Gene Hackman stars as Norman Dale, a new coach with a spotty past. The film co-stars Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper, whose role as the basketball-loving town drunk earned him an Oscar nomination. Jerry Goldsmith was also nominated for an Academy Award for his score. In 2001, Hoosiers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[4][5]
Plot
In 1951, Norman Dale arrives in rural Hickory, Indiana. His old friend, high school principal Cletus Summers, has hired him as the civics and history teacher and as head basketball coach.
The townspeople, passionate about basketball, are disappointed that Hickory's best player, Jimmy Chitwood, has left the team following the death of the previous coach, who had been a surrogate father to Jimmy. At a meet-and-greet, Dale tells the townspeople he used to coach college basketball. The next day, fellow teacher Myra Fleener warns Dale not to recruit Jimmy. She is encouraging Jimmy to focus solely on his studies so that he will have a future away from Hickory.
The small school has only seven players. At the first practice, Dale dismisses Buddy Walker for rudeness, causing another player, Whit Butcher, to walk out in protest. Dale begins drilling the others (Rade Butcher, Merle Webb, Everett Flatch, Strap Purl, and equipment manager Ollie McLellan) with fundamentals and conditioning but no scrimmages or shooting, much to the Huskers' dismay. Whit later apologizes to Dale and rejoins the team.
Dale instructs the Huskers to pass four times before shooting. During the season opener, Rade disobeys and repeatedly makes baskets without passing first. Dale benches him for the rest of the game, even when Merle fouls out, leaving only four Huskers on the floor. In a subsequent game, when a rival player jabs Dale in the chest during an on-court argument, Rade jumps to his defense and hits the player. During the altercation, Principal Summers, acting as assistant coach, suffers a mild heart attack. Dale further erodes community support by employing a slow, defensive style that does not immediately produce results. Dale also loses his temper on court and gets ejected from two games.
With Summers laid up, Dale asks former Husker Wilbur "Shooter" Flatch, Everett's alcoholic father, to be his assistant coach, with the requirement that Shooter be sober during all games and practices. Shooter agrees, on the condition that Dale not get ejected from any more games. Dale's choice of Shooter confounds the town and embarrasses Everett.
Mid-season, disgruntled townspeople decide to vote on dismissing Dale. Before the meeting, Fleener, sensing something amiss regarding Dale's past, uncovers years-old information about his hitting a player and being banned from coaching. However, Fleener chooses not to reveal this fact to the townspeople, instead telling them at the meeting to give Dale another chance. Nevertheless, they vote to fire the coach. Then Jimmy Chitwood arrives and announces he will rejoin the team, but only if Dale remains as coach. A new vote is taken, and the residents overwhelmingly choose to keep Dale.
After Jimmy's return, the reinvigorated Huskers rack up a series of wins. To prove to the townspeople (and to Shooter himself) Shooter's value to the team, Dale intentionally gets ejected from a game. This forces Shooter to devise a play that helps Hickory win on a last-second shot. Shooter also regains the respect of his son, Everett.
Despite a setback when Shooter relapses, the team advances through the state tournament with Jimmy's strong performance. Unsung players, such as short Ollie and devoutly religious Strap, also contribute. Hickory reaches the championship game in Indianapolis. At Butler Fieldhouse, and before the largest crowd they have ever seen, the Huskers face long odds to defeat the heavily favored South Bend Central Bears, who have taller and more athletic players. After falling behind, Hickory fights their way back and ties the game with just a few seconds left. Dale calls a timeout and sets up a play where Jimmy will be a decoy for Merle, who will take the last shot. The Huskers look uncomfortable, and when Dale demands to know what's wrong, Jimmy simply says, "I'll make it." He scores just before the buzzer sounds, securing the victory.
Sometime in the future, a boy shoots baskets in Hickory's home gym. A large black-and-white team portrait is seen hanging on the wall, and a voiceover from Dale states, "I love you guys."
In most U.S. states, high school athletic teams are divided into different classes, usually based on the number of enrolled students, with separate state championship tournaments held for each classification. In 1954, Indiana conducted a single state basketball tournament for all its high schools. This practice continued until 1997.[6]
Some plot points are similar to Milan's real story. Like the film's fictional Hickory High School, Milan was a very small high school in a rural, southern Indiana town. Both schools had undersized teams. Both Hickory and Milan won the state finals by 2 points: Hickory won 42–40, and Milan won 32–30. The last seconds of the Hoosiers state final are fairly close to the details of Milan's 1954 final; the last basket in the film was made from virtually the same spot on the floor as Bobby Plump's actual game-winner. The movie's final game was filmed in the same gymnasium that hosted the 1954 Indiana state championship game, Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse (called Butler Fieldhouse in 1954) in Indianapolis.[6]
Unlike the film's plot, the 1954 Milan Indians came into the season as heavy favorites and finished the '53–'54 regular season at 19–2. In addition, the 1952–1953 team went to the state semifinals, and they were considered a powerhouse going into the championship season despite the school's small enrollment.[6]
During filming in the autumn of 1985, on location at Hinkle Fieldhouse, directors were unable to secure enough extras for shooting the final scenes even after casting calls through the Indianapolis media. To help fill the stands, they invited two local high schools to move a game to the Fieldhouse. Broad Ripple and Chatard, the alma mater of Maris Valainis who played the role of Jimmy Chitwood, obliged, and crowd shots were filmed during their actual game. Fans of both schools came out in period costumes to serve as extras and to supplement the hundreds of locals who had answered the call. At halftime and following the game, actors took to the court to shoot footage of the state championship scenes, including the game-winning shot by Hickory.[citation needed]
The film's producers chose New Richmond, Indiana to serve as the fictional town of Hickory and recorded most of the film's location shots in and around the community. Signs on the roads into New Richmond still recall its role in the film. In addition, the old schoolhouse in Nineveh was used for the majority of the classroom scenes and many other scenes throughout the film.[7]
The home court of Hickory is located in Knightstown and is now known as the "Hoosier Gym."
Pizzo and Anspaugh shopped the script for two years before they finally found investment for the project. Despite this seeming approval, the financiers approved a production budget of only $6 million, forcing the crew to hire most of the cast playing the Hickory basketball team and many of the extras from the local community around New Richmond. Gene Hackman also predicted that the film would be a "career killer." Despite the small budget, dire predictions, and little help from distributor Orion Pictures, Hoosiers grossed over $28 million and received two Oscar nominations (Dennis Hopper for Best Supporting Actor and Jerry Goldsmith for Best Original Score).[8]
Shortly after the film's release, five of the actors who portrayed basketball players in the film were suspended by the NCAA from their real-life college basketball teams for three games. The NCAA determined that they had been paid to play basketball, making them ineligible.[9]
The music to Hoosiers was written by veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith. Goldsmith used a hybrid of orchestral and electronic elements in juxtaposition to the 1950s setting to score the film. He also helped tie the music to the film by using recorded hits of basketballs on a gymnasium floor to serve as additional percussion sounds.[10]Washington Post film critic Paul Attanasio praised the soundtrack, writing, "And it's marvelously (and innovatively) scored (by composer Jerry Goldsmith), who weaves together electronics with symphonic effects to create a sense of the rhythmic energy of basketball within a traditional setting."[11]
The score would go on to garner Goldsmith an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, though he ultimately lost to Herbie Hancock for Round Midnight. Goldsmith would later work with filmmakers Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh again on their successful 1993 sports film Rudy.
Until 2012, the soundtrack was primarily available under the European title Best Shot, with several of the film's cues not included on the album. In 2012, Intrada Records released Goldsmith's complete score, marking the first time the soundtrack has been released on CD in the United States.[12]
Reception
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 91% based on 47 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "It may adhere to the sports underdog formula, but Hoosiers has been made with such loving craft, and features such excellent performances, that it's hard to resist."[13]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 76 out of 100, based on 13 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews."[14] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on A+ to F scale.[15]
Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert praised the film, writing: "What makes Hoosiers special is not its story but its details and its characters. Angelo Pizzo, who wrote the original screenplay, knows small-town sports. He knows all about high school politics and how the school board and the parents' groups always think they know more about basketball than the coach does. He knows about gossip, scandal and vengeance. And he knows a lot about human nature. All of his knowledge, however, would be pointless without Hackman's great performance at the center of this movie. Hackman is gifted at combining likability with complexity — two qualities that usually don't go together in the movies. He projects all of the single-mindedness of any good coach, but then he contains other dimensions, and we learn about the scandal in his past that led him to this one-horse town. David Anspaugh's direction is good at suggesting Hackman's complexity without belaboring it."[16]The New York Times'Janet Maslin echoed Ebert's sentiments, writing, "This film's very lack of surprise and sophistication accounts for a lot of its considerable charm."[17]
Washington Post critics Rita Kempley and Paul Attanasio both enjoyed the film, despite its perceived sentimentalism and lack of originality. Kempley wrote, "Even though we've seen it all before, Hoosiers scores big by staying small."[18] Attanasio pointed out some problems with the film: "[It contains] some klutzy glitches in continuity, and a love story (between Hackman and a sterile, one-note Barbara Hershey) that goes nowhere. The action photography flattens the visual excitement of basketball (you can imagine what a Scorsese would do with it);" but he noted the film's "enormous craftsmanship accumulates till you're actually seduced into believing all its Pepperidge Farm buncombe. That's quite an achievement."[11]
Time magazine's Richard Schickel praised the performance of Gene Hackman, writing that he was
wonderful as an inarticulate man tense with the struggle to curb a flaring, mysterious anger.[19]
pic belongs to Hackman, but Dennis Hopper gets another opportunity to put in a showy turn as a local misfit.[20]
Pat Graham of the Chicago Reader was the rare dissenter, writing of the film that
Director David Anspaugh seems only marginally concerned with basketball thematics: what matters most is feeding white-bread fantasies (the film is set in the slow-footed 50s, when blacks are only a rumor and nobody's ever heard of slam 'n' jam) and laying on the inspirational corn.... Bobby Knight would not be amused, though Tark the Shark might've had a good laugh at the naive masquerade.[21]
Hoosiers was ranked number 13 by the American Film Institute on its 100 Years... 100 Cheers list of most inspirational films.[30] The film was the choice of the readers of USA Today as the best sports movie of all time. In 2001, Hoosiers was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" due in part to an especially large number of nominations from Indiana citizens.[31][4]
In June 2008, AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten" — the best ten films in ten classic American film genres — after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Hoosiers was acknowledged as the fourth best film in the sports genre.[29][32]
A museum to commemorate the real-life achievements of the 1954 Milan team has been established.[33]
In 2015, MGM partnered with the Indiana Pacers to create Hickory uniforms inspired by the film. The Pacers first wore the tribute uniforms during select games in the 2015–16 NBA regular season in honor of the film's 30th anniversary.[34]
In April 2017, Vice President (and former governor of Indiana) Mike Pence said that Hoosiers is the “greatest sports movie ever made" while traveling on a flight from Indonesia to Australia with a pool of journalists.[35]
Hoosier hysteria is the state of excitement surrounding basketball in Indiana or, more specifically, the Indiana high school basketball tournament. The most famous example occurred in 1954, when Milan defeated Muncie Central to win the state title.
Rudy is a 1993 American biographical sports film directed by David Anspaugh. It is an account of the life of Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger, who harbored dreams of playing football at the University of Notre Dame despite significant obstacles. It was the first film that the Notre Dame administration allowed to be shot on campus since Knute Rockne, All American in 1940.
Paul D. "Tony" Hinkle was an American football, basketball, and baseball player, coach, and college athletic administrator. He attended the University of Chicago, where he won varsity letters in three sports. Hinkle captained the Chicago Maroons basketball team for two seasons was twice selected as an All-American, in 1919 and 1920. After graduating from the University of Chicago, Hinkle moved on to Butler University as a coach. There, over the course of nearly 50 years, he served as the head football coach, head basketball coach, and head baseball coach. Hinkle was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor in 1965. Butler's home basketball arena was renamed as Hinkle Fieldhouse in the coach's honor in 1966.
David Anspaugh is an American television and film director.
Emmett B. "Branch" McCracken was an American basketball player and coach. He served as the head basketball coach at Ball State University from 1930 to 1938 and at Indiana University Bloomington from 1938 to 1943 and again from 1946 to 1965. McCracken's Indiana Hoosiers teams twice won the NCAA Championship, in 1940 and 1953. McCracken was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player in 1960.
Michael Kent Benson is an American former basketball player. He was a two time All-American at Indiana University, winning the 1976 Helms Foundation Player of the Year and helping lead the Hoosiers to the 1976 NCAA championship with a perfect 32–0 record, with Benson being named the 1976 NCAA Final Four Most Outstanding Player. Benson was the No. 1 overall pick of the 1977 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks, playing 11 seasons in the NBA for Milwaukee (1977–1980), the Detroit Pistons (1980–1986), Utah Jazz (1986–1987) and Cleveland Cavaliers (1988).
Hinkle Fieldhouse is a basketball arena on the campus of Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Completed in early 1928, it was the largest basketball arena in the United States until 1950. The facility was renamed Hinkle Fieldhouse in 1966 in honor of Butler's longtime coach and athletic director, Paul D. "Tony" Hinkle. It is the sixth-oldest college basketball arena still in use. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983 and designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1987, Hinkle Fieldhouse is sometimes referred to as "Indiana's Basketball Cathedral."
Damon Bailey is an American former professional basketball player. He rose to national prominence after being recruited by Indiana coach Bob Knight as an 8th grader, an unusual move at the time. Bailey went on to become Indiana's men's all-time high school leading scorer and would earn All-America honors playing for the Indiana Hoosiers. He became a cult figure during the late 1980s and early 1990s in Indiana. Bailey was an assistant coach of the Butler University's women's basketball team from 2014 to 2017.
The Harry Gladstein Fieldhouse, also known as the New Fieldhouse, is an indoor track and field complex on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. From 1960 to 1971 it also served as the home of the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team.
The Bill Garrett Fieldhouse or William Leon Garrett Fieldhouse is an on-campus gymnasium used for intramural sports at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. It was formerly the home of the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team.
The Butler Bulldogs are the athletic teams that represent Butler University, located in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Bulldogs participate in 20 NCAA Division I intercollegiate sports. After leaving the Horizon League following the 2011–12 season, nearly all teams competed in the Atlantic 10 Conference. The football team is a founding member of the non-scholarship Football Championship Subdivision (FCS)-level Pioneer League. On March 20, 2013, the Butler administration announced that the school would join the Big East, and moved to the new league July 1, 2013.
The Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team represents Indiana University Bloomington in NCAA Division I college basketball and competes in the Big Ten Conference. The Hoosiers play at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall on the Branch McCracken Court in Bloomington, Indiana on the Indiana University Bloomington campus. Indiana has won five National Championships in men's basketball – two coming under Branch McCracken and three under Bob Knight. For forty-seven years and counting, Indiana's 1976 squad remains the last undefeated NCAA men's basketball champion.
The 1954 Milan High School Indians won the Indiana High School Boys Basketball Tournament championship in 1954.
Bobby Gene Plump is a member of the Milan High School basketball team, who won the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) state tournament in 1954. Plump was selected Indiana's coveted "Mr. Basketball" in 1954, the award bestowed upon Indiana's most outstanding senior basketball player as voted on by the press. Plump was also named one of the most noteworthy Hoosiers of the 20th century by Indianapolis Monthly Magazine. He was also one of the 50 greatest sports figures from Indiana in the 20th century, according to Sports Illustrated.
The Hoosier Gym is a basketball gymnasium, museum, and community center located in Knightstown, Indiana. It is famous for being a filming location for the 1986 basketball movie Hoosiers, starring Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper. The gym was the home court of the movie's Hickory Huskers. The facility has retained the same appearance as when the movie was filmed in 1985. The gym attracts 80,000 tourists to the town per year.
Eshaunte "Bear" Jones, is a college basketball player, who de-committed from the Oregon State Beavers. In June 2007, he announced his intention to pass on an oral commitment to Indiana University. In October 2007, he announced his decision to attend Oregon State University the following season after playing as a 5th year senior at Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia. He would later de-commit from Oregon State after a coaching change. In June 2008, Jones signed financial-agreement paperwork with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Because it was after the NCAA signing period, Coach Doc Sadler could not confirm at that time that he had accepted a scholarship. Once he cleared the NCAA clearinghouse process, he enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the 2008 fall term. On March 31, 2011, Jones announced that he was leaving Nebraska to take care of personal things back in Indiana with his family. After leaving Nebraska, Jones popped up at Division II Northern Kentucky.
Maris Valainis is an American construction consultant and a former actor, best known for his role in the 1986 film Hoosiers. He portrayed Jimmy Chitwood, a basketball player who makes a last-second shot to win the 1952 Indiana state high school championship. Bobby Plump accomplished that feat in 1954.
Angelo Pizzo is an American screenwriter and film producer, usually working on films based on a true story, and usually about athletics. He is best known for Hoosiers and Rudy.
Ray Province Crowe was a basketball coach, educator, school administrator, and Republican politician in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the head basketball coach of Crispus Attucks High School from 1950 to 1957, after which he served another decade as the school's athletic director. His teams won the Indiana state basketball championship in 1955 and 1956, becoming the first all-black school to win a state championship in the country, and the first Indianapolis team to win the Hoosier state title. Crowe coached numerous Indiana All-Star players, including Oscar Robertson, Hallie Bryant, and Willie Meriweather, and was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1968.
The 1940 NCAA Basketball Championship Game was the final of the 1940 NCAA basketball tournament and determined the national champion in the 1939–40 NCAA men's basketball season. The game was held at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 30, 1940. The Indiana Hoosiers defeated the Kansas Jayhawks 60–42 to win the school's first national championship in men's basketball.
Hoosiers essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN0826429777, pages 791-792
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