Two eighth graders from Chicago's inner city show talent on their neighborhood basketball courts. A free-lance scout spots them and recruits them for St. Joseph's High School in Westchester, a western suburb. This is a school known for its powerhouse teams; it was here that Isiah Thomas of the Detroit Pistons began his climb to fame. And he also started from Chicago's inner city.
The two young men are named Arthur Agee and William Gates. They are the subject of a remarkable, compellingly watchable new film named "Hoop Dreams," which won the Audience Award as the most popular documentary recently at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah -- the nation's most important showcase for independent films. The movie, which was shot over a period of five years by three Chicagoans who eventually amassed more than 250 hours of film, isn't really about sports; it's about the elusive American Dream.
For Arthur and William, attending school at St. Joseph's means getting up before dawn and making a 90-minute commute by train to the western suburbs. It means being two of a handful of black students in an affluent, predominantly white student body. It also means, they hope, a ticket to a "full ride" scholarship at a good basketball college, and an eventual shot at stardom in the NBA.
For William, the chances look good. He's a brilliant athlete who gains national attention in his sophomore year. But then a knee injury interrupts his career, and the film follows him through surgeries and comebacks and the Nike All-American Basketball Camp, at which the nation's college coaches size up the top preps. He is recruited by several big schools, and selects Marquette, where he is a promised a four-year scholarship that does not depend on his basketball performance.
Arthur avoids injuries, but is not as precociously gifted as William. In his sophomore year, when his parents both lose their jobs and can no longer pay their share of his tuition at St. Joseph's, he is forced to withdraw from school, and he enrolls at Marshall, the city high school in his neighborhood. There is the suggestion that if his playing skills had been stronger, the tuition would not have been a problem; William, for example, has his share of the fees paid by a St. Joseph's booster.
"Hoop Dreams" follows both players through their high school careers and into their freshmen year in college, showing in great detail how the national basketball machine reaches down into grade school to spot likely prospects, and then puts them on a high-pressure track through prep and college sports. The odds against them are formidable; the makers of "Hoop Dreams" believe that of the 500,000 boys who play high school basketball in a given year, 14,000 will play in college -- and of those, 25 will play at least one season in the NBA.
Yet the dream is real to William and Arthur, and to their families. We live these five years with them so intimately that it's like knowing them. There are bad times, as when Arthur's father leaves the family and begins using drugs, and good times, as when the father returns home, and a Marshall team led by Arthur eventually makes it to the Illinois state finals. And the film records, without any comment being necessary, such episodes as when St. Joseph's demands the payment of back tuition before releasing Arthur's transcript; and the moment when his mother looks at the camera and the film's producers and says, "Do you ever ask yourself how I get by on $268 a month and keep this house and feed these children? Do you ever ask yourself that question?"
"Hoop Dreams" was produced in Chicago by Kartemquin Films, which has been making documentaries for 25 years. Additional financing was found in the third year of shooting from the Minneapolis-St. Paul PBS station. The movie was originally intended as a 30-minute short, but the story could not be told in 30 minutes -- and was not going to be over, the filmmakers quickly saw, in a single summer.
The film was directed by Steve James of Kartemquin, and co-produced by James, Fred Marx and Peter Gilbert, who was also the cinematographer (his credits include the Oscar- winning "American Dream," the documentary by Barbara Kopple about a bitter meatpacker's strike in Wisconsin). From the evidence on the screen, they obviously followed their two subjects and their families month after month, in good times and bad, concerned not with whether Arthur or William would "make it" at the college level, but simply about their struggle, which mirrors the dream of so many young black kids to someday be (in words used again and again) "the next Isiah Thomas."
Most fictional sports movies are about winning. Many of them use an underdog theme; one of my favorites, from last year, was "Rudy," about an undersized kid who was determined to play for Notre Dame, if only on a practice squad. But movies like that apply a filter to experience. They are told with the benefit of hindsight, about sports hopefuls who have already, in one way or another, found their dream. "Hoop Dreams" tells the much more realistic, and common, story of typical kids from the inner city who are good, even great, players -- but not necessarily of the superstar caliber demanded by the NBA. And it tells the stories of their families, of long hours and hard work and dreams.
Many of the images of black Americans in the movies and on TV are based on a world of guns, drugs, gangs and crime. One of the lasting impressions of "Hoop Dreams" is of the families that stand behind Arthur and William: strong mothers in both cases, and helpful extended networks of uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, church members, all striving to help the youngsters prevail in a world without many obvious opportunities. I came away from the film with a strong impression of two healthy, determined, supportive homes -- not without problems but certainly not without high standards. And with the thought that since Arthur Agee and William Gates are both, at this moment, in college, their stories have a happy ending.
COPYRIGHT 1994 THE EBERT CO. LTD., all rights reserved, cannot be reprinted without permission; Roger Ebert's reviews are available on CompuServe.
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