Filmed in the same hallowed hall as Bobby Plump’s famous game-winner, Jimmy Chitwood’s final shot in Hoosiers has become something of a legend among the cast and crew. No corn in Indiana at this time of year. You can unsubscribe at any time. A couple weeks later I got a phone call from him, and the first thing he said was, “I’ve got to play that coach.” That raised interest around town. I was just concentrating on making baskets, and luckily I made a lot in a row. All of those were largely absent back then.

Revealing mistake: In this film, you can see where the present-day lines on the basketball court have been sanded off and "50's" style lines added. PIZZO: There was some friction between Gene and David [Anspaugh] and me. They found it downtown, stripped, with no trunk lid, and the T-tops gone. But not everyone loves Hoosiers. People get pretty excited when they realize who I am. PIZZO: Everything that happened to us was a surprise. I thought, there’s no movie here. He and Anspaugh first envisioned Robert Duvall as Coach Dale, but Gene Hackman reportedly accepted far less than his normal asking price to take the role. My first draft was 230 pages long, and it was a total mess. MARIS VALAINIS (“Jimmy Chitwood”): I think originally they tried to cast the basketball players in Los Angeles, but they were getting a lot of actors who couldn’t play ball. Poole made a brief appearance in Anspaugh’s next film, Fresh Horses, and Valainis played Liberace’s chauffeur/lover in a TV miniseries.

He told us we were out of our minds. It’s because Pizzo and Anspaugh had to cut a scene.

She has refused to do publicity or make a single comment about the film ever since.

All that stuff you see when the ball goes in is pure, unbridled hysteria and joy. And there were mixed reactions from the team, a couple of players who felt the way the people of Milan did. “The Collapse,” West’s account of the 2011 Indiana State Fair tragedy, was a 2013 National City and Regional Magazine Awards finalist in the category of Best Reporting. It was a joke.” I thought, Oh, well, I get a day off school anyway, what the heck? PIZZO: A big chunk of what was taken out was the relationship between Myra Fleener and Coach Dale. The rest were kids from Indiana, and two of them, Wade Schenck (“Ollie McClellan”) and Kent Poole (“Merle Webb”), were farm boys not unlike the characters they played. PIZZO: A lot of scenes that we intended to shoot outdoors we ended up having to move indoors, because during the six-week period when the movie was shot, I think it rained 95 percent of the time. Hackman, my name is Bobby Plump.” And he said, “Hey, get over here. We didn’t want a lot of contact with them, because we didn’t want anyone suing us later, saying, What do you mean this is the Milan story? Hoosiers is almost perfect. It is very appealing to live in that world for two hours.

VALAINIS: Nobody could sit still on the set.

PIZZO: It was an experiment for me to write a screenplay because I had never done one. That might have been a real tourist boon to Waveland. His agent hadn’t sent him the script. At the end of the night, he came up to me and said, “Do you want to be in a movie?”. © Copyright 2020 Indianapolis Monthly, All Rights Reserved. He designs a play for Merle to take the last shot, but as the timeout ends, the players refuse to leave the huddle. Angelo and I fought it pretty hard at first, but he was dead-on right. He got a nice big severance check and decided it would be a perfect time to write the basketball movie. I remember him coming out here and saying, “Hey, you’re right, the girls just don’t look the same.”. So we was talking about it, and someone said, “What about an underhanded free throw?” It just kind of stuck. I wonder why I can’t. So he called me that night and said, “Wade, don’t bother. Continuity mistake: During the game against the Wildcats (the orange team) the incorrect score is often seen in the background. Most studio types were even less enthusiastic about entrusting the director’s chair to Anspaugh, who had experience directing dramatic series such as St. The state championship game is tied at 40, and Coach Dale calls a timeout. I was nervous because I felt the pressure to get it done. RAY CRAFT (the only former Milan player to appear in Hoosiers): The first time I became involved in the movie was when the crew came to do preliminary work. We expected a lot of people, but when we put out a call, only 200 or 300 people showed up. As a result, the movie audience sees no black characters—indeed, hardly any 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. He thought we was all playing a joke on him. At sporting arenas around the country, it’s not unusual for Jumbotrons to play clips of Coach Dale firing up his Hickory Huskers with a pregame speech. PIZZO: I don’t believe Barbara had much respect for what we were doing, for us as filmmakers, for the script, for much of anything. The school board had already voted on it. Factual error: During most of the basketball games, you can see an American flag in the background. Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases.

The crop is harvested before the season starts. The seventh member, "Buddy," is never shown returning, yet halfway through the film you start seeing him again in the games. He lives on the near-east side. It wasn’t until the film had run for several months and grossed close to $30 million that Hoosiers proved it had legs. David and I went to Indiana three weeks prior and got a hold of every television and radio station and every newspaper reporter and talked about how important it was for people to go to the theater that first weekend. Released in theaters in 1986, Hoosiers was an unlikely success. You could tell Wade’s dad was a tough farm guy and that Wade was a little bit afraid of him. ABOUT .

No corn in Indiana at this time of year. Then they took us all out to a steak dinner and said, “You got this part, you got that part, and we’ll see the rest of you later.”. I could make it look like I knew what I was doing. The movie ends with a little kid shooting in the empty Hickory gym, with a voiceover of some of Coach Dale's comments throughout the season, as the camera zooms in on the team picture from the championship season. But Hoosiers didn’t have such a cult following then. I ran into Harry a couple of months after the movie came out, and, oddly enough, he was with Dennis. PIZZO: The one person probably most responsible for getting the movie made was Jack Nicholson.

By our math, about one out of every 500 people you pass on the street in Indiana appeared in, worked on, or witnessed the making of Hoosiers. Trivia: Near the end of the film in the locker room prior to the championship game, Coach Dale makes reference to the players on the other team whose names are written on a chalkboard. I asked about conflicts between the players and the coach. THE LINEUP.

He was probably nervous because he was about to take one of the biggest shots in Indiana basketball history, second only to Bobby’s.

This happens several times throughout the game. The seventh member, "Buddy," is never shown returning, yet halfway through the film you start seeing him again in the games. PLUMP: After I graduated from Milan, I was giving 10 to 15 talks a year at high schools and clubs. They felt I had enough talent.

I didn’t know what I was doing. Like the Buddy scene—we know more than anyone it’s not there, but sometimes you have to make a sacrifice and hope people don’t notice. But I still wanted to capture the fabric and texture of Indiana and the people who lived there at the time.

I wanted to make him all about behavior, all about action. He got mad, but we didn’t know what was going on. SCHENCK: The underhanded free throw is the little shtick everyone remembers about Ollie, but that wasn’t in the script, either. SCHENCK: But Dennis Hopper was great. ANSPAUGH: I thought, My God, I forgot to tell everybody what to do when the ball went in. Then he came out with a chair and threw it the length of the court. PIZZO: Plump did point to where he made the shot, but we didn’t like where it was, so we moved it farther out.

Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, and Miami Vice, but had never done a major feature film. NEIDORF: The production company had bought that field, so they could do whatever they wanted. Showing all 5 items Jump to: Summaries (4) Synopsis (1) Summaries.

I was at a Dodgers game last year and heard somebody whisper, “That’s the guy from Hoosiers!’ It’s always a pleasurable thing to be recognized when you’re kind of an ordinary, run-of-the-mill actor. “But what do you expect in a movie about Indiana? I think my Hoosier drawl kind of helped. They were cheering for him in real life to make that shot.

That’s what really turned me off of acting.

Continuity mistake: In the first act, two of the seven Hoosiers leave the team after Hackman takes over as coach. I think that was my first scene alone with Gene Hackman. Wade’s dad must have heard, because he came ripping out there in his pickup. I would leave the keys in my car outside the hotel in Indianapolis, and sometimes the other guys would move it around the side of the building so I’d think it was stolen. This was right after the Bobby Knight chair-throwing incident, and we were just stunned. Just like the stovepipe hat, another one of Dennis’s ideas. I was in Casualties of War with Sean Pen and Michael J. PIZZO: I knew we were going to cast real basketball players and not actors in the roles of the team members. To keep the whole production together, Pizzo, and Anspaugh scrambled to keep their stars happy, make their young actors behave and enlist help from the locals. I was in a movie called Combat Academy with George Clooney. It’s kind of like Ned Beatty in Deliverance. Once we decided not to do the Milan story, we had to be very careful. Continuity mistake: When Dennis Hopper's "Shooter" character is drying out in the hospital and his son comes to visit him they talk for several minutes, however, the clock on the wall continues to read 9:49 from the beginning of the scene to the ending of it. But I’m surprised by how long the fascination with it has lasted. So everything you see in the movie—the cheerleaders crying, the South Bend Central players pounding the floor, Ray Crowe consoling his players, all of our guys jumping up—that was totally spontaneous. If it makes someone happy, then yeah, I’m the guy from Hoosiers. I later warned Willem Dafoe [who worked with Neidorf in Platoon and was scheduled to work with Hackman on Mississippi Burning] that Gene loses his temper. 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. We still had only about 1,000 people, and we had to move them from corner to corner and shoot real right. But it didn’t advance the story. We spent a couple hours shoveling that grain, but there wasn’t a lot said. We were running through it, playing tackle football and smashing into the corn. Finally, in 1985, after passing up offers to sell his rights to the film and fielding rejections from several studios, Pizzo found a production company, Hemdale Film Corporation, that would allow him to retain creative control. I remember teasing him, “When you come out to California, it’s not going to be like Indiana. But that helped the character, because in the movie people never really embrace Coach Dale until the end. Jimmy finally says, "I'll make it." Then he put his hands on his hips and grinned. He’s what this movie is all about, guys.”. SCHENCK: Everybody asks, “Why didn’t you go to California?” One of the main reasons was that Maris played Liberace’s gay lover in that miniseries. I wasn’t as well-known when I first came out, even after the first couple of years. Shortly after, one of the players reluctantly returns, bringing the total to six. ANSPAUGH (director): Angelo and I first discussed making this movie late one night in a living room during college. I thought, if that’s what it takes to get into show business, I’ll pass.

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