But when Walter was only 17, Dad died and son had to get a much more conservative haircut to land a job at Papa John’s Pizza. It seems that little Walter used to be an expert skateboarder whose father was so wise and loving that he let his son have a mohawk haircut.
It’s pretty complicated, according to Steve Conrad’s screenplay.
WALTEE MTTY MOVIE
But that wasn’t enough to float a whole movie, so they gave him a real-life adventure in which Mitty inadvertently found himself at the center of a ring of smugglers.Īs impersonated by Stiller, Mitty still daydreams - but now a movie about him must ask the question, “Why?” Mitty traded in the wife for an annoying mother in the 1947 film version starring Danny Kaye - who naturally had to sing in his fantasies. Unfortunately, this “Mitty” tries too hard, and as a result his many adventures - both real and imagined - are neither intriguing nor amusing.īack in 1939, when James Thurber wrote the original short story for “The New Yorker,” Mitty was just your ordinary henpecked husband who daydreamed extravagant fantasies of bravery and genius at the drop of his wife’s verbal jabs. In our superhero world, Ben Stiller must have realized how much harder it is today for milquetoast men in a macho America when he set out to direct and star in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which is set for a December release, but which premiered on Saturday at the New York Film Festival. It isn’t easy being Walter Mitty in the year 2013.