Not many people can say they once gave advice to Brad Pitt and mentored a student who went on to create a critically acclaimed TV series currently airing on Hulu. Andy Horton (PhD, ’73, comparative literature & film studies) can.
A juggernaut in the film industry, there really isn’t much Horton hasn’t done in his life and career.
After graduating high school in 1966 during the Vietnam War, Horton was drafted and later received permission to teach in Greece. There, he fell in love three times. First, with Greece, then with teaching, and then with a Greek.
He found his fourth love at the University of Illinois.
“When I was looking at PhDs as I was finishing my master’s, I talked to different people and they said you’ve got to go to the University of Illinois,” he said. “They have a comparative literature degree, so you can combine the Greek culture more. I went and fell in love with [the program] immediately because of the courses and the teaching.”
He found his fifth and final love when he went back to Greece to teach film—something no one else was really doing at the time, at least not in the university setting. That love was screenwriting.
He’s since made a career out of writing screenplays, teaching—most notably at the University of Oklahoma—and publishing books, but there’s one project that stands out in a big way.
To set the scene: It was the late 80s, and Horton was working with a producer from the former Yugoslavia who had approached him with a jumble of an idea and asked him to turn it into a screenplay. He did. Then, he got the leading casting director in Hollywood involved.
“They chose this guy who was 23 and had been in a couple of TV shows,” said Horton. “He was good.”
That guy was Brad Pitt, and the movie was “The Dark Side of the Sun” (1988), Pitt’s first feature film, which was filmed in Yugoslavia.
Horton was only able to be on the set for one week because of his teaching responsibilities, but it was a memorable seven days, both for him and Pitt.
“I’d been on different movie sets, so [the experience itself] wasn’t really a surprise for me,” recalled Horton. “It was more of a surprise for Brad, who wouldn’t let go of me. He had been trying to break into Hollywood, so I said, ‘Hey, hang in there, and enjoy it. The world out there—there are so many opportunities outside of this.’ I think that opened his mind—and just look what this guy has done.”
While Brad Pitt is arguably the biggest name attached to Horton, he isn’t his only success story. His most recent example is Sterlin Harjo, a former student from his time teaching in Oklahoma. Harjo created the Hulu series “Reservation Dogs,” a comedy about four Native American teenagers growing up on a reservation in eastern Oklahoma.
“The world loves it. The New York Times, everybody loves the show,” said Horton. “It’s so honest and real, and everything about it is Native American. I’m so proud of him.”
Horton said it was his time at the University of Illinois that inspired him to pay it forward and help others make a name for themselves.
“I give the University of Illinois the credit for helping me find my own little world at a big school,” said Horton. “I had a lot of help from people at Illinois, so [I decided] I wanted to help students, too. Even now, as a retired professor who got his degree from Illinois and learned a lot in Greece, I’m happy I can continue to help people.”
Dania De La Hoya Rojas
Editor's note: This story first appeared in the School of Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Fall 2023 newsletter.