Prison Ball | |
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Directed by | Jason Moriarty |
Written by | Jeff Scheftel |
Produced by | Jason Moriarty, Stephen Belafonte, Hugh O'Sullivan, Michael Butler and Theo Rozsa |
Release date |
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Running time | 90 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Prison Ball is a 2004 American documentary film directed by Jason Moriarty and written by Jeff Scheftel. The 90-minute film is narrated by Ice-T. [1] [2]
Prison Ball is about prison basketball as practiced by prisoners within prison walls. The documentary interviews various inmates and prison officials and specialists on the matter and tackles as well "prison basketball leagues" operating within prison systems. It focuses on four Louisiana state prison teams, [3] and was shot mainly in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. [4]
In 2004, it was nominated for the Hollywood Film Festival awards for the category "Hollywood Documentary Award". [5]
Billy Bob Thornton is an American actor. He had his first break when he co-wrote and starred in the 1992 thriller One False Move, and received international attention after writing, directing, and starring in the independent drama film Sling Blade (1996), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. He appeared in several major film roles in the 1990s following Sling Blade, including Oliver Stone's neo-noir U Turn (1997), political drama Primary Colors (1998), science fiction disaster film Armageddon (1998), the highest-grossing film of that year, and the crime drama A Simple Plan (1998), which earned him his third Oscar nomination.
Tracy Lauren Marrow, better known by his stage name Ice-T, is an American rapper, songwriter, actor, and producer. He began his career as an underground rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays—reportedly the first hip-hop album to carry an explicit content sticker. The following year, he founded the record label Rhyme $yndicate Records and released another album, Power, which would go platinum. He also released several other albums that went gold.
Steven Allan Spielberg is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. A figure of the New Hollywood era, he is the most commercially successful director of all time. Spielberg is the recipient of various accolades, including three Academy Awards, a Kennedy Center honor, a Cecil B. DeMille Award, and an AFI Life Achievement Award. Time magazine named him one of the 100 Most Important People of the Century in 2013.
Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio is an American actor and film producer. Known for his work as a leading man in biopics and period films, he is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. As of 2019, his films have grossed over $7.2 billion worldwide, and he has been placed eight times in annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actors.
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The Louisiana State Penitentiary is a maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections. It is named "Angola" after the former slave plantation that occupied this territory. The plantation was named after the country of Angola from which many slaves originated before arriving in Louisiana.
Harvey Weinstein is an American former film producer and convicted sex offender. He and his brother, Bob Weinstein, co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); The Crying Game (1992); Pulp Fiction (1994); Heavenly Creatures (1994); Flirting with Disaster (1996); and Shakespeare in Love (1998). Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love and also won seven Tony Awards for plays and musicals including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company, a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.
Robin Roberts is an American television broadcaster. Roberts is the anchor of ABC's Good Morning America. Roberts was the first woman of color and first openly LGBT woman to host the American TV game show Jeopardy!
Robert Jolin Osborne was an American film historian, television presenter, author, actor and the primary host for more than 20 years of the cable channel Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Prior to hosting at TCM, Osborne had been a host on The Movie Channel, and earlier, a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter. Osborne wrote the official history of the Academy Awards, originally published in 1988.
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Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.
Leonardo DiCaprio is an American actor who began his career performing as a child on television. He appeared on the shows The New Lassie (1989) and Santa Barbara (1990) and also had long running roles in the comedy-drama Parenthood (1990) and the sitcom Growing Pains (1991). DiCaprio played Tobias "Toby" Wolff opposite Robert De Niro in the biographical coming-of-age drama This Boy's Life in 1993. In the same year, he had a supporting role as a developmentally disabled boy Arnie Grape in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture. In 1995, DiCaprio played the leading roles of an American author Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries and the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse. The following year he played Romeo Montague in the Baz Luhrmann-directed film Romeo + Juliet (1996). DiCaprio starred with Kate Winslet in the James Cameron-directed film Titanic (1997). The film became the highest grossing at the worldwide box-office, and made him famous globally. For his performance as Jack Dawson, he received the MTV Movie Award for Best Male Performance and his first nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama.
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