Mystic Pizza
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Mystic Pizza | |
|---|---|
 Movie poster |
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| Directed by | Donald Petrie |
| Produced by | Mark Levinson Scott M. Rosenfelt |
| Written by | Amy Holden Jones Perry Howze Randy Howze Alfred Uhry |
| Starring | Annabeth Gish Julia Roberts Lili Taylor |
| Music by | David McHugh |
| Cinematography | Tim Suhrstedt |
| Editing by | Don Brochu Marion Rothman |
| Distributed by | Samuel Goldwyn Company |
| Release date(s) | October 21, 1988 |
| Running time | 104 mins |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $6,000,000 (estimated) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Mystic Pizza is a 1988 film directed by Donald Petrie and starring Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts, and Lili Taylor.
[edit] Plot
The film is about the romance lives of the three main characters: Kat, Daisy, and Jojo Araujo, who all work as waitresses at Mystic Pizza in Mystic, Connecticut.
The movie also touches on an Old World work ethic. Kat and Daisy are sisters and rivals; the former works all the time and aspires to attend Yale University, while the latter just wants to have fun. Kat is the apple of her Portuguese mother's eye, while Daisy is not, as she is promiscuous, and is not as goal-oriented as her younger sister.
There is also a dynamic between the Anglo-American employer of Kat, who is Portuguese-American, and the resulting relationship between the two. The class distinctions and variant European heritages are explored to some extent in various scenes of the film. Vincent D'Onofrio and Adam Storke co-stars; Matt Damon has a small part in his screen debut.
[edit] Background
Mystic Pizza (the restaurant) opened in 1973. The eponymous restaurant was a classic "dive", a dreary hangout for teenagers, serving terrible food, with terrible service, and no atmosphere. The pizza of the real "Mystic Pizza" was as mediocre as could be. Screenwriter Amy Holden heard the name of the restaurant, and equated "mystic" with "magical" (while the local name Mystic is simply a place name --originally derived from an Algonquian word for a tidal river or estuary) and made it the setting for a movie she was working on. There is no other connection between the "Mystic Pizza" of the movie and the restaurant in the town of Mystic, but of course that has not stopped the proprietors of the restaurant from making the best of it as a classic New England "tourist trap". The town of Mystic is well worth a visit for the world-class maritime museum Mystic Seaport and the impressive Mystic Marinelife Aquarium.
