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Did Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson provide the secret sauce that helped Wes Anderson's movies slide down the hipster moviegoer's throat a little more easily? Slate posits that Wilson's writing contributions to Anderson's films, which ended with The Royal Tenenbaums because The Stallion is now a huge star with little time left for screenwriting, might have tempered the director's more pointy-headed cinematic tendencies with a healthy dose of the "middlebrow":

Unlike Anderson, whose film vocabulary is impressive but top-heavy with auteurs—Jean Renoir, Truffaut, Michael Powell—Owen Wilson draws on the rich mine of the American middlebrow. When Max, facing expulsion from Rushmore Academy, asks his headmaster: "Can you get me off the hook? You know, for old times sake?" Wilson points out that it's a Godfather reference. When Max, alone in a classroom with his love object, the beautiful young teacher Ms. Cross, gets up, mid-conversation, to stick a pencil into an electric sharpener, Wilson recalls a moment in Terms of Endearment when Jack Nicholson, driving in a convertible across the beach, runs his fingers through Shirley MacLaine's hair and shouts, (according to Wilson): "Wind is in the hair, lead is in the pencil!"

While no one but Wilson and Anderson can pin down exactly what Wilson's role in their joint creative process was, we think we can all agree that everything seems a little bit more fun with some Butterscotch Stallion in it.