John Goodman

by Trisha Peplinski Harvey

John Goodman (Fox News)

As stated in an earlier post, John Goodman is from St. Louis.  The world knows him from his role in Roseanne.  However, before he was Dan Conner he was just another St. Louisian.

John was born in Affton in 1952. He attended Affton High School, where he played football. With his football scholarship, he attended Southwest Missouri State University (SMS) in Springfield. That school is now called Missouri State University. He pledged Sigma Phi Epsilon but did not get initiated until after he was a star. In fact, in the ’90s, he would go back to SMS and party with his fraternity friends.  I have seen pictures of this from some of my sister’s friends’ Facebook pages, as she attended SMS in the ’90s. Anyway, he suffered a football injury and decided to become an actor, leaving Missouri in 1975.

St. Louis is proud to have an Emmy award-winning actor (Guest Star in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) in our arsenal. He is also a Golden Globe winner for his work on Roseanne. Plus in 1997 he received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame, which we all know is way more important than the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Gooman is not afraid to jump the borders between movies and TV and will take on so many different roles from comedies, dramas to even children films. Americans love him as Dan Conner because he was an average working-class guy. He comes off as a real guy and not superficial, but maybe that is because he comes from a real, hardworking family from middle America.

I do not really pay attention when I am at the fabulous Lambert airport, but apparently his voice is on one of the automated messages.

Now I love movies and TV and basically anything in that category, so to end my post about John Goodman, I am going to say which is my favorite work he has done.  It is hard to choose because he has been in 72 films and countless shows, but I am a girl, so I am picking Coyote Ugly.

John Goodman & Piper Perabo in Coyote Ugly (Touchstone Pictures via IMDB.com)

In Coyote Ugly, he plays a concerned dad from New Jersey just wanting the best for his daughter.  He raised her without a mom and is very worried when he finds out where she is working.  John plays a father figure really well.  He is a father, but also, his own dad died when he was a toddler.  He is just very believable.

So here’s to you, John Goodman.  You might not live in St. Louis anymore, but St. Louis will always be proud to be your hometown.

Trisha Peplinski Harvey is living in Texas with her husband and two dogs but still calls St. Louis home.  She has never met John Goodman, but she has been on the SMS campus quite a few times.

“Up in the Air”

by Mary Poletti

Remember how we said St. Louisans especially like shout-outs to St. Louis from homegrown celebrities? Well, St. Louisans will take them pretty much anywhere we can get them. And that’s why St. Louisans like — no, LOVE — the Oscar-nominated 2009 film Up in the Air, great swaths of which were filmed in our fair hometown. The St. Louis media was all over this film like a cheap suit before filming even started. Sure, other great movies had been filmed in St. Louis — Planes, Trains and Automobiles featured some scenes at Lambert Field, and hello, Meet Me in St. Louis? — but had any of them starred GEORGE FREAKIN’ CLOONEY? And had any of them cast legions of St. Louisans as extras? And had any of them treated St. Louis as their own personal soundstage without actually mostly taking place in St. Louis? Not in this generation, bubba.

Hey, that's OUR airport! And...and that's George Clooney! (Paramount Pictures via TheInsider.com)

So we rubbernecked in our own streets during filming, hoping to catch a glimpse of Clooney, and we waited with bated breath for Jason Reitman’s inadvertent love letter to our fair city to drop. And when it did, we hurried into theaters, oohing and aahing over the gratuitous shots of St. Louis — the ones we had anticipated like Lambert (which gets a serious shout-out in the film) and the Cheshire Inn, but also the unexpected ones like Mansion House Apartments, the Renaissance, Affton High School, Lafayette Square, a little Methodist church in Maplewood…the list goes on. (In fact, the Post-Dispatch visualized the whole list.)

And when Up in the Air succeeded, critically and financially, and began to generate Oscar and Golden Globes buzz, we were euphoric — and disappointed when it failed to follow through on most of the buzz. Much of the day-after coverage of the Golden Globes and now the Oscars in the St. Louis media has led with something to the effect of “Avatar and The Hurt Locker score big; Up in the Air does not.” We were INVESTED this year, man. Compared to the rest of the field, Up in the Air never really had a shot at the Oscars. Not when Best Picture was the duel of the director-exes between Avatar and The Hurt Locker; not when Jeff Bridges and Mo’Nique had Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress sewn up (Clooney said he’d even voted for Bridges himself); not when Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire was pretty much guaranteed Best Adapted Screenplay, perhaps as a consolation prize for losing out on Best Picture and Best Actress. But in St. Louisans’ minds, Up in the Air just had to score big. It just had to. It already had with us.

For in our hearts and minds, St. Louis is the real winner with Up in the Air‘s Oscar buzz. We get to feel a little better about the city we love, which obviously many others have now seen and loved too, even if it’s disguised as a host of other cities. A friend who was gunning for Avatar for Best Picture scoffed earlier that Precious was poverty porn; when Up in the Air came up in the same conversation, I responded that it qualified as St. Louis porn. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. Congratulations on your achievement, Reitman and Clooney and friends, and thanks for bringing us along for the ride.

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She lived a block away from that little Methodist church in Maplewood, and her sister lives within walking distance of the Cheshire Inn. Neither one ever saw George Clooney.