Picking At The Mystic Pizza Crust
The winning combo of the specific and the universal, in movie-sized form
A Fresh Taste
I’m not much of a movies person. I’ll take books or music or podcasts for 9 times out of 10, and Ted Lasso another .5 times.
I’ve watched Mystic Pizza, however, 2.5 times this calendar year. It’s a movie from 1988 that I hadn’t heard of before I watched it. And it struck a chord with me.
The story is about two sisters and their best friend, each in their late teens or early 20s, who live in a small town in Connecticut and work at the local pizza parlor. Each of them has a romantic plot to follow; the pretty floozy falls for a rebellious rich kid, the hometown girl is struggling with a boyfriend who demands commitment, and the aspiring Yalie gets embroiled with a babysitting client. Throw in small-town hijinx, class and ethnic tensions, the nostalgic but not too distant late teenage feel, and a plot line around the titular pizza’s review by a Phantom Gourmet type critic, and it’s a sweet movie.
I watched it for the first time with Amy1 in the spring, then stumbled on it again in a Netflix perusal this summer, and decided it would make for a good Visible Cities topic. I had planned to write about its touching sense of place, a slow-paced fleshing out of a community and a specific part of the world, and how I liked those things. I would have nodded to more recent entries like Lady Bird, as an example of movies I like: movies that tell a story within boundaries, both for the characters and the setting, and ask not much more of the audience than to pay attention and empathize.
I have decided not to write about Mystic Pizza that way. That would be too pat, and too maudlin. The movie does a great job at setting, at conveying life in Mystic without, as Borges2 might put it, overfilling it with local color. It’s a fun movie. I’m not fit to make bold statements about movies of today, yet it seems like this type of movie doesn’t get made a lot anymore. It also features Julia Roberts’s first star turn and Matt Damon’s first screen appearance and several other interesting actors and avoids having an overly cheesy 80s soundtrack and it’s not long and there’s even a snatch of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous featuring Mar-a-Lago, all of which gives it a feeling of being of its time without being dated.
I liked it and you might too. Let’s leave the movie as a piece of art there. I’d rather pull on a few strings about it instead.
Developing The Recipe
First, how does something like this get written and made? I imagine that these sorts of stories are personal, not necessarily biographical but rooted in experience. And that could be the case in terms of the story. The setting appears to have been a happy selection: Amy Holden Jones, the original writer, had no specific ties to Mystic, Connecticut but vacationed there one summer, and reportedly,
“She sampled a pizza, likened it to "a slice of heaven" and thought the establishment would be great setting for a movie she envisioned about women who worked there as waitresses.”
Jones’s story leads us down another alley. She has had a long and successful career in entertainment, starting as an assistant for Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver, moving from there into film editing and then into screenwriting. Mystic Pizza was the script that made her name in the industry, but it was bittersweet: she had intended to direct the movie, but after various runarounds, the studio decided to have Donald Petrie,
“a man who had never directed before…(direct the movie). By now I’d written and directed three films. That was what life was like as a woman trying to direct their own material in the 1980’s. It was a long, uphill fight.”
So the movie’s production was of its time.
The Local Ingredients
The next thread is how the setting was adapted into the story. Mystic, Connecticut is on the eastern Connecticut shore, close to Rhode Island and the bottom of Massachusetts. It’s a region once known for whaling and fishing and lobsters. In the movie, the owners of the restaurant are Portuguese by heritage. The Portuguese roots go back to the beginning of the European presence in New England, including the oldest still standing synagogue in the country, in Newport, Rhode Island. That early presence included a man who “introduced the sperm-oil industry” to America, though he doesn’t get mentioned in wider whaling histories (and alas was also involved in the slave trade). In any case, whaling is what drew Portuguese to the U.S., especially from the Azores islands and Madeira and especially to New Bedford, the center of the whaling industry in 19th century U.S. and the opening setting for Moby Dick (which, again alas, has no Portuguese characters in it).
This initial momentum maintained even as whaling receded, and that coast is among the most concentrated Portuguese-American community in the country. It comes up in J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, which includes a description of the Catholic Bishop and then Cardinal Humberto Sousa Medeiros in Boston during the desegregation/school racism struggles of the 70s in Boston:
“The son of immigrants from the Portuguese Azores, he had come of age in Fall River – fifty miles south of Boston – where he had got a taste of ethnic warfare, Massachusetts style. To many Fall River Irish, the Portuguese – or “Portogees,” as they were invariably known were only one step above the Negroes, and Humberto’s schoolmates hadn’t hesitated to remind him where he stood in the pecking order.”
The movie is imbued with Portuguese sensibilities: the Catholic church and religious touches in the houses, the characters’ last names, the feeling of helplessness that Daisy, the character played by Julia Roberts feels (reflecting some sense of class inferiority), a WASP-ish racist incident that is a climax in the movie, and even that pronunciation of Portogee; all of them either background elements or plot pieces. It’s for all that an understated element in the movie. It fits the way the lobster and fishing industry3 does, a key part of the setting that adds color and specificity to the movie without being an all-defining theme.
Missing The Soil And Roots
That leads me to another thread, though, which is the town itself. For some reason when I first watched this and looked up Mystic on Google Maps, I got the impression this was a made-up town. But Mystic is real, and Mystic Pizza is real. The town has a seaport museum and an aquarium and was where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall honeymooned, staying in an inn that has since had its own dark history. The town looks gorgeous in the movie and in the online photos.
I grew up one state over in Massachusetts. The closest I have come to Mystic is getting off a Long Island ferry at New London a few miles west. This makes me think of the narcissism of small differences. I grew up in a suburb of Boston; western Massachusetts was a hickish farmland in our eyes, New Hampshire Cow Hampshire, Maine some unfathomable wilderness once you got past Portland, and Vermont sort of a hippie version of western Mass. Connecticut, for me, was always a state to drive through, and I don’t think I’ve spent a night in it that was not for wrestling purposes. Even the South Shore of Massachusetts was to be distrusted, probably from producing wrestling rivals. We appreciated Cape Cod as a summer destination, viewed Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard as rich people territory, and Rhode Island was sort of a curiosity. We visited Newport for its mansions, though I took some pride in the seeing the synagogue mentioned above. We skied in New Hampshire, and most of our other day trips or excursions were in state. And now, I look at a place like Mystic, and I think of all the small towns I’ve gotten a kick out of in the Midwest, and wonder at what the difference in my inspiration is.
A Real World Delivery
The town was also affected by Mystic Pizza, which is where I tie together the ‘choice’ of the Portuguese community and the musings on the town. Mystic Pizza, the shop, is run by a Greek-American immigrant family, who bought the previous iteration of the pizza place (“Ted’s”), and renamed it after the town. They seemed to have no problem with the movie changing the ethnic focus of the shop4, and proceeded to prosper from the movie.
In regular coverage from the New York Times – because Connecticut was part of their local market or because they loved local color? – the owner, Steve Zelepos, goes from hope:
''We registered the trademark,'' Mr. Zelepos said, holding up a pizza box, where the universal copyright sign has been added after his restaurant's name. ''Now we try for some big business, maybe a franchise.''
To being mildly overwhelmed:
''Sometimes it's too busy, you know?'' said Mr. Zelepos, a native of Greece, who opened the pizza parlor in Mystic 16 years ago. 'I didn't expect it like this. This is too much.''
To euphoric success:
"Business has gone up every year for five years," he said, his hand sweeping gently up to illustrate the point.
On weekends, he added, the place is always jammed and sometimes there are lines outside. And, yes, people still do occasionally call for reservations. "Someone called yesterday." He gives them the same answer. "What reservations? And when they show up without reservations, they are likely to buy, in addition to pizza of course, the T-shirts and mugs and lighters and caps that say "Mystic Pizza, A Slice of Heaven."
Meanwhile, the town also seemed to get a big kick out of the filming, teaching the actors how to catch and handle lobsters and how to dance the “chamarita”, and joining in the movie itself, which featured some 700 local extras. The closest I can get to a dark side to this story is a few “well actually,” style reviews that say the pizza is overrated. Hardly a harsh trade-off.
The Special Sauce
I really like Mystic Pizza. When I decided to write this essay, I thought it might unearth an unsung gem from the 80s, something a lot of people had forgotten. It became clear that I hadn’t heard about it but that it was plenty sung, to the tune of morning show cast reunions and extensive explainer posts and twitter buzz and pithy recaps. Even at the time, more critics than not recognized its sweetness, the power of its setting, and the portent for its actors’ careers. So, I’m not sure I had much to add about the movie itself.
But, the places are what draws me, and the people therein. And I think what makes Mystic Pizza more than a coming-of-age story is that it belongs somewhere. Or maybe, what makes the best coming-of-age stories work is how they belong to a time and place that is imagined and novel, even as we recognize how much of our lives and the characters’ lives are universal. That push and pull between the specific and the universal, I think, is what makes the world understandable and exciting.
Thanks for reading! Mystic Pizza is available on Netflix if you are in the U.S., and for rent on Amazon if not. I may have bought the thing just to put it on again whenever I want to, but that’s my issue.
Next week is going to be a briefer, update on the state of VC sort of post, and then we’ll get back to normal city posts in October. Thanks for sticking around, and if you’d like to share it with a friend, I’d be honored.
One advantage of marrying up in age is getting cultural exposure to an earlier generation’s highlights. "Beverly Hills Cop”, “Valley Girl”, “The Grifters”, “Lonesome Dove”, and, yes, “Pretty Woman”, all since the pandemic started.
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges once said that there were no camels in the Koran, insinuating that one does not need to throw on local flourishes in their work to really capture a place, and that doing so is a sign of an outsider faking it.
The owner in the movie, Leona, is not explicitly said to be Portuguese, but her motherly affection towards the main three girls and the accoutrements in the movie’s pizza shop, including a postcard of the Azores, are a pretty strong indication. I believe she says the ingredients for her secret sauce come from those islands as well. Also, a more learned person might be able to confirm whether the way she crosses herself at one point is in the Catholic or Orthodox manner.