90S MOVIE STILLER RYDER HAWK MOVIE

Take the gas-station scene, which Shamberg credited entirely to Stiller. But she isn’t always remembered as the woman behind the film-Childress hadn’t even heard about the Tribeca reunion when I mentioned it to her (after this piece came out, the festival added her to the roster)-and she knows it.

90S MOVIE STILLER RYDER HAWK MOVIE

“It was going to be a studio film.” And while Lelaina struggles with the idea of selling out, Childress was so excited that TriStar had hired her to write a movie based on her own life that she produced the first draft in about six weeks. “There was nothing we could do,” Childress told me when we spoke recently. “This is the movie that has been both praised as the last word on X-ers and damned as Hollywood’s slickest effort yet to exploit them,” Frank Rich of The New York Times declared upon the film’s release.ĭefine irony: It’s when you try to sell a Hollywood movie to a DIY generation. That particular quandary was styled as a hallmark of Generation X, and Reality Bites was perhaps the most polished of a bunch of mainstream attempts to portray the ambivalent cohort.

As if that weren’t work enough, Lelaina is also attempting to choose between two men who represent her divergent prospects: to sell out or not to sell out. She drew from her own life to create the story of Lelaina Pierce, a disaffected college grad (played by Hollywood’s grunge icon, Winona Ryder), who is herself producing a documentary about her equally disaffected friends. Just as the 1994 movie was the first feature-length film Stiller ever directed, it was the first that the writer Helen Childress had ever scripted. “Ben” is Ben Stiller, the director and co-star of Reality Bites, which marks its 25th anniversary this year with a reunion event at the Tribeca Film Festival. “The Ed Ruscha gas station where they’re dancing under the stars,” he told The New Yorker in 2012, “that’s all Ben.” But the movie’s producer, Michael Shamberg, compared it to pop art. The tableau is reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting, at once desolate and bright. Cut to exterior: The trio dance in the glowing light of the Food Mart, their car abandoned at the pump to the left, the astral darkness reaching over it all. Four 20-something friends with uncertain futures are bearing armfuls of chips, soda, and cigarettes as The Knack’s “My Sharona” starts up on the radio three of them immediately drop everything to bop along to the song. If Reality Bites has a defining moment, it’s got to be that scene at the gas station.

90s movie stiller ryder hawk