The Basketball Diaries

The Basketball Diaries (1995)

Timing: 1:42 (102 min)

7.398/10
2175

7.837/10
145413

7.3/10
132000

All about film

Video 1

Photo 37

Actors and characters

Release date

1995-04-21

Country

United States

Production

New Line Cinema, Island Pictures

Genre

Drama, Crime

Budget

$2 000 000

Revenue

$2 381 087

Website

Director

Scott Kalvert

Actors

Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruno Kirby, Lorraine Bracco, Ernie Hudson, Patrick McGaw, James Madio, Mark Wahlberg, Barton Heyman, Roy Cooper, Michael Imperioli
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Producer

John Bard Manulis, Liz Heller, Chris Blackwell, Dan Genetti

Operator

David Phillips

Composer

Graeme Revell

Artist

Audition

Avy Kaufman

Editing

Dana Congdon
All team (77)

• The film is based on Jim Carroll's autobiographical novel "The Basketball Diaries" (1978), which was written based on a diary the author kept as a teenager.
• 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 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.
• 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 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.
• Jim Carroll himself appears in the film in a cameo role as a drug addict in one of the scenes in a den.
• 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.