Norman Dale lives on
The late Gene Hackman made "Hoosiers" a classic
When Gene Hackman passed away last month his memory was honored with glowing and occasionally lengthy tributes from film stars recalling what a privilege it was to have acted alongside him. Yet what stood out were two short sentences from a legend who never once worked with Hackman.
“There has never been a ‘Gene Hackman Type.’ There has only been Gene Hackman.”
Nicely put by Tom Hanks. It’s impossible to imagine anyone other than Gene Hackman playing Norman Dale in Hoosiers.
Jack Nicholson expressed interest in the role and was friends with the film’s director David Anspaugh but the timing didn’t work. Burt Reynolds and Robert Duvall were considered.
Hackman said yes, dropping below his standard rate and working for $400,000 to accommodate a production being filmed on a $6 million shoestring. Years later when an interviewer praised Hackman’s legendary work in Hoosiers the actor replied candidly: “I took the film at a time when I was desperate for money.” Hackman was going through a divorce.
With their star on board Anspaugh and screenwriter Angelo Pizzo were able to cast Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey. Both signed on to appear in a modestly budgeted sports movie set in the 1950s and shot entirely in Indiana because it represented a chance to work with Gene Hackman.
In retrospect this type of good fortune smiled on Hoosiers at every turn. The fact that it was even made stemmed from an incident decades earlier in London.
Anspaugh and Pizzo met as fraternity brothers at Indiana University. Each built a successful career in film and television, and soon after Indiana won the 1981 national championship the two started pitching a movie about their home state’s passion for high school basketball. Studios were not interested and years passed before Pizzo’s script landed on the desk of John Daly, a British producer at Hemdale Film Corporation. He wept when he read the scenes between Shooter and his son Everett. When Daly was a child one of his own football matches was marred by his father turning up drunk alongside the pitch. “I had to make this movie,” Daly would later say.
Pizzo’s script was inspired by the Milan Miracle, Milan High School’s 1954 state championship. The school’s enrollment was 161 students, the Indians defeated Muncie Central in the title game, and the team really did have a relatively new (second-year) coach. But when Pizzo researched his script by talking to members of the 1954 team he was disappointed to find there was little if any conflict or tension between the incoming coach and the team. Everyone got along fine.
The screenwriter created the drama he sought by fashioning Norman Dale into a Bob Knight figure, a basketball genius, disciplinarian, and master of fundamentals with a reputation for towering rages. For mysterious yet plainly dark reasons, one of the top minds in the game has been reduced to taking a job at tiny Hickory High School. Like John Wayne at the beginning of The Searchers, Hackman’s an enigmatic newcomer in a remote locale where a tiny population asks him unwelcome questions about his past.
Hackman knew nothing about basketball but he was a quick study who absorbed what he needed from the real-life players cast as the Hickory team.1 Preexisting knowledge aside, Hackman in his very presence was wordlessly and commandingly Knight-esque. He could adopt a relaxed posture and a tone of voice so low it bordered on a whisper while packing every ounce of coiled menace into a single word: “Translate.”
That element of Norman Dale came easily for Hackman. He was perfectly cordial with fellow cast members but in his own words he had a problem with authority. He wasn’t above treating directors the way Knight treated journalists. The star could be especially hard on young directors, and Hoosiers was Anspaugh’s first feature film. Decades later Anspaugh could look back with gratitude for Hackman’s mastery but also with honesty about what was required to put that performance on film: “And he just made it hell on earth for me every day.”2
Hopper got into movies at a young age, appeared alongside James Dean and Sal Mineo, developed a reputation as a brooding new-wave Method actor, struck gold his first time out as a director with Easy Rider, and rode out the 1970s as a counterculture celebrity. He pursued the role of Shooter not only to work with Hackman but because he himself was a recovering addict. In the script Shooter lives in a cave and in the film he begs for money to eat. Still, Hopper brought a resilient wit and even pride to a town-drunk role that could have been played as hollowed-out and bitter.
Shooter still talks about the shot he missed for Hickory at sectionals “in ‘33.” The scene where the coach tells him “You’re embarrassing your son” is played beautifully in a low key by two seasoned pros. Hopper’s version of Shooter wants to believe he’s held on to a measure of dignity however small. He cleans himself up, takes on a role as assistant coach, and under his instructions the team runs a certain play.
We’re gonna run the picket fence at ‘em. Merle, you’re the swingman. Jimmy, you’re solo right. All right, Merle should be open swinging around the end of that fence.
If you’re a Method actor who’s embracing your role and you’ve made it safely past that tangle of scripted basketball anachronisms, you may feel emboldened to improvise a fitting conclusion: “Now boys, don’t get caught watchin’ the paint dry.”
It was a pitch-perfect ad-lib, one that has since become storied in its own right. As Pizzo put it: “We liked it so much — even though we weren’t sure what it meant — that we left it in.”
Not everything was left in. To come in at two hours filmmakers cut nearly an hour’s worth of scenes. Those cuts went to the bone in two places in particular. In the film Buddy is kicked off the team within seconds of Norman Dale assuming his role as head coach but the player soon reappears at practices and in game scenes with zero explanation given.
Hershey’s character Myra Fleener disdains basketball, wants Jimmy Chitwood to get out of Hickory, is initially wary of Coach Dale, grows less suspicious, suppresses information on why he was sacked at his previous job (shades of “The Music Man” and Marion the librarian), and is kissed by him out of the blue before the movie ends with no further development of their relationship or indications of their hopes if any. All of the above would make more sense had there been fewer cuts.3
But even in its maimed final cut Hoosiers is beloved and it’s Hackman who gives the film wings. Unlike the case with the real Bob Knight, the storied fury of Hickory’s new coach never did surface. (That too was a deleted scene.) But Hackman carried that potential in his eye and in every step and because Hackman did Norman Dale did as well. Where Hackman stood alone was in his ability to portray characters who couple this tension and this capacity for lashing out with a wish to do better next time.
Just like Hackman, Coach Dale had seen hard times and, just like Hackman, he wasn’t good at talking about them. But Norman Dale was working to do better. What he could speak to with plain sincerity was what can be achieved when we do that work.
If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don’t care what the scoreboard says….
There has never been a Gene Hackman type and there could never be any other Norman Dale.
Anspaugh and Pizzo believed it would be easier to teach basketball players to act than teach actors how to play basketball. With one exception Hickory’s team was portrayed by real-life in-state players who answered a casting call to display their basketball skills. The exception was David Neidorf, an actor who played Shooter’s son Everett. Neidorf had to pass a basketball audition at the Beverly Hills YMCA.
A decade-and-a-half later Hackman would give young director Wes Anderson the same wild ride on the set of The Royal Tenenbaums. During one take Hackman stopped mid-scene and growled at Anderson: “I can see you frowning and moving around over there.”
Happily in the 2020s deleted scenes are a click away. Hershey in particular was done no favors by the final cut and on a first viewing of Hoosiers it’s baffling to see a performer of her stature playing such a minimal role. One vital element that did survive more or less intact was Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic music score. Here was still another instance where Hoosiers benefited from a level of talent far beyond what its budget said it could afford. Goldsmith scored big Oscar-targeted movies for decades, everything from Patton to L.A. Confidential. His music for the opening credits of Chinatown alone is worth a streaming documentary. Goldsmith saw a rough cut of Hoosiers, loved it, and signed on.
I heard Angelo Pizzo speak a couple of years ago. He said Hershey was by far the most difficult actor to work with. He said she made it be known she was extremely unhappy to be in the film and made it known every day.