Ben Affleck had his phone in one hand and the Oscar in the other.
It was the night of March 23, 1998, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Minutes earlier, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau had read out his name and Matt Damon’s as the winners of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Good Will Hunting, the film they had both written together. Now, in the press room, while Damon was still answering questions from journalists, Affleck’s cellphone rang. It was a StarTAC, the most modern phone of its time. And without letting go of the statuette, he answered.
Damon was 27 years old. Affleck, 25. They were two friends from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had grown up dreaming of Hollywood and who for years had tried to make their way in an industry that did not always have a place for them. When the roles did not come, they decided to write their own story: that of Will Hunting, a young Boston genius who would eventually take them to the most important stage in cinema.
That night, after years of effort and sharing dreams and difficulties, the two friends were finally holding the award they had won together. Their mothers were there to see it. They, on the other hand, still seemed to be trying to understand what had just happened.
And perhaps that is why the photograph is so special. It does not show a speech or a grand celebration. It shows something much simpler: two young people, 25 and 27, talking on the phone while holding the Oscar they had just won.
They still did not know that that statuette would be the beginning of a career that would make them two of Hollywood’s most recognizable names. But the photograph remained forever as a portrait of that night: two friends who had bet on a film they had written together and had just discovered that their gamble had changed their lives.