Once upon a time in . . . Missouri
The Oscars remind Mary McNamara of a one-time noname classmate at university. His name? Brad Pitt.
Dear Brad Pitt:
You probably don’t remember me, but we went to college together, at the University of Missouri’s journalism school. You famously lost your mind and skipped out a few credits shy of graduation to pursue some crazy dream of becoming an actor, while I sensibly got my diploma and pursued a glamorous and highly lucrative career in print journalism.
More than 30 years later, here we both are in Los Angeles. What are the odds, right?
It’s OK if you don’t remember me; I don’t remember you either. I won’t lie – when Thelma and Louise came out in 1991, and you became a star, my college friends and I all suddenly believed we most certainly remembered you.
One said you had been in graphics class with us – remember all those conversations about creative white space, and how we had to design our own stationery? Another insisted that you were in one of the big classes Don Ranly taught – can you name any of his 10 comma rules?
Sometimes I think I have a memory of you, a cute frat boy in a polo shirt with the collar flipped up under a rugby shirt, but honestly, there were so many of those at Mizzou in the early ’80s that I’m probably making it up. Chances are good that our paths did not cross often.
You and I are the same age (not that this bothered me at all when you stripped to the waist in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood and managed to look like you were still in your late 20s), but you were a year behind me. More important, you were in advertising. I was in print, and those of us in print were super-snobby, particularly about those in advertising, which we didn’t consider part of journalism at all. At least not a serious part.
Now, of course, we do. Now, we know advertising is very serious, and we weep for those big, beautiful full-page ads, those columns of classifieds that kept us in business. Like Ebenezer Scrooge contemplating Bob Cratchit, we wish we had been a bit more appreciative.
Still, maybe we did know each other, even if neither of us remembers it. Maybe we chatted briefly over a keg of Busch at some party, or at happy hour at the Heidelberg, or over Long Island iced teas at Harpo’s. There were certainly a lot of those moments – in ranking the top 10 US party schools, Playboy once marked Mizzou with an asterisk and wrote: ‘‘We don’t rank professionals.’’ (Congratulations on getting sober, by the way. I did, too, more than 20 years ago; maybe all those Long Island iced teas weren’t such a great idea after all.)
Even if we didn’t, it’s been fun watching your career, knowing that we both spent time on the same campus, which means we both know what the Columns are and remember how cool the Shack was before they tore it down.
It’s been slightly irritating to see you ranked among the school’s most notable
Hollywood
Once Upon a Time . . . in
Mary McNamara is a Los Angeles Times columnist.
It takes a lot of guts for a boy from Springfield, Missouri to pull up stakes and fling himself at Hollywood, where good-looking guys with movie star smiles are thick on the ground.