But earlier this year, he gamely agreed (“why not?”) to talk about the legacy of Now and Then, starring alongside Ricci in Casper, his onetime teen-heartthrob status, and his butt for the duration of our delightful interview.ĭo you remember your audition for Now and Then? More recently, he starred in The Fanatic as a famous actor being stalked by John Travolta. Sawa has since done plenty of memorable work, leaning into his teen-heartthrob phase for a few years before trying on a punkier persona with films like Final Destination and Idle Hands. Now and Then is made of artificial bits and pieces.”
“What distinguished Stand by Me was the psychological soundness of the story,” Ebert wrote. Roger Ebert hated the film, comparing it to Stand by Me, which he loved - and just happened to be about four boys growing up beneath the looming specter of death. But back in the ’90s, her dreamy, dark, nostalgic look at growing up didn’t exactly translate to the majority-male film critic population. If ever a film was shot from the Young Female Gaze, Now and Then was it. Sawa’s moment didn’t feel creepy or frightening, like most things having to do with sex feel when you’re that age - it felt fun and goofy and safe, a collective peek into a future we didn’t have to rush into before we were ready. Part of the appeal of the Butt Scene was the way in which Lesli Linka Glatter directed and shot it. I do watch Now And Then, once a month at least. Although I may have seen them a half dozen times that year because of different screenings. I haven’t seen Casper, FD, idle hands,SLC Punk Slackers etc. All of my celebrity crushes afterward - young Leonardo DiCaprio, Shane from The L Word, post-hererosexuality Kristen Stewart - were made in his androgynous, delicate-boned, faintly emo image. Soon I was buying up all of the Tiger Beats at the local drugstore, isolating Sawa’s face with a pair of scissors and creating deranged, ransom-note posters. That changed as I was confronted with the stark reality of Devon Sawa’s butt. “Devon Sawa’s butt” is now shared cultural shorthand for “the first time I was able to conceptualize horniness.” Back in ’95, I had mostly been interested in boys as an intangible concept my celebrity crush was Pierce Brosnan, a 42-year-old. Even so, the mere suggestion of it was enough to send an entire generation of young girls - all of whom had likely never seen a dick and were still half-terrified about the idea - absolutely reeling.
#Now and then free#
Having once been an adolescent with a VHS player and a lot of free time, I can confirm that this is not the case ( Sawa has also debunked it). Implacable rumors have long swirled that Sawa’s actual junk is on display if you pause the film at the right time. The girls gasp and gawk, and Thora Birch’s Teeny turns to her friends, grinning. His pale white tush gets many, many seconds of screen time. The camera cuts to Sawa - who was 15 at the time, and on the cusp of becoming a Jonathan Taylor Thomas–esque lust object - frolicking in the river, naked.
They soon find a river, but also stumble upon their sworn enemies, the Wormers, a group of local boys headed up by Scott (Sawa), whose interests primarily include hurling water balloons and punching people at small-town baseball games. On the way, a bird poops on the perpetually doomed Chrissy (Aston Moore), and the girls must find a water source with which to assuage the problem. In the scene in question, the central foursome are biking to a nearby town to do some investigating into a mysterious death (another one of my favorite youthful pastimes). I did not think about death for a long time after that. I remember feeling relieved, imagining that in a few years I might have a group of fun girlfriends who’d patiently sit with me while I summoned the dead in a knit poncho. For the first half of the film, I remember feeling gleefully seen, watching fledgling writer Sam (Hoffmann) moodily scribbling in her journal and obsessing over strangers’ graves. I was a freaky 8-year-old who loved séances and hanging out in cemeteries when Now and Then hit theaters, which meant I was perfectly primed for a coming-of-age tale following a group of tweens (Gaby Hoffmann, Thora Birch, Christina Ricci, Ashleigh Aston Moore) who loved séances and hanging out in cemeteries. Personally, I’ll never forget the first time I saw that butt. If you were alive in 1995 and somewhere between the ages of 7 and 17, it’s likely that Devon Sawa’s tush in Now and Then was either wholly responsible for, or at least contributed to, your sexual awakening. Photo: Photo Illustration by Stevie Remsberg And Christina Ricci, and that butt scene, and the sexual awakening of an entire generation.
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