Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1991 coming-of-age drama, "The Man in the Moon."

It was directed by Robert Mulligan from an original screenplay by Jenny Wingfield.

"The Man in the Moon" stars Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, Gail Strickland, Jason London, Emily Warfield, and a young Reese Witherspoon in her motion picture debut.

[upbeat music] Dani Trant is a 14-year-old girl living in a small town in Louisiana in the summer of 1957.

She loves Elvis and the outdoors, but she's less keen on doing her household chores.

Dani's father is a carpenter, and her housewife mother is pregnant with her fourth child, a child her husband fervently hopes will be a boy.

Dani has an older sister, 17-year-old Maureen, who will be going off to Duke University in the fall, and a younger sister, Missy.

One sunny day, Dani runs off to skinny-dip in a nearby creek, but a newcomer, an older boy named Court, shows up at the swimming hole and tells her she's trespassing.

Dani argues with him before she angrily returns home.

She finds her mother busy preparing dinner for a visit from an old friend and her family.

The old friend is Marie Foster, who's known Dani's mother and father since they were all in school together.

She's returned to her family farm following the recent death of her husband.

With her are her rambunctious twin boys and their 17-year-old brother, who turns out to be Court, the boy who shooed Dani away from the swimming hole.

When his mother asks Court to drive into town to go to the store, Dani is forced to go with him.

Despite the earlier friction between them, Dani and Court slowly start to get along and enjoy each other's company.

They become friends, but for Dani, at least, their friendship is also her first serious crush.

As the summer progresses, her feelings for Court grow, but so do her chances of suffering her first serious heartbreak [gentle upbeat music] Coming of age is a major turning point in any young person's life as they make the transition from being a child to becoming an adult.

Coming of age can take many forms.

There are several stages in becoming an adult in the eyes of the law in the United States, for example, from getting a driver's license to gaining the right to vote to being old enough to drink alcohol legally.

Becoming an adult is often marked by some sort of ritual in religious communities, one of the rites of passage that one experiences through the course of one's life.

Religious rituals, such as the bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah in Judaism or adult baptism or confirmation in Christianity, represents both the community's recognition that a young person has gained the status of an adult and the young person's recognition that they must assume the obligations and responsibilities of an adult within their community.

In addition, some cultures have secular ceremonies to mark a young person's transition to adult status.

The traditional Sweet 16 celebration for many American girls as a counterpart to the more elaborate Quinceanera in Spanish-speaking South American countries, or the Bal des Debutantes or Festa de Quince in Brazil.

Stories about coming of age are popular subgenre of literature, as well as motion pictures.

This is hardly surprising since most compelling stories involve the idea of change and the acquisition of wisdom, either as an accompaniment to the achievement of some sort of goal or as the goal itself.

Almost every fairy tale is, in some sense, a coming-of-age story as a protagonist learns something about the world and how best to cope with it.

In English literature, Henry Fielding's "History of Tom Jones, a Foundling," Lawrence Stern's Life and opinions of Tristram Shandy," and Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey" are all examples of early novels about someone coming of age through a series of experiences and adventures and becoming wiser and more mature as a result.

Many later novels, including Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," James Joyce's "Portrait of the artist as a Young Man, or J.D.

Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," focus on the personal struggles of a sensitive young man.

But there are also many stories about young girls coming of age, from Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" to Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" to Alice Walker's "The Color Purple."

All three of those novels have been rendered into memorable motion pictures as well, or in the case of "Little Women," several memorable motion pictures.

[gentle upbeat music] According to a review in the Los Angeles Times when the movie opened, "The Man in the Moon" was based on novice screenwriter Jenny Wingfield's recollections of growing up in rural Louisiana.

The movie was shot in part on location in Natchitoches, the oldest settlement in the Louisiana territory, located about 250 miles northwest of New Orleans.

The town had previously been used as a setting for the 1989 film "Steel Magnolias" starring Sally Fields, Dolly Parton and Shirley MacLaine.

The production crew for that movie apparently made so many demands on the residents who worked as extras that when "The Man in the Moon" was being filmed in Natchitoches, very few of the towns people were willing to participate.

The film makers were determined to find fresh faces for the role of the movie's three teenaged leads, Dani Trant, her sister Maureen, and Court Foster.

About 5,000 young people from 10 states auditioned for parts.

Reese Witherspoon, who was born in New Orleans, began work as a model for local television commercials at seven, took acting lessons, and won first place in a state talent fair at 11.

She went to an open casting call for "The Man in the Moon" in hopes of getting a part as an extra, but ended up with the lead role of Dani Trant.

Director Robert Mulligan later said, "When I saw Reese's test, she just jumped off the screen simply as a personality.

Then when I tested her in Santa Monica, a scene where she had to get angry with a boy, it had a false ring to it, because in real life she isn't a tomboy, she's a real girl girl.

Just before we did another rehearsal, I told her I wanted her to chew gum.

Well, she started chewing gum, and all of a sudden, the performance happened.

She was tough, strong, direct, and the scene worked.

She said, 'Can I always chew gum?'

And I said, 'Yeah.'

Witherspoon's performance as Dani Trant was lauded by critics.

Reviews in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety said it was "virtually flawless" and "outstanding".

Janet Maslin of the New York Times wrote, "Mr. Mulligan gets and outstandingly natural performance out of Miss Witherspoon, who has no trouble carrying a lot of the film single handedly.

It falls to her to remind the audience that this is a story, at heart, about a family, and she does."

Roger Ebert, writing for The Chicago Sun Times said of Witherspoon, "Her first kiss is one of the most perfect little scenes I've ever scene in a movie."

Ebert also had high praise for Robert Mulligan, who had previously directed notable coming of age stories and motion pictures like "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 1962, "Inside Daisy Clover" in 1965, and "The Summer of '42" in 1971.

Ebert wrote, "Although his work is uneven, he has always been a serious and sincere artist.

Nothing else he has done, however, approaches the purity and perfection of 'The Man in the Moon'."

Not all critics were as laudatory as Roger Ebert.

Some felt the trajectory of the film's coming of age story was sentimental and overly familiar.

Others found the accidental death of Court Foster immediately after he has consummated his relationship with Dani's older sister, Maureen, to be a cynically convenient way of resolving the estrangement between the two sisters.

Rita Kempley wrote in a review for the Washington Post, "As the director of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Summer of '42', Mulligan managed to marry the disparate dramatic elements to find the balance between the bleak and the bright that eluded him here.

Perhaps 'The Man in the Moon' marks the eclipse of a glorious career."

Indeed, the film proved to be the last Mulligan directed before his death in 2008 at the age of 83.

After her debut in the "Man in the Moon", Reese Witherspoon received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as high school over-achiever Tracy Flick in 1999's "Election" opposite Matthew Broderick.

Witherspoon's breakthrough role as fashionista and aspiring law student, Elle Woods, followed in 2001, with "Legally Blonde".

Some 20 years later, Forbes Magazine identified her as the highest paid actress in the world.

In 2023, based on her work as both an actress and a producer, Forbes put Reese Witherspoon on its list of the 15 richest celebrity women in the United States, with an estimated net worth of $440 million.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.