Tatum O’Neal Won An Oscar At 10 Years Old For Playing The Same Scene Sam Levinson Wrote For Alamo’s Flashback In This Week’s Euphoria
Peter Bogdanovich directed Paper Moon in 1973. The con man at its center is Ryan O’Neal. The 9-year-old playing his daughter is his actual daughter, Tatum.
Tatum won Best Supporting Actress at the 1974 ceremony for the role. She’s still the youngest person to win a competitive Academy Award.
The film is set in Depression-era Kansas. Addie Loggins has just lost her mother. Moses Pray, a small-time Bible-selling grifter, agrees to deliver her to her aunt in Missouri.
Across one long summer of small-town swindles, Addie figures out the game and joins it. By the end of the film, she’s a better grifter than Moses. The dramatic question that hangs over every scene is whether he’s actually her father.
Sam Levinson rebuilt the structure for half of this week’s Euphoria. The gender is flipped. The grifter is Alamo Brown’s mother. The bait is young Alamo. The mark is Preston, a chemical-factory accident survivor with a big settlement coming.
Alamo’s mother coaches him on how to charm Preston. How to look him in the eye, how to shake his hand, how not to flinch at his scars.
They play house with Preston for a full summer. He buys her gifts and treats her like a princess. At the beach, he asks Alamo for his blessing to propose.
They come home to find the house cleaned out. The “robbery” is the work of his mother’s crew. The mark she’d been working all summer was her son.
Alamo’s mother is played by Danielle Deadwyler. She was the lead in Till (2022), the film about Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
Deadwyler’s performance was widely considered the biggest Best Actress snub of the 2023 Oscars. She returned in 2024 in The Piano Lesson, the August Wilson adaptation Netflix released that fall, playing Berniece Charles opposite John David Washington.
Sam Levinson cast her for one episode of TV.
Where the two films part ways is what the child does with the realization.
Addie ran back to Moses at the end of Paper Moon. She’d been delivered to her aunt’s house, walked out, found him on the road. She chose the imperfect man over being alone.
Young Alamo made himself a different promise: “never again would a b*tch outsmart him”. He grew up to be the man Rue Bennett is currently working for.
Tatum O’Neal won an Oscar in 1974 for playing the child who figures it out. Sam Levinson cast Danielle Deadwyler to play the woman on the other side of that scene. The Academy passed on Deadwyler for Till. He gave her this performance instead.
