Hoosiers (1986) Hoosiers (1986)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Hoosiers) | Backbeats (Hoosiers)

Quick Facts

• Director: David Anspaugh
• Screenplay: Angelo Pizzo
• Starring: Gene Hackman (Coach Norman Dale), Barbara Hershey (Myra Fleener), Dennis Hopper (Shooter Flatch), Sheb Wooley (Cletus Summers), Maris Valainis (Jimmy Chitwood), David Neidorf (Everett Flatch)
• Cinematography: Fred Murphy
• Editor: C. Timothy O'Meara
• Music: Jerry Goldsmith
• Runtime: 114 minutes
• Setting: Hickory, Indiana, 1951–52
• Release Date: November 14, 1986 (US)
• MPAA Rating: PG
• Distributor: Orion Pictures

Overview

A college coach with a temper-shortened resume — Norman Dale, banished from the NCAA after striking a player a decade earlier — arrives in tiny Hickory, Indiana, in the fall of 1951 to coach a high-school basketball team that lost its star player to mourning over the previous coach's death. Dale runs an unfamiliar disciplined system (passes before shots, the picket-fence offense), alienates the town, picks the local drunk Shooter Flatch as his assistant, and is fought every step by Myra Fleener, the young teacher who has watched the town consume one boy after another into the basketball machine. The film is loosely inspired by the 1954 Milan High School championship — the Cinderella run of a tiny school to the Indiana state title at Butler Fieldhouse — and ends at that fieldhouse with Jimmy Chitwood, the prodigy who finally returns to the team, taking the last shot. Hackman's Dale is built around the question of whether the man whose tools broke him a decade earlier can be trusted with another set of boys; Hopper's Oscar-nominated Shooter is the film's parallel test of the same question. The closing line — "I love you guys" — is delivered to the team in the locker room moments before they take the floor for the state final.