Hoop Dreams
An Extraordinary True Story.
Hoop Dreams (1994)
Timing:
2:54 (174 min)
7.615/10
282
282
Country
Production
Genre
Documentary
Budget
$700 000
Revenue
$2 147 483 647
Director
Actors
Scenario
Producer
Steve James, Peter Gilbert, Frederick Marx, Catherine Allan
Operator
Peter Gilbert
Composer
Artist
Audition
Editing
Short description
Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.
What's left behind the scenes
- Initially, the director planned to shoot a 30-minute documentary film commissioned by the Public Broadcasting Service (a non-commercial television broadcasting service in the USA). However, over 5 years of filming, 250 hours of footage was collected. This resulted in a film with a runtime of 170 minutes.
- St. Joseph School in Illinois filed a lawsuit seeking to ban the film's distribution, but after negotiations, the parties signed a settlement agreement.
- Many of the locations where filming took place have since changed beyond recognition. The Cabrini-Green public housing complex, where one of the film's subjects lived, was "revitalized" shortly after the film was completed. Where a baseball field once stood, expensive apartments and a shopping center were built. The last building in Cabrini-Green was demolished in May 2011.
- According to film critic and television host Roger Ebert (1942-2013), when this film was not nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category, he and his close friend Gene Siskel (1956-1999) decided to find out how documentaries were nominated for an Oscar. It turns out that when watching documentary films, members of the relevant committee have flashlights with them, and when a film is clearly disliked, they must shine the light on the screen. The film screening is stopped if a majority of committee members signal their disapproval in this way. This particular film had to be stopped just 15 minutes after the beginning of the screening.
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