Multiple supporting actors are not an ensemble. Hoosiers is about a basketball coach in Indiana. The main characters are played by are Hackman, Hopper, and Barbara Hershey. The basketball team members are there to move the plot along, and are just stock figures (the star loner, the goof who wins the big game, straight arrow kid with a tr…
Multiple supporting actors are not an ensemble. Hoosiers is about a basketball coach in Indiana. The main characters are played by are Hackman, Hopper, and Barbara Hershey. The basketball team members are there to move the plot along, and are just stock figures (the star loner, the goof who wins the big game, straight arrow kid with a troubled father, etc) You could make the same movie about the football team, the chess team, or the debate team without changing anything other than the competition scenes.
Hoosiers is the underdog story that was unlike the Milan Indiana team that was the smallest school to ever win a state championship in Indiana when all of the schools played in one division.
Hoosier is just another version of the underdog winning.
Growing up in Illinois before the tournament was divided into classes, we had similar stories. I think it was 1964 when the giant Chicago-area schools crashed out of the tournament and the finals included Cobden, IL vs Pekin, IL. Pekin is known for having the most offensive mascot name: the “Chinks”! (Really. Look it up). Pekin is supposedly directly opposite Beijing on the globe. Cobden had @ 1,000 residents. Cobden won.
There's a high school in Chicago, with a high percentage of black students, called Simeon (Now Simeon Career Academy). Not Simian mind you, but still, when you say it out loud...I'm amazed the name has survived this long.
It's some of that. It's also a Rocky style training montage film and a redemption story. The scene at the end where they play in a big gym for the first time is shocking in the way it takes you from this made uo seeming recent past to something that appeared perfectly contemporary in the 1980s.
Sure they are. Having up to 4 characters both main and supporting of same gender age and race was Steve's point. Mine is that it is possible for a film to explore more than 4 characters if they're drawn better and distinctively.
Traditionally an ensemble cast has tended to mean a cast where all the characters have roughly equal amount of time, and there is no one star that is expected to carry the picture by themselves alone. You can have multiple stars, but no one single star standing out above all others.
The Oceans Eleven remake (or even the original), Pitt Clooney Damon Garcia Cahn, and the various other white members of the Ocean crew exceed the number 4 (in dthe original except for Sammy Davis, they were basically white and all about the same age). The latter was a modest hit and the remake, the former, was a solid hit at the box office.
Stock figures or not, the film isn't necessarily simply a Gene Hackman star vehicle per se---it's an ensemble cast.
The original point remains. It is possible and it has been done from time to time where a film has an ensemble cast of more than 4 characters. For it to effectively work, however, requires the characters to be distinctive enough for the audience to carry about and identify with. And of course this isn't the majority of films made in Hollywood, which then as now tends to overwhelmingly favor star vehicles.
It remains on the screenwriter(s) to make sure that the multiple characters are drawn distinctively way before the cameras start to roll.
Sure, but "Glory Road" is only a fairly decent movie made by fairly decent talent, so limiting itself to four early 20s tall black guys with different personalities would have been more within its limits.
Before “Bourne Identity” Matt Damon was valuable in Hollywood because his boyish looks marked him out as clearly the junior partner when cast opposite e.g. Clooney or Pitt. A lot of the early “Bourne” reviews emphasized the surprise casting. In classic Hollywood there used to be those types like Montgomery Clift or Mickey Rooney (both of whom had problems as they aged) who were cast opposite more manly-looking actors like John Wayne or Burt Lancaster. As Steve has remarked many times, now Hollywood leading men are almost all fresh-faced types like Ryan Gosling and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Even when Clift knocked Wayne on his ass in "Red River", the Duke had just been shot in the side a moment before to make it believable. Even Walker Percy in "The Moviegoer" called the scene absurd.
Multiple supporting actors are not an ensemble. Hoosiers is about a basketball coach in Indiana. The main characters are played by are Hackman, Hopper, and Barbara Hershey. The basketball team members are there to move the plot along, and are just stock figures (the star loner, the goof who wins the big game, straight arrow kid with a troubled father, etc) You could make the same movie about the football team, the chess team, or the debate team without changing anything other than the competition scenes.
Hoosiers struck me as a re-telling of David and Goliath, not a story about a coach, despite Hackman’s compelling performance.
Hoosiers is the underdog story that was unlike the Milan Indiana team that was the smallest school to ever win a state championship in Indiana when all of the schools played in one division.
Hoosier is just another version of the underdog winning.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnderdogsNeverLose
Growing up in Illinois before the tournament was divided into classes, we had similar stories. I think it was 1964 when the giant Chicago-area schools crashed out of the tournament and the finals included Cobden, IL vs Pekin, IL. Pekin is known for having the most offensive mascot name: the “Chinks”! (Really. Look it up). Pekin is supposedly directly opposite Beijing on the globe. Cobden had @ 1,000 residents. Cobden won.
There's a high school in Chicago, with a high percentage of black students, called Simeon (Now Simeon Career Academy). Not Simian mind you, but still, when you say it out loud...I'm amazed the name has survived this long.
It's some of that. It's also a Rocky style training montage film and a redemption story. The scene at the end where they play in a big gym for the first time is shocking in the way it takes you from this made uo seeming recent past to something that appeared perfectly contemporary in the 1980s.
Sure they are. Having up to 4 characters both main and supporting of same gender age and race was Steve's point. Mine is that it is possible for a film to explore more than 4 characters if they're drawn better and distinctively.
Traditionally an ensemble cast has tended to mean a cast where all the characters have roughly equal amount of time, and there is no one star that is expected to carry the picture by themselves alone. You can have multiple stars, but no one single star standing out above all others.
The Oceans Eleven remake (or even the original), Pitt Clooney Damon Garcia Cahn, and the various other white members of the Ocean crew exceed the number 4 (in dthe original except for Sammy Davis, they were basically white and all about the same age). The latter was a modest hit and the remake, the former, was a solid hit at the box office.
Stock figures or not, the film isn't necessarily simply a Gene Hackman star vehicle per se---it's an ensemble cast.
The original point remains. It is possible and it has been done from time to time where a film has an ensemble cast of more than 4 characters. For it to effectively work, however, requires the characters to be distinctive enough for the audience to carry about and identify with. And of course this isn't the majority of films made in Hollywood, which then as now tends to overwhelmingly favor star vehicles.
It remains on the screenwriter(s) to make sure that the multiple characters are drawn distinctively way before the cameras start to roll.
Sure, but "Glory Road" is only a fairly decent movie made by fairly decent talent, so limiting itself to four early 20s tall black guys with different personalities would have been more within its limits.
Before “Bourne Identity” Matt Damon was valuable in Hollywood because his boyish looks marked him out as clearly the junior partner when cast opposite e.g. Clooney or Pitt. A lot of the early “Bourne” reviews emphasized the surprise casting. In classic Hollywood there used to be those types like Montgomery Clift or Mickey Rooney (both of whom had problems as they aged) who were cast opposite more manly-looking actors like John Wayne or Burt Lancaster. As Steve has remarked many times, now Hollywood leading men are almost all fresh-faced types like Ryan Gosling and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Even when Clift knocked Wayne on his ass in "Red River", the Duke had just been shot in the side a moment before to make it believable. Even Walker Percy in "The Moviegoer" called the scene absurd.
In a somewhat related story, Bill Simmons & Company just released a "Rewatchables" podcast ep on the Nick Nolte early-90s college basketball film "Blue Chips," which featured Bob Knight, Rick Pitino, Jim Boeheim, Anfernee Hardaway, Shaquille O'Neal, Bobby Hurley, Bob Cousy, and 1990s Indiana player Matt Nover, who was a real 1950s throwback https://www.theringer.com/podcasts/the-rewatchables/2025/03/24/blue-chips-with-bill-simmons-chris-ryan-and-van-lathan