Hoosiers

Top 10 Fun Facts

1. Hoosiers is loosely based on Indiana's 1954 state basketball champs, Milan High School. When you share that little factoid at your next dinner party, be sure to pronounce it MYE-lun, not like the city in Italy. Crisis averted.
2. Speaking of Milan (this time we do mean the city in Italy), most European cinemas showed the film under the name Best Shot-evidently the term "hoosier" got lost in translation.
3. Extra! Extra! Extra? After filmmakers were unable to drum up enough extras with an Indianapolis-area casting call, they invited a pair of local high school basketball teams to play that week's match-up on location at Butler University. A fieldhouse full of cheering fans followed. Who needs CGI?
4. Gene Hackman's role as Coach Norman Dale was originally offered to Jack Nicholson. Strange, Jack seems more like the Bobby Knight type.
5. Dennis Hopper wanted his drunken stagger onto the basketball court to look real, so he spun around in circles for ten seconds before the director yelled "action." Apparently the craft services table was fresh out of rum balls.
6. In the movie, Rade Butcher is benched by Coach Dale for hogging the ball. In real life, the young collegiate basketball player who portrayed him (Steve Hollar) was benched for three games by the NCAA for appearing in the movie, plus fined 5% of his acting fee. Why do the Harlem Globetrotters never run into these problems?
7. Wade Schenck was a high school junior when he was cast in the role of Ollie. One day during filming he slipped out to watch his basketball team play, and the crew was forced to call his mom to get him back on set. Not as harsh as 5% of your paycheck, but way more embarrassing.
8. Honey, keep an eye on your brother: Wade's real-life sister Libbey plays one of Hickory's cheerleaders.
9. Continuity crazies: the scoreboard gets a little wonky during the regional game against Linton, as the score occasionally gets smaller. Then in the finals, period 2 becomes period 1. Betcha didn't know Hoosiers was also about time travel.
10. The voice you hear during the final game is Hilliard Gates, the same man who announced Indiana's state finals in 1954. Good call-Marv Albert probably would have been a little distracting.

Cast

Crew