem | Crooklyn |

D

Daughters of the Dust | Dead Presidents | Deep Cover | Def By Temptation | Deliver Us From Eva | Detroit 9000 | Dolemite is My Name | Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking You Juice in the Hood | Dreamgirls | Drumline | 

E

Eve's Bayou

F

The Five Heartbeats | Friday | Friday Foster | Foxy Brown

G

Gang of Roses | Ganja & Hess | Get Christie Love | Girl 6 | Girls Trip | The Great Debaters | Guava Island 

H

Hair Show | The Harder They Fall | Harlem Nights | The Hate U Give | Head of State | Hidden Figures | Higher Learning | Holiday Heart | Hollywood Shuffle | House Party | House Party 2 | The House on Skull Mountain | How Stella Got Her Groove Back | How U Like Me Now? | Hustle & Flow |

I

 I Am Not a Witch | If Beale Street Could Talk | The Inkwell | Introducing Dorothy Dandridge |

J

Jacked Up | Jackie's Back | Jason’s Lyric | Jean of the Joneses | Jingle Jangle | The Josephine Baker Story | Just Another Girl on the IRT |

K

King Richard

L

Lady Sings the Blues | The Last Dragon | The Last Fall | Lionheart | Love & Basketball | Love Don’t Cost a Thing | Love Jones | A Low Down Dirty Shame

M

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom | Madea’s Family Reunion | Mahogany | Masquerade | Major Payne | Melinda | Menace to Society | Meteor Man | Middle of Nowhere | The Mighty Quinn | Miss Juneteenth | Mo Better Blues | Mo Money | Monsters and Men | Mudbound |

N

New Jack City | Notorious |

O

P

Panther | Pariah | Peeples | The Photograph | The Players’ Club | Poetic Justice | Polly | Posse | Praise This | The Preacher’s Wife | The Princess and the Frog

Q

Queen and Slim | 

R

Rafiki | A Rage in Harlem | Respect | Roll Bounce | Romeo Must Die | 

S

School Daze | Selah and the Spades | Set It Off | Sheba Baby | Sister Act, 2 | Soul Food | Soul Plane | Sounder | Sparkle, Sparkle (2012) | Sprung | Stomp the Yard | Strictly Business | Sugar Hill | Suicide by Sunlight | Sylvie’s Love

T

Tales from the Hood, TFTH 2, TFTH 3 | Tap | That Man Bolt | They Cloned Tyrone | A Thin Line Between Love and Hate | This Christmas | Till | TNT Jackson | To Sleep with Anger | Twitches | Trippin | Trois | Trois 2 | Truck Turner | Two Can Play That Game |

U

Undercover Brother | The United States VS Billie Holiday | Us | 

V

Vampires in the Bronx | Velvet Smooth

W

Waiting to Exhale | Wendell & Wild | What’s Love Got to Do with It | White Men Can’t Jump | Why Do Fools Fall in Love | The Wiz | The Woman King | The Women of Brewster Place | Woo | The Wood | A Wrinkle in Time |

X

Y

You Got Served

Z

Numerical 

3 Strikes | 42 

As of 03/05/2022, this list needs A LOT of work, as I haven’t been as general with the tagging system for these. Will be rectifying that in my free time. Thanks!

- Auntie Nesha

Edit: In case it's not clear for untagged reblogs. These aren't the movies. It's a tags masterlist for the available content featured on the blog. Hope this helps.

[mobius-m-mobius]

u finally giffing the wendell baker story is so 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 and thank u for carrying the ocw fandom on ur back still with ur gorgeous gorgeous gifsets of him cuz in case u didn't know we are nothing without u 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

I'm?????????? 😳😳🙏

Not worthy of the sweetest message of all time but thank you so much! 😭 I can't even come close to taking credit for supplying OCW gifs alone (shoutout to you yourself and @faylights especially 😘) but being the world's slowest watcher of movies does make it easier to look like I'm keeping steady content 😂

Also even more thanks right back at you for singlehandedly supplying the dash with Tom gifs so stunning they reverse all attempts by the Succession team to make it look like he doesn't fuck 🙏💕

[ocw-archive]

The Story of O - Texas Monthly, June 2003

By John Spong “Mooooonshine,” said Owen Wilson, sounding typically awed and random. “Isn’t it too bad that something with such a great name has to be illegal? ‘Moonshine.’ It’s beautiful. I’ve never even had any, but I’ve always wanted to try it. How could you not? It’s called ‘moonshine.’” The Oscar-nominated screenwriter and big-popcorn movie star was driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, and the talk in the car was going a lot like it does in his films. Whether his lines are ones that he works on for months or just thinks up that morning on the set, they zig and zag softly around topics that appear to have no ready connection other than the fact that they popped into his head and right out his mouth. Following Owen through a conversation is like replaying the last five thoughts that entered your own mind, only he does it out loud.

The discussion had started with, of all things, a quote from Samuel Beckett. From there he moved through his dad, Ireland, God, Planet of the Apes, and moonshine. Owen was on a roll. He bounced to hard drugs to Axl Rose to James Garner to James Brown, then he lightly touched down with a bittersweet anecdote about perception and love that he’d lifted from another master of letters. The punch line to his rambling? Owen had never actually read the anecdote or anything by its author. But he sure did think it was cool.

And that was it: the perfect opening scene for a magazine profile of Owen Wilson. Here was Owen behind the wheel, floating in innocent oblivion, throwing out observations that would sound sarcastic coming from anyone else, looking a whole lot like Owen on-screen. Whether he’s supremely blond male model Hansel in Zoolander or the obnoxious young western novelist Eli Cash in The Royal Tenenbaums, his characters seem wholly unaware that the rest of the world runs at a different pace and in a different direction, and Owen plays them so naturally that it’s hard not to assume that he’s just being himself. This was the proof. Owen is as Owen does.

But a problem arose. When we talked on the phone a week later, he said that the bittersweet anecdote, the best part of our conversation, couldn’t show up in the article. Not even the author’s name. He said it was a key point in a script he’d been reading and that to use it would ruin the film. “So if you wouldn’t mind,” he said, as polite as you please, “I think we have to leave that out.” A couple of days later I e-mailed him to gauge his resolve. He wouldn’t budge. “I can’t say any stronger how off-limits that thing is,” he wrote. “But call me if you want to come up with something else. We’re both funny guys. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

Come up with something else? It didn’t exactly bear the hallmark of great literary journalism, but it was a curious notion, and not just because he was calling me funny. Owen Wilson was offering to co-author a scene for this story. I e-mailed him back saying I would give it a go. With Owen on board, it might not be hard at all.

At a time when there are enough successful big-screen families to justify a separate map to sibling star’s homes-Baldwins, Culkins, Gyllenhaals, and so on-the moviemaking Wilson brothers, Owen, 34, Luke, 31, and Andrew, 38, are the most fun to watch, in large part because they’re so often found together. Owen has created roles for Andrew and Luke in all three of the movies-Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums—that he’s penned with his best friend and collaborator, Wes Anderson. Luke still lives in Owen’s house in a quiet neighborhood in Santa Monica, even though he bought a house of his own more than a year ago. And not long after you read this, they should all be in Austin shooting The Wendell Baker Story, a film written by Luke, who will co-star with Owen and co-direct with Andrew.

But even though each of the brothers has a movie of his own coming out later this year, Owen is the Wilson to watch right now. In addition to his screenwriting success, he’s become Hollywood’s leading buddy, a strange hybrid of straight man and goofy sidekick to the likes of Jackie Chan, Eddie Murphy, and Ben Stiller. He’s got a string of upcoming movie projects that will keep him working for the next few years. And last March, when the three Wilsons sat with their parents at the Texas Film Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Austin, it was Owen who was the recipient of the rising-star award. Neither of his brothers seems jealous. “I thought my picture was going to be in an insert on the cover of Texas Monthly,” joked Luke when I called him in mid-April to talk about his older brother. “But I guess I understand. I want to get to the bottom of that guy as much as you do.”

Start at a household with no television. When their dad, Bob Wilson, took over as manager of the Dallas PBS affiliate in 1969, a year after Owen was born, he and his wife, Laura (a renowned photographer who took the pictures on these pages and the cover), decided the Wilsons would be television-free. “I really loved TV as a kid,” said Owen, “but we’d have to go over to a friend’s house to watch it. We’d watch the afternoon movie on Channel 11, where we’d see Planet of the Apes Week one week and Clint Eastwood Week the next.”

Despite the differences in their ages, the Wilson kids spent the time they might have been parked in front of the television actually engaging one another, playing sports, hanging out with the same friends, and making their own entertainment. “They did short plays as the Farquar Players,” remembered Bob (the name coming from the street they lived on in Dallas). “I was generally the brunt of the action. They’d set up three stools, and one of the boys would play me driving the other two out to East Texas or somewhere, trying to whack the two in the back seat. It was nice to have them act it out rather than rebel.”

Owen did manage to find his fair share of trouble. Never a student of academic distinction, he was expelled from the exclusive Dallas boys’ school St. Mark’s during his sophomore year when he and some friends got ahold of the answers to a geometry exam. According to Owen, a C to D student, he wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t started answering the extra credit questions correctly. But that’s not why he got the boot. “They wanted the name of a guy who cheated along with me,” he said, “but I talked to my dad about it, and we didn’t feel that was right. There’s kind of a shabby nobility in that.” Owen finished high school at the New Mexico Military Institute, in Roswell, a spot of his own choosing, surprisingly enough. He considers it a good move. At NMMI, he concentrated on his passion for writing, edited the school’s literary magazine, and more importantly, met the kid who would introduce him to Wes Anderson.

Owen’s fabled first encounter with Wes took place in a University of Texas playwriting class in 1990, Owen’s junior year. “Wes walked in wearing L.L. Bean duck boots and short pants,” Owen has said, “which I thought was kind of obnoxious.” But it wasn’t until that summer, when Owen’s NMMI friend introduced them, that they started to talk. They discovered a shared love of movies, which made Wes the perfect stand-in for the other Wislon boys, who for one of the few times in Owen’s life, weren’t in the same town. By the next semester, the two were sharing a house just west of campus.

“UT had a great movie thing,” said Owen, “showing them every night in Hogg Auditorium or that Texas Union place, and we’d walk over and there’d never be anybody there. Wes actually worked up in the projection booth for a little bit.” Wes was fascinated by the technical aspects of filmmaking, which never held Owen’s attention, and soon they were creating short films to air on Austin’s public access channel. “I was a big movie fan,” said Owen, “but I didn’t see how you could really work in movies. That seemed sort of impossible. The subject I was okay at was English, so I could see trying to write short stories or maybe even books. The most practical thing seemed to be in advertising, writing copy.”

In 1991 Owen left UT a couple classes shy of his English degree-he says he needed a break-and moved into a small apartment with his brothers on Throckmorton Street in Dallas. Soon Wes moved in, and he and Owen continued work on Bottle Rocket, a screenplay they’d started in Austin about a group of young guys with a hopelessly unrealistic dream to rob banks. They showed some film they’d shot to Texas filmmaker L.M. Kit Carson, an acquaintance of Bob Wilson’s, and with his encouragement, and about $7,000 he was able to round up, produced what Owen describes now as a “thirteen-minute, black and white, guerilla-style” short. They took it to the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, where it became the movie to see, even though it wasn’t in the festival competition. Then James L. Brooks, a true Hollywood don who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi and developed The Simpsons, saw the short and was sufficiently impressed to secure a feature-film deal with Sony Entertainment allowing Wes to direct and the Wilsons to star.

Bottle Rocket, shot in Dallas, was finished in 1994. At first look it is a strange film, a caper flick with characters who spend their time talking about their life of crime rather than getting on with it; they don’t even seem clear on what a life of crime is. In the movie’s final scene, the group’s ringleader, Dignan, played by a handcuffed Owen, gives his comrades a no-worries smile and two-handed wave from inside a prison yard, as if the fact that he got caught means he’s finally arrived. Test audiences didn’t make it that far into the movie; they left in droves, and early. When it was released, reviews were mixed, and it died at the box office. Owen started talking about getting into advertising or the military.

But the passage of time was kind. When Bottle Rocket was released on video, it developed a strong cult following. It became a favorite movie for high school and college guys to get together and watch with a case of beer, just as Night Shift and Spinal Tap had been when the Wilsons were growing up. Hollywood took note and gave Owen and Wes a second chance. Their 1998 follow-up, the flawless prep-school daydream Rushmore, made even fewer concessions to the audience than Bottle Rocket but received universal critical praise and established Wes as a director. In the meantime, Owen began making a name for himself as an actor, finding ways to steal entire films with small parts. Some of the roles were in movies begging to be stolen, like 1997’s J-Lo meets Ice-Cube meets-great-big-snake debacle, Anaconda, and 1998’s Bruce-Willis-meets-asteroid-so-asteroid-doesn’t-meet-earth schlockbuster, Armageddon, but others were films expected to stand on their own, like Jim Carrey’s The Cable Guy, in 1996, and Ben Stiller’s Meet the Parents four years later.

By 2001, when he was handpicked by Gene Hackman to be rescued from Kosovo in the military action film Behind Enemy Lines, Owen was at the top of the marquee. At Christmas of that year, Owen and Wes’ Salinger-like family soap opera, The Royal Tenenbaums, came out, and critics who had dismissed Owen’s hilarious but light sidekick turns in Shanghai Noon and Zoolander had to pay their respects when the Tenenbaums script received an Academy Award nomination. Now, he has put his writing on hold while he picks his roles as he pleases, like last year’s I Spy, with Eddie Murphy, and this year’s Shanghai follow-up, with Jackie Chan. John Moore, who directed Wilson in Behind Enemy Lines, summed up Owen’s progress: “He can get movies made. I’ve been in meetings and heard people say, ‘Well, if we get Owen, we’re set.’ And they’ll pay him ten million dollars for it. That’s the judge of it these days.”

Owen measures things differently. For him, the critical reexamination that accompanied Bottle Rocket’s cult popularity-Martin Scorcese, among others, called it one of the ten best movies of the nineties-is all the achievement he needs: “It’s always gratifying when people come up and recognize me from a movie, but the one that means the most is Bottle Rocket. It was the first one, it’s me and my brothers, my friend Wes directed it, and we wrote it together.”

A week after visiting Owen in Los Angeles, he and I began exchanging e-mails, trying to come up with this article’s opening scene. It wasn’t so easy after all. He’d just started filming Starsky and Hutch with Ben Stiller and had plenty of other things to think about, like starring in an $80 million movie. I was in my office, sifting through photocopies of literary criticism. We agreed to begin with his thoughts on moonshine, but to get to the punch line, we had to find another writer and anecdote. Owen was full of ideas. “What about Finnegans Wake?” he wrote from his trailer on the set. “We talked about that. We had a long conversation about how much we liked Joyce or really just the idea of Joyce, since I haven’t read that either.”

This view of Owen at work was more than I’d hoped for. If there is any real mystery to Owen, it’s in the way he writes with Wes. Brooks, who followed the two through Bottle Rocket, couldn’t explain it, nor could Owen’s brothers, nor even Bob Wilson, who has turned rooms in his office and home over to the two when they are working on scripts. Conventional wisdom puts Wes at a keyboard, getting down the details and much of the story, with Owen on the other side of the room, feet up on a table, throwing out lines. But Owen was vague when the subject came up. “We both kind of respond to certain characters and try to spin a story around a character or relationship,” he said. “And, yeah, I don’t know how to type, so Wes is at the keyboard.”

Our e-mails were turning into that kind of collaboration, except that the characters were us, and I’m not Wes Anderson. I’d spent half an hour typing out a laundry list of suggestions, and as soon as it was gone, I’d get a one-line response from Owen, who was watching out for the bigger picture and the punch lines. “Explain what we get with that other story,” he wrote, righting our course. “I like the idea of talking excitedly about a book for a long time, and at the end we realize that both of us haven’t read it.” When we stalled, he’d throw out encouragement: “Let’s take this as a challenge. I, for one, think we can come up with something great. But you know me, I’m a bluesky artist.”

“’Bluesky’?” I replied.

“It’s blue sky,’”wrote Owen, “like Pollyanna. I think I left out a space.”

Finally, on Good Friday I e-mailed him a rough draft of a new opening scene. He mulled it over for a couple of days and on Easter Sunday sent his revisions. They were pure Owen, random musings you could imagine from almost any of his characters, and significantly funnier than his comments in the car. “I like this stuff,” he said when he called to read through it. “I kind of want to save some of it for a movie.” But he said to leave it in. Our new scene was complete.

The story of O, is not, contrary to a recent Details cover line, the story of a nose. Owen’s appeal has less to do with his oft-broken snoot (at least two times, confirmed) than with a demographic, specifically guys between the ages of twenty and forty. Carson claims that Owen has “given a voice to his generation,” an exaggerated characterization if you’re looking to Owen’s oeuvre for a grand statement. But it’s dead-on when you consider that much of what he says sounds like it could come from any guy near his age. Owen is like a buddy from college, a guy’s guy, someone it was more fun to stand by the keg and comment on the party with than to actually join in. Although Owen now dates rock stars-a highly publicized romance with Sheryl Crow ended last year-he’s never lost that familiar quality. When guys see Jackie Chan try to coax Owen into some ridiculous Crouching Tiger acrobatics in Shanghai Knights and Owen throws up his hands and says, “What in our history makes you think I’m capable of something like that?” he might as well be sitting in the theater next to them.

At a café in front of Fred Segal’s high-toned shopping center in Santa Monica, Owen though out loud about how he’s become everybody’s buddy. “Maybe it’s from growing up with my dad, who can be real funny but who can also be kind of moody, up and down. So I became good at getting along with tricky personalities. And growing up in Texas, it was important that we be polite. When I meet these guys like Eddie Murphy, Bruce Willis, and Jackie Chan, I’m always super respectful. Then I get to know them, and then I can start to kid around with them.” It’s an exercise he enjoys. Working with Murphy on I Spy fulfilled a childhood dream-if not box-office hopes-and he’s become close friends off-screen with Chan and Stiller.

What’s harder for Owen to understand is the way critics describe him, favoring words like “oddball,” “slacker”, and “quirky.” “I guess ‘quirky’ is a euphemism for something most people, like, aren’t going to like,” said Owen between bites from a bowl of turkey chili. But when I asked him about a New York Times review that called him a “stoner’s version of James Garner,” his answer didn’t quite counter the charge. “That’s great because I loved James Garner in The Rockford Files,” he said, without a trace of insincerity. “I loved the way they’d open each show with Rockford’s answering machine going off and him getting some cruddy message like, ‘Hey, Jim, just calling to let you know that that race down in Baja that we thought was this weekend-it turns out it’s next weekend. Hope you haven’t already left.’ I love that.”

In truth, Owen is well aware of how he’s perceived and it informs everything he does on the screen. When he signed on to play a cocky top-gun pilot in Behind Enemy Lines, he pushed to have his character moved to the back seat, figuring his persona would play better as a put-upon navigator. It did. When he didn’t feel right portraying an accomplished intelligence agent walking Murphy through the world of espionage in I Spy, Owen created a second, rival spy in the script who would outshine his own and get all the best 007 gadgets. And instead of portraying a hard-guy gunfighter in the Shanghai movies, he converted the character into an inept, insecure, wannabe train robber who was really just in it for the girls. “We’ve worked these characters to be ones that I’m comfortable playing, that aren’t such badasses,” he said. “I’m more the kid in the back of the class making wisecracks.”

These are natural roles for Owen, all the more so because he tends to invent his own lines. Here is where his generation really hears itself, connecting with the pop-culture references Owen uses to fill out his dialogue. A favorite line from Shanghai Noon, “I may not know karate, but I know ka-razy. And I will use it” is from a James Brown song. His taunt to rival male model Stiller in Zoolander, “Who are you trying to get crazy with ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?” was originally a point of high drama in 1992’s Chicano gangster flick American Me. And the line that may be his most quoted, “They’ll never catch me because I’m f---ing innocent,” from Bottle Rocket, is lifted from a Guns n’ Roses song. “Scorcese wrote in Esquire that that was one of his favorite lines, and it’s from ‘Out ta Get Me,’” he said. “Obviously it’s used very differently in the film from what Axl Rose did with it.”

Owen comes up with all of this, and though this kind of riffing may not be heavy lifting, if you’re in on the joke, it’s part of that otherness that makes up his appeal. Maybe that’s what the critics mean by “quirky.” Brooks, who gave the world could-be savants Georgette Baxter from Mary Tyler Moore and Jim Ignatowski from Taxi, favors more-flattering terms, although he ends up sounding like Owen himself when he talks about it. “It’s a very delicate thing to maintain the right distance between you and the world,” he said, “but Owen’s got a great perch. You could throw him in a Hemingway novel, you could put him in the twenties, you could put him in the forties; he would be a star in any era. There’s something nicely literary about that little remove. I don’t even know what I mean when I say that, but I’ve always thought it.”

So maybe Owen has a slacker’s remove but hardly a slacker’s workload; fans will see plenty of him in the coming year. Next in the theaters will be an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce, opposite Morgan Freeman. It’s set in Hawaii, and Owen said it concerns “a crime and a con, and I play an antihero. You know you’ve almost made it when you get to play an antihero.” He’ll be shooting Starsky and Hutch through June, then he and brother Luke will make cameos as the Wright brothers in Jackie Chan’s remake of Around the World in 80 Days. Then it’s to work on The Wendell Baker Story with both Luke and Andrew. Throughout these projects, he and Wes will be sending ideas back and forth on a top-secret project known in Hollywood as Wes’s “oceanographer” script. Within the next couple years, he’d like to write a script of his own, but in the meantime, fans will have to content themselves watching Owen in other people’s projects, listening for those signature lines only he would make up.

And finally, the opening scene: “Moooooonshine,” said Owen Wilson, sounding typically awed and random. “How great a word is ‘moonshine’? I don’t even know exactly what it is, and I’ve never seen it, but I know I want to drink it for the rest of my life. It’d probably be a good name for a dog. ‘Come here, Moonshine!’ Like an old Where the Red Fern Grows type of dog.”

The Oscar-nominated screenwriter and big-popcorn movie star was driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, and the talk in the car was going a lot like it does in his films. The discussion had started with, of all things, a quote from Samuel Beckett after I’d asked Owen, who is known as well-read, about a large black and white photograph of Beckett hanging in his living room.

“He wrote one of my favorite lines,” said Owen as we got into the car. “’Fail. Fail again. Fail better.’”

“What’s that from?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never really read Beckett, but I like that line. And I really just like the photograph-all the lines on his face. You hope God looks like that.”

And from there he started rolling from his dad to Ireland to Planet of the Apes and finally to moonshine, where he ultimately got stuck.

“Moooooonshine,” he said again, letting the word roll around in his head. “Just think, if it were legal, what a good adman could do with a word like ‘moonshine.’ How is ‘water’ or ‘milk’ going to compete with something called ‘moonshine'? Orange Crush could maybe give it a run for its money but not really. It’s like ‘aaaangel dust.’ I guess its real name is PCP, but that doesn’t sound so good. ‘Angel dust’ sounds kind of wonderful. What about ‘skunk bud’? That’s not really a beautiful name, but it sounds….intriguing. I wonder why things that are so bad for you have to have such great names.”

Owen paused, realizing he’d answered his own question. I tried to bring him back down to earth. “So that’s Beckett. What about Joyce?”

“What about him?”

“Didn’t Beckett work for Joyce? I think when Joyce was going blind, Beckett was his secretary. He’d read to him and take dictation.”

“You know,” said Owen, “there’s that story about Finnegans Wake, when Beckett is taking dictation for Joyce and there was this knock on the door. Joyce heard it, but Beckett didn’t, so when Joyce says, ‘Come in,’ Beckett writes it down. Then later, when they pick back up and Beckett reads back to Joyce from the place they’d left off, Joyce asks how ‘Come in’ got in there. And Beckett says, ‘You said it.’ And Joyce decides to leave it in. He decides it would be okay for coincidence to be a collaborator. Do you know that line in Finnegans Wake?”

“In Finnegans Wake? No.”

“Neither do I. But I sure like that story. Doesn’t that sound like a great way to write?”

To the guy taking dictation, it certainly does.