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Archive 1 |
"sociopathic" seems much too strong here. -- incandenza 17:09 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I am thinking of adding themes to this page, including duality, coming of age, love, and the intangible antagonist. Any suggestions/objections feel free. -- Asuskay 03:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
I added an 'intangible antagonist' section to themes because I feel it is essential to undertstanding this to appreciate the movie.-- Asuskay 23:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I feel that under the synopsis section for the page the conclusion indicates to the audience that Will is seeking Skylar first before he seeks the opportunities Lambeau has provided for him. I am not sure this is true, in fact I think it is insinuating that he is eventually going to come back, which I feel is inaccurate to the concluding scene of the movie.-- Asuskay 23:36, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I re-worded the second to last paragraph which discusses "Chuckie's one great hope." I feel this is very valid to this film page, but the wording seemed a little off. I simply took out and added a few words to make it a little more accurate. Originally this paragraph indicated that the one time Chuckie came to pick Will up he wouldn't be there. For the reader, this suggests Chuckie does not pick Will up every day, which he does.-- Asuskay 23:47, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
I don't think the theme section of this page flows well. Some of it seems copied and pasted from other papers. I am going to make it flow a little better by taking out the "three major theme" heading because there are more than three written about. there are also a few times the synopsis is replicated in this section, which I think is unnecessary at this point of the page.-- Asuskay 15:36, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
I am not sure the themes section flows very well. I am going to do some minor editing to the wording because certain parts don't really make sense in how they describe Will Hunting.-- Asuskay 19:21, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
I am pretty sure the anon contributor who is saying this film is based on some 'unknown' MIT person is a vandal - after depositing their (unsourced) info they wiped out the rest of the page. But I am going to AGF and leave the info there for a while and stick a unverfied tag on instead. I am going get rid of it if a source doesn't appear soon tho... novacatz 14:44, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
I removed the huge and badly-formatted Quotes section. Oh, and I added a link to the movie's Wikiquote page, which has more than enough quotes. riana 14:45, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
By definition, this section should be relatively brief, but it's turning into a full re-write of the screenplay. What say we keep or shorten its current length and focus on keeping it as well-written and flowing as we can? Dudesleeper 17:52, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
I have removed the Trivia section by moving the para re Williams into the production section and combining it with a sentence there that had been commented out.
I removed the other para in the Trivia section from the article, because I can't see a place to put it, and because it is more about JSBSB than about GWH. Maybe a section called References in popular culture could be started. Dog Day Afternoon has such a section.
-- Jtir 19:20, 30 May 2007 (UTC)
I removed the "citation needed" flag because the dedication occurs in the film's credits crawl, and surely that should be sufficient (both authors had died that year, 1997). F.N. Wombat 09:10, 16 August 2007 (UTC)F.N. Wombat
What evidence is there that the movie had a weak opening? According to Box Office Mojo, the film averaged nearly $40,000 per screen in its opening weekend. It was a limited release, granted, but limited releases are common for Oscar-bait features. Stick Fig 04:03, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
After reading some differing articles about different personality disorders, I'm inclined to think that he suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder 24.107.109.117 ( talk) 02:05, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
It appears to me in an episode of Family Guy there is a cut scene joke to what appears to be a room and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are in a room and Damon is sitting at a table and says,'There all finished. I'm calling this movie Good Will Hunting by Matt Damon.' Ben Affleck is lying on a couch and says."Hey, can yo like put my name under yours?' damon replys,'No all you have done for the past 6 months is eat all of the food and smoke pot!' Aflleck replys,'Got any more pot?'
So I;m not really sure what episode it was but I'm pretty sure it was in an episode that was made before 1999. -- 72.91.32.178 11:09, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
The phrase "...and the scene is filmed in the westbound lanes because a sign announces the coming of a "Toll Plaza" east of the New York state border" seems a bit obvious and superfluous. Obviously they would be filming in the westbound lanes as Will Hunting is traveling westward, and obviously the toll plaza is merely a part of that fact.
Also, the street name on the bridge is wrong. Instead, the sign reads 'Prospect St Stockbridge' in the film, which
Google Streetview confirms. (also, there is no Pittsfield Rd. in Stockbridge that crosses I-90) --
Hyperquantization (
talk)
03:50, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
I removed this from the intro paragaph: "The movie took 12 days to shoot which is astonishing."
It sounds like a 12 year old fanboy plus the making of the movie is already covered in detail below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Silentjames ( talk • contribs) 21:58, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
I removed this from the "Fictional Sequel" section:
It certainly should not be in that section, and probably not in the article at all. 67.103.42.20 ( talk) 08:21, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
For that random bolded part with a bunch of quantifiable info...
I think maybe we should work that into a paragraph instead of a list. It looks sloppy. If not a paragraph, at least we should make a proper table of information out of it. Leaving it like that makes the whole section look rushed. Any ideas?
Magicmuggle (
talk)
17:55, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
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In the Jay-z song feat rihanna and Kanye west, Kanye says in the last line, "I can spend my whole life good will hunting", should this be in the trivia or Cultural references ? 68.50.8.134 ( talk) 21:24, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
The language of the article is not good enough. For example, "When his buddies present him with a rebuilt Chevrolet Nova for his 21st birthday, he decides to go after Skylar, setting aside his lucrative corporate and government job offers." "Setting aside lucrative offers" suggests that he is making a choice here. I think it is wrong. There is no urgency about the offers. They can (will) wait.
Similarly, "Meanwhile, Lambeau pushes Will so hard that Will eventually refuses to go to the job interviews that Lambeau arranges for him." I doubt this interpretation. I think Will baulks because he is actually not interested in becoming a lawyer! And why an extra 'eventually'? 122.169.37.231 ( talk) 04:26, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
I knew Matt when they were writing this script and remember that the central character was based on a story that was circulating at the time about someone that had been at Yale. Does anyone know who this was? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.46.55.175 ( talk • contribs) 22:37, 22 June 2007 (UTC)
Having been instrumental and present in the invention of the story, I will tell you now there was no real WILL HUNTING. period.
The character in the original treatment, brief, was a combination of real MIT students encountered at MIT decades before the film was ever conceived of and scripted. The inspiration for Math wiz quality/dimension is now a professor o MATH at a leading INVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITY. At the time of his attending MIT. The model, the real math wiz was far more advanced than Will Hunting is portrayed.
The street and bad boy aspects of Will's personality are based on another person, the Irish and Boston and contemporaneous aspects and business was added at the scripting by DAMON and AFFLECK and by whomever else assisted them after the conceptulization and invention was completed. The idea/story Ghost prefers not to be known. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.107.91.119 ( talk) 19:33, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
Who are Joshua Inglethorpe and Professor Michael Durst? I've never heard of them, and I wasn't able to find any information on either of them. If no one can find information to support the claim that they are the inspiration for the story, the introductory paragraph should be changed. -- Sarahjane10784 ( talk) 17:07, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
"In Season 1, Episode 11 of Futurama, Gunther gets a girl's number and says "You like bananas? I got her number, how'd you like 'dem bananas?"" What? How is this relevant? This desperately needs an explanation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.89.196.10 ( talk) 19:49, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
Please stop writing stupid and wrong credits in the article, if you cannot PROOF it.
At a WGA seminar in 2003, William Goldman denied the persistent rumor that he was the actual writer of Good Will Hunting: "I would love to say that I wrote it. People don't want to think those two cute guys wrote it. What happened was, they had the script. It was their script. They gave it to Rob [Reiner] to read, and there was a great deal of stuff in the script dealing with the F.B.I. trying to use Matt Damon for spy work because he was so brilliant in math. Rob said, "Get rid of it." They then sent them in to see me for a day - I met with them in New York - and all I said to them was, "Rob's right. Get rid of the F.B.I. stuff. Go with the family, go with Boston, go with all that wonderful stuff." And they did. I think people refuse to admit it because their careers have been so far from writing, and I think it's too bad. But I did not write Good Will Hunting, alas." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.133.221.238 ( talk) 00:20, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
I believe the soundtrack section should become a separate article. Ak112358 ( talk) 04:51, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Can someone write something about how/why the title of this movie was chosen? I expected it to be about "The Search for People of Good Intentions", and instead it was about "William Hunting was a Good Boy". -- Keeves 10:36, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
The entire film is based on descriptions of the life and times of William Sidis (and his associates) as found in Amy Wallace’s 1986 book The Prodigy (and the pictures found in her book):
Film Character | Based on | Description |
---|---|---|
Will Hunting ( Matt Damon) | William Sidis | Sidis (with his adulthood estimated IQ=250-300) was accepted to MIT at age 8; Harvard mathematics age 16, law school age 17. Hunting and Sidis were Boston "Southies"; Sidis living his out his post-MIT life in a "small South End apartment" working menial clerical jobs. Sidis defended himself in court, getting the charges dropped (so to speak). Sidis ends up going out to California following is period of psychological probation, just as does Hunting at the end of the movie, so "to see about a girl." Both Sidis (age 20) and Damon (age 22) dropped out during their last semester of coursework at Harvard (Sidis while in Harvard Law), while in good academic standing, for no apparent reason, failing to degree. |
Sean Maguire ( Robin Williams) | Boris Sidis | Boris was Will's parole psychologist for one year (1919) after his arrest for assaulting an officer. |
Gerald Lambeau ( Stellan Skarsgard) | Daniel Comstock | In 1918 (age 20), Sidis got his first job working with Comstock at MIT who needed an assistant in his laboratory, which at the time was working on the development of a submarine-detection program. As Comstock explained to William’s mother Sarah: “I’m hiring Will for two reasons—I need a brilliant mind, and I hope to keep the boy out of jail for his refusal to go to war.” Comstock was said to have given Sidis “some advanced theoretical problems”, just as Lambeau was said to have brought Hunting into his laboratory to work on “some advanced combinatorial mathematics”. |
Skylar ( Minnie Driver) | Martha Foley | Skylar, played by Minnie Driver, whom Hunting meets at a bar and who he later telephones while in jail is based on Sidis’ only love interest, a 20-year-old Irish socialist Martha Foley, who Hunting (age 21) meets while in jail in 1919; both were among the 114 people arrested May 1st, for the May Day communist anti-war rally protest. When Sidis died from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944, he was still carrying Martha Foley's picture (although she'd long since married someone else). |
Chuckie Sullivan ( Ben Affleck) | Isaac Rabinowitz | Chuckie was based on Sidis' life long buddy Isaac Rabinowtiz, who was well-aware that Sidis lived out the reminder of his life working menial jobs, thus doing little with his so-called mental "lottery ticket", as expressed by Chuckie in the film. |
You can read about the other characters here. I added an overview of this to the article, but most of it was reverted. -- Libb Thims ( talk) 23:04, 18 May 2010 (UTC)
Is all of this information about filming locations, and which businesses are still open, really necessary? It seems like a lot of trivia to me. --- The Old Jacobite The '45 14:37, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
I watched this film last night and I'm sure it was Harvard he was as a janitor at and not MIT. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.158.156.194 ( talk) 16:58, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
"The musical score for The Conjuring was composed by Danny Elfman, who had previously collaborated with Gus Van Sant on To Die For and would go on to score many of the director's other films. The film also features many songs written and recorded by singer-songwriter Elliott Smith. His song "Miss Misery" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic. Elfman's score was also nominated for Oscar, but lost Titanic as well. On September 11, 2006, NBC's The Today Show used Elfman's song "Weepy Donuts" while Matt Lauer spoke during the opening credits."
Whats? Where (and how) does The Conjuring come into this? I think it's a simple mistake - I'm changing it. But so removed from that film is the subject of this article, that I thought I'd write about it: perhaps I'm missing something? Something someone else might want to conjure... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sapienza ( talk • contribs) 08:10, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
Anyone have some good sources for the development of the screenplay? Appears to be a glaring omission from the article czar ♔ 06:24, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
Fascinated by this info, I checked the source and it was apparently a personal quote from Harvey Weinstein said on the Graham Norton show. I looked up the video and watched it— Mr. Wenstein flat out says the oral sex scene was between Sean and the Professor. Not Sean and Will like it says in the article. I do not know why my change was reversed due to being "incorrect", clearly he did not actually look up the source— Sundayclose, it is also a bit silly to suggest to an unregistered user to "leave you a message on your talk page" and then have the talk page be semi-protected so that only registered users who have been registered for 4 days and 10 edits can edit. -- SRCruz ( talk) 21:49, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
Is it worth putting a bit in somewhere about the rumours criculating at the the time of the oscars that william goldman or kevin smith was actually responsible for the script? Smith quite clearly denounces this as false on his first Q & A DVD, but it is an interesting point of trivia to note. Iwtbf42 ( talk) 23:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)
I changed the article so that Robin Williams is the Main/Lead Actor in the Movie and not Matt Damon. There are two places where someone can check who is the main actor: First of all the Movie Poster states in the lower section/credit section Robin Williams as the First actor. Additionaly the beginning credits in the movie state Robin Williams as first actor too. The end credits state otherwise, here is Matt Damon mentioned first, but the end credits are sorted by appearance. Even as the story evolves around Will Hunting, he is the main focus of the movie, this does not mean he is the Lead Actor. The credits and/or movie poster decide who the lead actor is. It is the same for the "Force Awakens", Harrison Ford is the lead actor and not Daisy Ridley, on which the story focus. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Da Vinci Nanjing ( talk • contribs) 17:03, 31 March 2016 (UTC)
"The film grossed over US$225 million during its theatrical from a $10 million budget." Is 'theatrical' being used as a noun here, or is the word'run' missing? Kdammers ( talk) 06:37, 10 March 2018 (UTC)
The plagiarism claim in the lede needs to be removed. Per WP:REDFLAG, extraordinary claims require multiple mainstream sources, and this especially so in this case as the claim could be a WP:BLP violation. The argument that there is no source for Affleck and Damon writing the script is ridiculous and wrong. --- The Old Jacobite The '45 12:32, 2 May 2018 (UTC)
Do we really need so much information on the mathematics? I think anything not directly relevant to the film should be removed. --- The Old Jacobite The '45 16:00, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
What is to be done about them?
"though he works as a janitor" -- his work is assigned by his PO; not a choice.
"The next day," -- is a POV since it is not indicated in the film that the next scene is the following day.
"Lambeau sits in on his court appearance and watches Will defend." -- defend what?
"treats his first few therapists with mockery." -- he treats all his perspective therapists, including Maguire, with mockery/disdain
"Will begins to open up." -- that is a POV as in a later scene M. challenges W's defensive attitude. Talking more or discussing more is a fact but opening up is left to interpretation. WP avoids that.
"Lambeau sets up a number of job interviews for Will," -- L. has been hounded on his phone for W. to start taking interviews and 1 was set up. W. says that he has sent someone else to it. That is 1 interview, not many.
"Skylar asks Will to move to California with her, but he refuses and tells her he is an orphan, and that his foster father physically abused him. Will breaks up with Skylar" -- they share during this one scene many personal views and experiences including misperceptions or misunderstandings each had about the other.
"Lambeau … takes a sabbatical to travel the world." -- M. does not say he is taking a sabbatical, and he will say later that he is going to travel to Baltimore and China, not the world.
"When Will's friends present him with a rebuilt Chevrolet Nova for his twenty-first birthday, he decides to pass on his job offer and drive to California to reunite with Skylar." -- will never says except in his note that he declines any job offer but hat if L. "calls about that job, sorry" and instead, "had to go see about a girl.
"Chuckie goes to Will's house to pick him up, only to find that he is not there, much to his happiness." -- happiness is a POV as a smile can mean many things but it can be safely said that when W. was not there C. smiled. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2605:E000:9149:A600:4474:DD7A:8E8A:9909 ( talk) 05:25, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
I realize that "Parseval's theorem" was on the board when a professor announces a problem-solving challenge at the beginning of the movie. But Parseval's theorem is a very old and commonly proved result. The professor would not be terrifically impressed if someone managed to prove Parseval's theorem. Therefore I think it unlikely that Parseval's theorem was the subject of the problem the professor mentioned, and I will remove all references to Will proving it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Porffiry ( talk • contribs) 02:13, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
Note that, after correctly writing Parseval's theorem on the board, the professor incorrectly refers to "Percival". The closed captioning also writes it as "Percival". MathPerson ( talk) 18:07, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
Well sourced deletion of 'Irish-American' citation seems baseless, if not proprietorial. Many other sources support this. Reason? 109.154.200.100 ( talk) 22:35, 13 January 2023 (UTC)