“I think I was lucky to get Matthew.” Pretty soon, lots of other producers, directors, and studio execs will be saying the same thing. A year later, he couldn’t be more effusive about his choice: “I don’t think Matthew was lucky to get this role,” the director says. Elmo’s Fire with a then-unknown Demi Moore and Flatliners with a then relatively unknown Julia Roberts, Schumacher is the man who made McConaughey’s breakthrough possible. Previously responsible for, among other things, St. “The research people had never seen anything like it,” Joel Schumacher, the movie’s director, says. When A Time to Kill was screened for test audiences, the response was 500 “excellents” out of 509 cards, a staggering, near-impossible level of approval. McConaughey knows he caught a break, but he never doubted it would come eventually. “I have more options, and options are power, which is good if you use it in the right way.”

“I’m looking at these offers and going, ‘Really?’” he says, chuckling. McConaughey (pronounced “Muh- con-uh-hay”) is just enjoying the play, especially when the phone calls come, promising no-audition roles and dollar figures he has never seen before. Hollywood being Hollywood, the town recovered from its surprise and immediately coronated the actor with “It Boy” status. The heroic, conflicted role of the young defense attorney was one that every youngish actor coveted, so the movie world was caught off guard when the plum went to someone with such a slim résumé. The racially charged legal cliff-hanger turns on the rape and beating of a ten-year-old African American girl when her father enacts a murderous revenge upon the white men responsible, his fate becomes a matter of life-or-death-penalty for his lawyer, Jake Brigance. The reason for this prime placement was McConaughey’s unexpected casting in A Time to Kill, the latest adaptation of a book by John Grisham, America’s best-selling thriller writer. He was the one who wasn’t Tim Roth or Leonardo DiCaprio. In April the 26-year-old Uvalde native, a veteran of Austin filmmaker Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused ensemble, was one of three up-and-comers featured on the cover of Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood issue. For while most moviegoers don’t know what he looks like and his big turn is only now hitting theaters, the verdict has been in for months: Matthew McConaughey is a star. Sometimes they actually get it right, and a solid product and marketing align in such a way that the studios just know something is a hit. But in this age of $100 million budgets, the movie companies do everything they can-surveys, focus groups, demographics studies, micromanaged ad campaigns-to determine what will put paying bodies in the cineplex seats. No matter what America’s corporate entertainment machine puts in the theaters, the public can always reject it.

POPULAR CULTURE IS DETERMINED BY THE POPULACE.

A time to kill book