The Basketball Diaries
Short description
The Basketball Diaries follows Jim Carroll, a teenager at a Catholic high school in New York who has a real talent for basketball and a place on his school's team. His life away from the court is a different matter: he and his friends drift into petty crime, casual vice and drug use, and Jim's grip on his future loosens as his habit deepens. The film is based on Carroll's own autobiographical writing about his youth.
Scott Kalvert directed, working from a screenplay by Bryan Goluboff. It was Kalvert's first feature as director; his next film, Deuces Wild, came in 2002. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jim, with Bruno Kirby, Lorraine Bracco, Ernie Hudson, Patrick McGaw and James Madio among the main cast, part of a production that credits 44 cast members and 77 crew. The film was made for about 2 million USD and returned roughly the same amount worldwide.
It sits differently with audiences than with critics. On IMDb it holds 7.3/10 from around 132,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.4/10 from roughly 2,300 votes, while the critics' rating is 5.5/10 from 41 reviews. The gap suggests viewers have connected with the film more strongly than reviewers did. It runs 102 minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- Jim Carroll himself appears in the film in a cameo role as a drug addict in one of the scenes in a den.
- Michael Imperioli, who played Jim's best friend (Bobby), Lorraine Bracco, who played Jim's mother, and Vincent Pastore, who played the man on the ferry chasing the main characters at the beginning of the film, later starred in the popular series "The Sopranos".
- The film is based on Jim Carroll's autobiographical novel "The Basketball Diaries" (1978), which was written based on a diary the author kept when he was a teenager.
- The role of the basketball coach was offered to Steven Lange, but he declined, stating that the book in the film's script had been significantly altered.
- The film is included in the list of works prohibited from distribution in the Republic of Belarus.
- River Phoenix was originally cast as Jim Carroll, but he died of a drug overdose before filming began.
- The film was banned after a teenager named Barry Lukatis reenacted one of its scenes in 1996, wearing a cowboy duster to school concealing a weapon, and opened fire. In 1998, another teenager, Kip Kinkel, repeated the scene – after killing his parents, he went to school in a similar duster with a concealed weapon – resulting in 2 students dead and 24 wounded.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
