Mystic Pizza

The movie Mystic Pizza is a 1988 coming of age type film, is rated R, run time is 1 hour and 44 minutes and was directed by Donald Petrie and written by Amy Holden Jones. The Mystic Pizza story line centers around the lives and loves of two sisters and their friend. The sisters, Kat Araujo, played by Annabeth Gish, Daisy Araujo, played by Julia Roberts and their friend Jojo Barbosa, played by Lilli Taylor, are all waitresses at Mystic Pizza. Matt Damon is seen briefly in the film and has just one line.

Kat is her mother's pride and joy, she has earned a partial scholarship to Yale University and is a hard worker. Kat works at the pizza parlor, a local planetarium and helps to take care of the children of her Mystic Pizza boss. There is an odd dynamic that builds between the boss, whose wife is not in town at this time, and Kat as they work together watching the children and working in the restaurant.

Daisy is the complete polar opposite of Kat. Daisy tends to sleep around, works just hard enough to get by and seems to want nothing more than to have fun while trying to find a way to get out of this small town.

The movie shows Mystic to be a fishing town that has a high concentration of Portuguese Americans. Some issues raised through the film concern the differing work ethics of the different cultures, as well as their values and morals on many other topics.

The film title comes from an actual pizza restaurant, Mystic Pizza, in Mystic, CT. The name became stuck in the mind of screenwriter, Amy Holden Jones, during a visit. Eventually Mystic Pizza evolved into a story and later became a screenplay. The Mystic Pizza shop was popular among locals and tourists alike long before the film bearing its name.