Important: 50 Literary Cameos in 90s Movies
Or, An Elaborate Excuse to Revisit 10 Things I Hate About You
Max Fischer reads Diving for Sunken Treasure by Jacques Cousteau in Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998) . . .
. . . whereas Miss Cross reads Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Nancy is not so immersed in the Qabalah at this moment in The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996).
Jacob reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger on the subway in Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990). The book also appears later in the film.
“Oh no. He lives.” Morticia Adams reads Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat with great disappointment in Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1993).
And it only gets creepier from there, with Cinderella.
Which is not to forget Stephen Hawking.
Expectations are not met in Hot Shots! Part Deux (Jim Abrahams, 1993).
William Butler Yeats is all over The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood, 1995), which is based on the novel by the same name by Robert James Waller. Meryl Streep was nominated for an Oscar for her excellent reading of The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. (That is not why.)
In Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998), literature is one of the many things that brings color (and sin!) to the eponymous TV town—David (aka Bud) reads the oft-banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye to his classmates, and Jennifer (aka Mary Sue) has her own transformation while reading D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Emily Temple
Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
