Leadership in Film Issues - Essay Example

The movie eventually grossed a dose to $30 million at the box office, and undisclosed video and DVD sales and TV broadcasts are still contributing to its bottom line. Coach Norman Dale became Gene Hackman's comeback role, and Dennis Hopper earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as Wilbur "Shooter" Flatch. "Hoosiers is told from a nostalgic distance, and those allergic to corniness might best be advised to stay home," wrote a reviewer for The Washington Post. "But what do you expect in a movie about Indiana? Corn is what they make there. And the movie's enormous craftsmanship accumulates till you're seduced into believing all its Pepperidge Farm buncombe".

One man's corn can be another's inspiration. At sporting arenas around the country, it's not unusual for Jumbottons to play clips of Coach Dale firing up his Hickory Huskers with a pregame speech. New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner has been known to compare his management decisions to those of Hickory High's principal, Cletus. Last year, Ron Hunter, coach of the IUPUI Jaguars, made his team watch Hoosiers before taking on number-one seed Kentucky in the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

But not everyone loves Hoosiers. Pizzo and Anspaugh's fictional South Bend Central, the team Hickory faces in the final game, is a composite of two teams Milan did play in its 1954 tournament run: all-black Crispus Attucks and Muncie Central, which was integrated but predominantly white. As a result, the movie audience sees no black characters - indeed, hardly black faces at all - until the film's climax, when little Hickory has to face big bad South Bend Central, the majority of whose players and all of whose coaches are black. As a way to honour their place in Indiana basketball lore, Pizzo and Anspaugh gave two members of the historic Attucks team - legendary coach Ray Crowe and player Bailey Robertson - cameo roles as South Bend coaches, but the film's racial dynamic has drawn fire from prominent critics over the years. Filmmaker Spike Lee, for one, sees the movie not as an inspirational drama but as the embodiment of white nostalgia for a segregated society. "They are usually warmly embraced, these pictures about how wonderful and fine it was when niggers weren't around", he writes in his book Best Seal in the House: A Basketball Memoir. In his book, basketball great and former Attucks star Oscar Robertson also questions the film's implicit message: "Is the proverbial race card being played?" (Kauffman, 3 p.).

Despite the controversy, Sports Illustrated recently ranked Hoosiers sixth on its list of greatest sports movies (perhaps what kept it from the top spot was its synthesized soundtrack, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1986 but now sounds like it was composed in, well, 1986). But Hoosiers' legacy transcends the world of movies. If not for Hackman, Hopper and the boys, one has to wonder if SI would have named the 1954 Milan Indians its 12th-favorite sports team of all time, or if ESPN would have named them the third-greatest clutch team. To the extent that Milan's victory inspired Hoosiers, one could argue that Hoosiers returned the favour, enshrining the game in the country's collective sports-history consciousness. And here, to mark the 50th anniversary of the game that Hoosiers celebrates, former Milan players and the film's cast and crew hold court on making a sports movie for the ages.

A scene that was changed during filming was one in which Shooter was supposed to have broken out of the detox ward and appeared in the locker room at the final game. But Dennis, having been sober for about six years at the time, said that if we wanted to believe Shooter is committed to sobriety, then we had to keep him in the hospital. Angelo and I fought it pretty hard at first, but he was dead-on right. Just like the stovepipe hat, another one of Dennis' ideas. I said, "He'll never get away with wearing that - he'll be laughed off the screen." He said, "Trust me, it'll work" And it did.