#Brad pitt in river runs through it movie#

But the most intriguing incident in Paul’s Dartmouth life came the spring of his senior year. In those days neither publication carried bylines, so Paul’s contributions can’t be identified. Like Norman, Paul was drawn to writing, and at Dartmouth he devoted his attention to The Dartmouth, where he served on the editorial board, and Jack-o-Lantern. The two roomed together part of the time, though in 1925 their boardinghouse burned down, apparently destroying Norman’s early efforts at fiction. Paul’s wild streak and eagerness to defy authority had already surfaced, and Snyder thinks the family hoped Norman could “play sheriff” for his younger brother. After a year at the University of Montana he transferred to Dartmouth, where Norman had remained after graduation to teach English. When he was in high school in Missoula, Paul played football as a lean, 5-foot-10 halfback. Still, two days before his death, Paul mailed a contribution to the Alumni Fund. “If anything, it was stronger than Norman’s,” says Joel Snyder, Norman’s son-in-law. Norman went East to Dartmouth, but throughout his life never abandoned a disdain for the school and relished tales of how he swiped dates from the prep-school swells and took their money in poker. Norman and Paul grew up in Montana, the sons of a strict Scottish Presbyterian minister who nonetheless enjoyed raising tough boys who could fight and win. “As far as his untimely end, there was a strong feeling in the family that he was headed south.”

#Brad pitt in river runs through it movie#

He was just so beautiful,” says Richard Friedenberg, the screenwriter on the movie who did extensive research in preparation. Stories about him still pop up in the newspapers, and a 2012 blog post about his death has drawn more than 100 comments, some from as recently as last fall. The father and the older son are haunted by their inability to rescue the younger man from his self-destructive ways.īecause of his portrait in the book and on the screen, Paul stands as a wonderfully romantic figure, one of the most vivid and intriguing in modern American literature.

In lyrical prose, the book recounts a father and two sons, emotionally constrained yet deeply loving, bonded by their joy in fly-fishing. Paul Maclean would be little more than a forgotten obit in the 1938 alumni magazine if his brother, Norman, hadn’t written a late-in-life autobiographical novel, A River Runs Through It, that was made into a 1992 movie. And after a short life he died in a brutal killing that remains a mystery. He wrote well, often using his talent to blister the bigwigs in his Montana town. An artist of that elegant and graceful sport, fly-fishing, he also fought, gambled, and drank heavily. He was the real deal, the basis for the swashbuckling protagonist of an acclaimed novel.