The Paxton-Pullman Effect
By Nate • Jan 17th, 2009 • Category: Movies
All of you have seen at least one of their movies. They’re the somewhat-handsome, somewhat-rugged, vaguely Midwestern guys. With brownish hair, flinty eyes, gruff-but-comforting voices and an easy demeanors. They’re Bill Paxton and Bill Pullman, and many of us get them confused.
Quick, which one starred with Helen Hunt in Twister?
Okay, which starred with Will Smith in Independence Day?
Which one was Lonestar in Space Balls?
Which one was in Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks?
Confused? This is what my wife and I call the Paxton-Pullman Effect; that nagging feeling that the guy in the movie might be either Bill Paxton or Bill Pullman, but you’re not sure which. It happens to all of us at one point or another, it’s okay.
The Paxton-Pullman Effect had it’s heyday throughout the 1990′s, with a string of films that did extremely well at the box office. Kicking off the decade together in the shitty horror film Brain Dead, they made this decade their bitch in short order. Let’s do the list:
- Predator 2
- Tombstone
- A League of Their Own
- Sleepless in Seattle
- True Lies
- Apollo 13
- While You Were Sleeping
- Twister
- Independence Day
- Titanic
That’s a lot of Box Office. Just between Titanic and Twister, that’s well over a billion dollars. They both starred or appeared in a slew of other films that didn’t do a lot of business, but are nonetheless ubiquitous, like Singles, Lost Highway, Lake Placid, Indian Summer and Mr. Wrong.
In the middle of the decade, it almost seemed like they were trying intentionally to confuse us, with one of them starring in the movie Tombstone and the other in Wyatt Earp. These movies came out in successive years, even. Granted, they had the decency to play different historical figures(Pullman=Bat Masterson/Paxton=Morgan Earp), but still. I think that it’s pretty clear that they were fucking with us.
So, the next time you’re out with friends and arguing over what the name of the guy that stars in the HBO series Big Love is, remember that you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right, but that none of you are going to be able to decide which without the help of Internet Movie Database.
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Nate is pretty sure Mark Twain said it best, "Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place."
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