With his first feature filmmaking project Glory Road, director James Gartner proves he has a winning touch. Grossing $16.9 million in its opening weekend (Jan. 13-16) and scoring the number one position for box office sales, Glory Road demonstrates that the successful commercial helmer’s talent extends beyond the small screen.
Gartner became involved with this project through the prolific producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who had previously approached the director about working together. Gartner said that he hadn’t found a project that was right for him until Glory Road came his way. “He’s pretty smart in that he pays attention to commercial guys and he’s given a lot of commercial directors their first movie,” Gartner said of Bruckheimer.
Glory Road is based on the true story of the men’s basketball team from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) that won the 1966 NCAA Championship with the first starting lineup of all African-American players. Texas Western beat the University of Kentucky in the championship game.The trailblazing team and its coach Don Haskins faced opposition and racism because of the number of African-American players Haskins recruited. In Gartner’s hands these factors combine to form an engaging and inspiring movie. “I’ve kind of made a commercial career out of doing humor and emotion and those same elements were here,” Gartner related.
TALENT
Josh Lucas stars in the film as Coach Haskins. In Lucas, Gartner said he found the “good, solid actor” he was looking for. However, when he cast the basketball players, skills on the court came first.
“If they could not play basketball, then I didn’t bother to have them read for me because it was critical that these guys knew how to play ball,” the helmer said. “I just don’t think that’s something one can fake.”
Most of the film was shot in New Orleans where Gartner staged games in high school auditoriums. Coordinating the action wasn’t as difficult as one might think, he shared. “Each play in the game was choreographed and then it was just a matter of shooting it and making sure that you were covered, just like one would with any other scene.”
Basketball coordinator Michael J. Fisher worked on the choreography with the head coach of the University of Southern California’s men’s basketball team, Tim Floyd. During the week that Gartner shot the championship game, Pat Riley, head coach of the Miami Heat and a player for Kentucky in the real 1966 NCAA championship, was on the set.
The cast of Texas Western teammates includes: Derek Luke (Friday Night Lights, Antwone Fisher), Austin Nichols, Mehcad Brooks, Alphonso McAuley, Damaine Radcliff, Al Shearer, Sam Jones III, Schin A. S. Kerr, Kip Weeks, Mitch Eakins, Alejandro Hernandez, and James Olivard.
TRAINING
Gartner has been directing commercials for 15 years and sees it as the perfect experience for a feature film director. Through GARTNER, Santa Monica, Calif., he helms spots for clients like Cingular and American Express.
“There’s nothing that really came up in the movie that I had not faced in some way doing commercials and so the production was not really different,” he said. “It was just the length of time [that differed], and obviously there are some things that are different, but for the most part when you do commercials, you’re shooting a lot of little movies.
“You’re taught discipline in commercial work too,” he continued. “You’ve got these little units of thirty or sixty seconds to work with and you learn that each frame counts and you learn how you can efficiently tell a story and I think that’s a good backdrop for doing movies.”
The helmer, who won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials in 1988 and ’93, has already returned to the spotworld. Since wrapping Glory Road he has shot work for Chase Bank, Disney and Net Zero.
Although he does not have current plans to work on another feature, he is open to the possibility if the right script comes along again. He and partner/executive producer Don Block have, however, opened a new division of GARTNER called Red Flannel Café. They started the enterprise after Glory Road as a way for them to find and develop feature projects.