Each contingent had brought their own experience, their own cheers, and their own style to the mix. Saadiqa-Turner says that GW had used more soulful moves with their cheers, while the Hammond girls were more rigid. Williams was somewhere in between. As the days went by, a common, amalgamated style emerged—along with an increasingly strong bond. We became close, as a matter of fact. As the school year started, the on-field Titans also began to realize what they had by coming together.
In combining the best players from three schools and culling the herd during training camp, they had essentially built an Alexandria all-star team. The coaches knew they had the talent to win a state championship, and they dangled that prize in front of their players as motivation to not only do their individual best in school, but also to make sure everyone else in the student body behaved as well.
After all, the busing situation was still an experiment. They saw us working together. In reality, the team more than lived up to its mythological mascot, going undefeated and outscoring opponents — Nine of their 13 wins were shutouts.
And unlike in the film, which claimed that T. Williams was playing strictly white opponents, all the competition was integrated just like the Titans. In the actual title game weeks later, T. Williams held Andrew Lewis to negative-5 yards of total offense en route to a 27—0 anticlimax and a state championship. The Titans finished their season ranked second in the nation. Along the way, many in the community did rally around their team. Luckett remembers the stands full of people who had started the season keeping to their own, sitting according to race, and how they were soon mixed and united in rooting on the Titans as they rolled.
Littlejohn counters that the feelings of togetherness had more to do with victory than with overcoming racism. High school football might be big in Texas. Regardless, at the time, President Richard Nixon sent a letter to the school that said the team and its success saved the city—so the narrative long predated its Hollywood treatment.
But the real-life Titans never needed a president or a big-shot producer to help them realize what they had accomplished and what it meant to them and their teammates. Long before Disney made them worldwide celebrities, they had moved on to build families and careers as real-estate investors Littlejohn , fire investigators Luckett , soldiers Saadiqa-Turner , and salesmen Morris. They used their experience as a foundation, telling themselves that hard work, diversity, and cooperation can help you accomplish anything.
We care about how you do it. Be professional. Take care of your family. Do the right thing. There was, perhaps, one exception to Denzel's focus: Panettiere, then a year-old child actor. Panettiere: Denzel loved to try to make me laugh when the camera was on me. There's the scene when he comes to our house to speak to Will Patton's character about him getting the head-coaching job, and I say, "We've got 11 offers and certainly no time for you. It became a game to see if I could keep a straight face or not.
To this day I'm not sure if he ever let me get through one take without doing that. Faison: After the movie came out, he said some of the most complimentary things about all of us. He's like, I feel like a lot of y'all are going to be stars because of this. And he was right. People went on to be movie stars and television stars and whatever it is.
And he built a lot of that confidence in us because it was us versus him when making the movie. Before they could film, they needed to train. There were the actors, many of whom had not played much football before, and the extras as football players, who were high school, college and semipro players recruited from an person open call in Atlanta for the film.
Mike Fisher, football coordinator: You're bringing together a half-dozen, 10 actors that don't know each other and have maybe never played football. The one thing about football camp and football in general, it can make you feel absolutely miserable. I mean, you're sweating.
You're dying out there, and somehow there's nothing like misery to bring people together. Suplee: We weren't rehearsing anything really.
We were just training, and I was pretty much incapable of doing that. I would get through the stretching portions and I would be completely exhausted for the day, just from stretching.
Then continue for hours and hours and hours doing whatever the hell football training is, throwing balls and hitting pads and running and all of that stuff, which I would just be too tired for. Kirkwood: It was terrible. I had to keep reminding people that we are actors. This is not real. Stop hitting me. No, stop it. What are you doing? Some of those hits, they forgot themselves because we had semipro players out there, you know.
And they were hitting, dude. Faison: Denzel came one day and got on the sled, and we had to push him yards, nine of us, just so he could see what it would be like to be the coach. I remember being like, "Ah, man, I love you Denzel, but I wish you weren't here right now. I really wish you were gone right now, dude. It's called monkey rolls or something like that. We had to learn how to do all of that so when we got to shooting, we would be able to do it.
We were in such good shape by the time we were shooting. The Gettysburg speech, a scene Bruckheimer called the "touchstone" of the film, was shot while they were at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. In the movie, it brings the team together. It was one of the first scenes they shot. Oman: It wasn't in the script, the whole Gettysburg thing. Greg had a similar thing in just a nondescript location, and I'm sure he would back this up, I just had this idea, let's do it at Gettysburg and make the setting the theme and the importance of it.
Have him wake them up in the middle of the night and take them down there. Because he kept writing the speech, but it kept coming out and didn't have much gravity to it.
Howard: Chad called me and said, "You can't. You have to find another place for it because it's such a great speech. Bruckheimer: That scene, for me, was one of the most important scenes in the movie. This is how he turned his players, how he got them to bond, how he got them to change, and you have to give an enormous amount of credit to Boaz and to Denzel.
Because that's not an easy speech. Faison: We were in the middle of the woods running around, and the [director of photography] has these lights up and they are shaped like moons, first time I had ever seen it, like big balls in the sky.
So it looked like nighttime. It looked like the moon was out and it looked natural, you know what I mean. Kirkwood: It was amazing. It was early, early morning. Had the fog machines going, and I remember reading the script, that was the scene that really made an impression on me. So to be in it at the time was a culmination of a lifetime of work up to that point.
The scene where Suplee's character, Louie Lastik, is in the cafeteria and sings in front of the team is another early highlight. Faison: All of us were waiting for our moment to do our scene with Denzel.
We each have a moment in the movie. Every character. Ethan was the first one to get the scene done, if I remember correctly. Kirkwood: The energy was incredible because there were so many extras. There were like 40 extras, something like that, and watching Ethan and Mr.
Washington do their thing, it was fun, man. It was amazing, to this day, I got paid to do that, sit and watch that and egg him on. Suplee: Terrifying. It's one thing, I think, to sing like in a car or in the shower or when you're cooking in your kitchen or something like that.
It's even another thing to f around with your friends and sing a song around a few people. This was a packed room, mostly with people I had never met before and wasn't going to get to know. It was singing in front of a very, very large audience, and I'm not even including the crew. That was a scene where every extra in the entire movie was being used to fill up that cafeteria, and so it was like performing in front of a few hundred people, which made it extra nerve-wracking.
I thought it came out well, but I definitely croaked the first few times we tried to do it. Faison: By the time Ethan got to shoot that, I remember we were all laughing and we were pissed because we couldn't sit next to each other. The movie is about segregation turning into integration, right?
They kept segregating us, and we'd turn around and it'd be on Denzel and Ethan. We'd all switch sides and go and sit with each other because we were all friends at this point.
One of the seminal moments in the film is when Ryan Hurst's character, linebacker Gerry Bertier, gets in a car accident. Wood Harris, who played defensive end Julius Campbell, liked to get actors together to rehearse. Harris did not respond to messages for this story.
Faison: He would do things like, "Do me a favor, Ryan. Lie down on the floor and pretend that you're dead so we can sing, 'Na na na na, hey hey, goodbye. And we would all be like, "All right. You'd be like, what the s?
So the hospital scene, when we got to that point, I remember the rehearsals for all of this stuff, so we're all very melancholy in that scene. It really did feel like one of our own had gotten injured and wasn't going to be able to play in the game with us. Suplee: It was almost like a day where you're actually going to a funeral or something. Or a day where you experience some loss. Everybody's sad. Howard: When I interviewed [Bertier's mother], she had that deep Southern accent.
I said, "Well, what happened in the hospital? Big Julius was crying. Tears won't make my baby walk. You don't change it. There's nothing I could do more raw and more honest than "Tears won't make my baby walk. Oman: In the preview, the only scene that scored poorly was that one, the hospital scene. People didn't like it. What I realized was they weren't saying they didn't like it. They were saying that they didn't like what happened and they were sad.
Because they loved it. They just hated that it happened. One of the discrepancies between real events and the film, along with the fact that Bertier's accident actually occurred after the season, was the championship game. In reality, the game was a blowout; T. Williams played one close game all year. But the movie needed a climax, and a win over Andrew Lewis wasn't going to do it. So they used the one close game the Titans had, a win over Marshall, as the state championship game.
Bruckheimer: We're not making a documentary. We're making a dramatic film, and you got to entertain the audience. If the drama's not there we've got to add it, unless it's totally unrealistic. Yakin: Their hardest game didn't come at the end of the season.
It came at some point in the middle against a very tough team, and they only won by doing this trick play that we sort of embellished and recreated at the end of the movie. Something like that play had actually won them that game. It was, well, obviously we're going to put that at the end.
Derrick Lassic, football advisor and former Alabama and Dallas Cowboys running back: We were shooting at Sprayberry High School [in Georgia] and the scene came together and everything just clicked. We were doing one-take plays, and it is hard to do a one-take play. We did like four or five of those out of 15 plays and I said, "The football scenes are really coming together. Fisher: On the last play, [Yakin] kind of waited and he said, "I don't really care how this happens, but all I want is to make sure that Kip [Pardue, playing quarterback Ronnie Bass] is leading Rev down the field on the play.
So the quarterback has got to lead the way down the field blocking. I said, "OK, so I got to get my quarterback in front of my wide receiver going down the sideline to run like 70 yards.
Kirkwood: I was sick as a dog. I was super-duper sick, had the flu. I was like "Ehhhh" while running. We did those takes over and over and over again and I'm bolting down the thing, but it all worked.
To be in the moment running the play with the cameras rolling, it felt real, you know what I'm saying. I wasn't a football star, I was a thespian. To have that moment and to have it feel real, to this day it's one of the most amazing feelings. I just ran the touchdown to win the title for my high school. And it was one of those things to where you really believe it when you're in it. Did you know Edit. Trivia There is one scene in the film, where a brick is thrown through Coach Boone's window.
In real-life, it was an old toilet that was thrown, but filmmakers thought that would add humor to the serious situation. Goofs T. Williams High School had actually been integrated since The successful football season was not credited to integration but to consolidation of two other high schools; the tripling of the class sizes gave them a larger talent pool to choose from. There was racial violence at that time in Alexandria but not over the football team; instead it was over an unrelated incident where a white convenience store clerk killed a black student in a struggle.
Quotes Coach Boone : I don't scratch my head unless it itches and I don't dance unless I hear some music. Crazy credits Home movies are shown of each person, when they state what happened to them after the '71 season.
Alternate versions In , a director's cut was released on DVD. That version runs approx. Connections Featured in Conversations with Jerry Bruckheimer User reviews Review. Top review. Light, but effective. This movie received a lot of criticism for being a little too "light" in it's depiction of racism in that time period.
However, the fact that Disney decided to take on the topic at all astounds me. I think that this movie is incredibly effective and an excellent football movie. It really sucks you into these characters and make you feel for them. I am emotionally affected by this film no matter how many times I've seen it, and I think that this movie will stand up over time as one of the most endearing sports classics of all time.
Quote that i believe defines the movie: "I don't care if you like each other, but you will respect each other. And maybe, I don't know, maybe we can learn to play this game like men. They cross the line of scrimmage I swear to God I'm going to take every one of you out.
Boheme97 May 26, FAQ 4.
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