Forgotten Characters: George in Hoosiers

Chelcie Ross in Hoosiers

as George Walker

Five years ago this month I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of “Hoosiers” (1986), the mostly beloved basketball movie, at my then-neighborhood’s Music Box theater. It was followed by a discussion and Q&A hosted by the Chicago Tribune’s film critic, Michael Phillips, and sports columnist, David Haugh. The featured guest was Chelcie Ross, who played George Walker, principal “Hoosiers” antagonist. Ross is a true That Guy – “Hey! That guy!” Seriously, scan his IMDb credits and you will know almost all the movies even if you don’t straight away remember him in them, though if you give it a little thought, his face and who he played will start to come back to you. He’s a character actor if there ever was one, and one who has excelled equally at the movies, on the stage, and in TV. He’s been everywhere, man.

In the Q&A, Ross could not have been warmer, which I found funny because in “Hoosiers” he is often so cold. You see it when George is running a basketball practice for little Hickory High that new coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) politely, yet insistently, commandeers. That leads to George making a thinly veiled threat, and as he does so, Ross truly evinces a small town guy who dislikes change, which is one of the currents undulating just below the heartwarming underdog story. You see this dislike even more acutely in a scene finding Norm summoned to the town’s barbershop where all the local men gather to grill the new Coach, even the man of cloth, who very seriously queries about Dale’s preferred on-court defense. Throughout this, George sits in the barber’s chair, which may as well be the small town throne, putting him on a pedestal above the coach, which Ross plays to the sneering hilt.

Behind the scenes, George gradually engineers it so that Coach Dale, whose team finds little success with star player Jimmy Chitwood refusing to play, is on the verge of being run out of town, brought to a head at a town meeting where a vote is set to be taken to decide Norm’s stay or go fate. But that meeting is where the fabled Jimmy Chitwood turns up to say he’ll play, but only if Coach Dale stays, which naturally means Coach Dale will stay no matter what. And when George realizes this, Ross is given one shot to make it count, which he does by assuming an expression of a man who just ate some bad fish.

From there, Hickory High start its march to the championship game, and because it does, George takes a backseat, though he fails to completely fall out of the picture. He is still occasionally glimpsed, and as he is, both Ross and director David Anspaugh continue slyly cultivating the character’s arc. Because if initially every time we see George in the crowd, he is peeved or looking Americana Machiavellian, his demeanor noticeably brightens. When hapless assistant coach Shooter (Dennis Hopper) briefly takes the team’s reigns and runs the picket fence to improbably win a last second game, the camera catches sight of George patting Shooter on the back whereas in earlier moments George could hardly stand to breathe the same air as the trying-to-stay-sober drunk. Winning cures all ills, they say, and George proves it, because as Hickory becomes an unstoppable basketballing force, all George’s objections with Coach Dale fall by the wayside.

And if many shots from “Hoosiers” have stayed with me over the years, one has stayed with me even more than most. It occurs at the championship game where Hickory triumphs over mighty South Bend Central. In the wake of Jimmy’s winning jump shot, the camera shows us the reactions of almost all the characters we have come to know, including George, who looks like this…

Has there ever been a more succinct image of the lunacy that winning engenders? That is not merely a man espousing joy over the positive outcome achieved by a few good-hearted, hard-working teenagers; that’s a man unleashing psychotic relief over mastery of the terrible alternative. And all us sports fans have been there, don’t try and deny it. That, like it or not, admit it or don’t, is the face of winning.

At the Q&A, Ross mentioned that his character was supposed to be the father of one of the team’s players, gum-chewing, defensive specialist Buddy, though, as Ross pointed out, in the editing room, that connection entirely fell away. And this editing decision was right. By having no personal attachments to the team, the team was his all he had, meaning he funneled his self-worth entirely through their wins and losses. There was no “Hoosiers” sequel, of course, and we don’t know if Coach Dale stayed on or if he moved away, though in the last scene, all we see is one framed Championship Team photo, not two, meaning there was no repeat. I wonder if the team’s record fell off. I wonder what George looked like then.

Forgotten Characters: Camille, On the Road

My friend Andrew has a regular piece at his site, Encore's World of Film & TV, where he examines Forgotten Characters, those who made a significant impression despite minimal screen time. Today, I once again pay homage (rip him off), in honor of one of Cinema Romantico's all-time favorite actors whose celebration of birth is today.

Kirsten Dunst in "On the Road"

as Camille

Perhaps it's ridiculous to suggest that any character in a novel as seminal as Jack Keoruac's "On the Road" is "forgotten" but I dare say any wannabe beat such as myself who initially encounters the classic burst of run-on prose by the bard of the beats in his twenties reaches the last page with even half a thought of Camille. She was merely a speck dispersing in the rearview mirror, receding on the plain, collateral damage to a twenty-something idiot male tearing through "On the Road" while looking out on the drooping evening star shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie of the parking lot belonging to his apartment in Des Moines, Iowa where he wanted to believe whole-heartedly in the Dean Moriarty phantasm that his place of residence had the most beautiful girls in the world.

"We got what we needed," Sarah Vowell once wrote of Kerouac's most famous work, "namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America." All true. When you read "On the Road" at an impressionable age you take what you want and deny the rest. I remember reading it around the same time I first heard Eamon's "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)", a song from which I took what I wanted and denied the rest. Several years later, which felt like eons, I heard that song again and could only hear the winy self-involvement, the foul-mouthed vainglory, the cold-shoulder to introspection. "Christ," I thought to myself, "I could have been any more stupid? Or shallow? Or willfully ignorant?"

I felt like that when I caught up with Walter Salles' "On the Road" a good decade-plus after I first read the book and saw it as - to borrow the phrasing of Slate's David Haglund - "a pretty interesting work of literary criticism." It causes us, as Haglund notes, to "reconsider" Kerouac's book, and to reconsider it specifically from the vantage point of the women.

The first time we meet Kirsten Dunst's version of Camille, she is vivacious, in love with life, in love with Dean. When we catch up with Camille much later, she is no longer vivacious, in love with life, or in love with Dean. Now, because we have been on the road all this time with the dudes we are not privy to the change Camille has gone through. This means that when we return to Camille it is entirely up to Dunst to evince this change. She does.

I have a dear friend with two kids. Not long after she had the first one, I tagged along with her and her husband and the kid to their lakeside cottage in Wisconsin. At some point that weekend, after the little dude had run her ragged, she laid down on the couch, briefly, for like fourteen seconds, until the little dude re-sprang into her action. The look on her face as she laid there was a look I've only seen one other time - on Kirsten Dunst's face in "On the Road" when her tired eyes look up at Dean with such exhausted sorrow. And that's it. That's all Dunst needs to do to convince us of the all the years she has endured between her previous scene and now. Just one look.

And it's in moments like this where we see Dunst's absolute refusal to let Camille to fester as The Nagging Wife. In her exhaustion there is a strength, one so palpable that Dean recoils from it, because he knows he can't stand the heat, not like Camille, who Dunst, in a few flourishes, convinces us is too tough a cat to hang with this faux-macho weakling.

Forgotten Characters: Otis Tucker in Cookie's Fortune

My friend Andrew has a regular piece at his site, Encore's World of Film & TV, where he examines Forgotten Characters, those who made a significant impression despite minimal screen time. Today, I once again pay homage (rip him off).

Courtney B. Vance in Cookie’s Fortune

as Otis Tucker

“This is not the kind of movie where the characters are introduced. They are all already here. They have been here for a long time. They know all about one another.” This is what the late great Roger Ebert wrote about Robert Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller”, but he just as easily could have been talking about “Cookie’s Fortune”, my favorite Altman film, and my annual Easter weekend viewing. Set in a small Mississippi town, the film doesn’t begin so much as just sort of drift into view. Willis Richland (Charles Dutton) is already at his bar stool; Camille (Glenn Close) and Cora (Julianne Moore) are already in the midst of Easter play rehearsal; two of the town cops are mid-conversation. When the impressionable new policeman, Jason (Chris O'Donnell), learns his old gal, Emma (Liv Tyler), is back in town, he just marches right on up to her and into a make-out session. Then she goes back to doing what she was doing. Introductions here are unnecessary, even if you’ve been gone a long time. The only character who really gets introduced is Courtney B. Vance’s Otis Tucker, the detective in from the big city, arriving on account of a possible home invasion ending in the murder of local matriarch Cookie Alcott (Patricia Neal), even if we, the audience, know she wasn’t murdered at all.

Otis purposefully marches into his first shot of the film, outfit in an impeccably cut suit and straw hat pitched at a necessarily jaunty angle. And though Otis initially wonders why the jail cell door is hanging wide open, and though the Sheriff’s assistant continually ogles Otis, this initial take-charge, charismatic introduction is somewhat a sleight-of-hand. He maintains a cool air throughout, yes, peppering his witness inquiries with partly sweetened, partly satiric “Uh-huhs”, but it’s telling that he brings no partner with him. This mean there can be no implementations of Good Cop/Bad Cop; it’s just Good Cop all the time. The one brief instant when Eddie “The Expert”, local forensics specialist, tries desperately to play bad cop, Otis shuts him right down. Otis lets the people have their say, and what they say is what gets to the truth.

That’s what makes Vance’s performance both a standout and overlooked. Generally when an out-of-town detective shows up on the scene, he’s there to talk some sense in these people, to extrapolate the truth by any means necessary, to heroically harangue, to valiantly prowl, to get to the bottom of things dammit. Det. Otis Tucker doesn’t really get to the bottom of things; he incisively, but subtly probes, and then just lets things rise to the top. Look no further than the scene that puts the nail in the metaphorical coffin of Camille, the chief villain. When Cora enters the jail near the end, wondering where Camille is when Camille is convinced only Cora can get her off the hook, Otis doesn’t hold Cora back, he points toward Camille and says “Right over there” in a supremely, tellingly relaxed line reading, allowing her to go right on over and put the nail in the coffin herself.

For a while I thought Otis Tucker deserved his own FX show (Mississippi Nights w/Otis Tucker), but now I see that his own show would be contrary to the character’s spirit. He couldn’t hold his own show because he’s not the focal point and never wants to be. He is not the bourbon or the cognac or the dark rum or the black tea or the sugar or the lemon juice; he’s the straw that stirs the drink.

Forgotten Characters: SFC Cunningham in Signs

My friend Andrew has a regular piece at his site, Encore's World of Film & TV, where he examines Forgotten Characters, those who made a significant impression despite minimal screen time. Today, I once again pay homage (rip him off).

Ted Sutton in Signs

as SFC Cunningham

Typically when someone tells you a ghost story or claims to have seen a UFO or swears that one time they saw Champ, the Lake Champlain Monster, you smile and laugh and nod your head and play along. This person’s a crackpot obviously. Let ‘em have their make-believe moment and then go about your day. It was an amusing story anyway, fun to listen to, so no harm done. But every once in a while, someone tells a ghost story and…it’s not that it sounds real necessarily, but it sounds like it could be real. It sounds like the person telling the story isn’t just making things up or suffering from a screw being loose. Something in their tone, something in the telling, something in the details of the telling, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You feel it. You try not to admit it. You try to smile and laugh it off. You still dismiss the storyteller as a crackpot. But then you go home and lock the door and turn on all the lights.

“Signs” (2002) is a movie about an alien invasion. The title refers to crop signs. It’s a fine choice as a harbinger because crop circles have been debunked. So, when people see them in the movie, they can shrug it off, the work of local hooligans or copycats, and go about their day. But then, they wonder. The crop signs on the Hess Farm in “Signs” give way to weird noises and strange sightings. It seems like something’s going on. But why would something be going on? Then, a TV report shows crop signs cropping up all over. Something’s definitely going on. But why would something be going on?

The Hess Family escapes into town to try and get their minds on something else. Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) wanders into a local army recruiting branch. (Watch it here.) He’s looking at a poster on the wall. He hears a voice: “I’ve got it figured.” Then he turns to his right and drifts, just slightly, off to the side of the camera, revealing SFC Cunningham lurking in the shot’s background, seated at his standard-issue desk. He looks cut straight from an Uncle Sam catalogue. But notice the coffee cup in his hands. You can almost picture him downing mugs at that desk all day long, just waiting for someone to come in, someone to whom he can espouse the theory he’s devised and about to unleash on Merrill. He continues, halting between sentences, like we wants to ensure that he’s saying takes hold: “I’ve had two separate folk tell me that there have been strangers around. Can’t tell what they look like, ‘cause they’re staying the shadows... covert-like. Nobody's been hurt, mind you, and that’s the giveaway.”

At this point, Merrill humors him. He grins, kind of, offers an “I see.” It sounds like a fun story. Let the Sergeant tell it. The camera switches, behind Merrill again, still creeping forward, inching toward Cunningham, just as the music, flutes creepily tingling, subtly invades the soundtrack. “It’s called ‘probing,’” explains Cunningham. “It’s a military procedure. You send in a reconnaissance group, very small, to check things out. Not to engage, but to evaluate the situation, evaluate the level of danger. Make sure things are all clear.”

Now Merrill’s lost the grin. He’s not buying in to this theory, per se, but he’s listening, he’s definitely listening. “Clear for what?” he wonders.

And then the camera stops. A medium shot of Cunningham. The perfect pause. And then… “For the rest of them.”

Cunningham is played by Ted Sutton. He doesn’t have a lot of acting credits, and hasn’t had one since 2007. But he has a distinct voice. Boy, does he, and he utilizes it to exemplary effect in this scene, his only one. His voice sounds like there might be a bat or two in the belfry, yes, but its eeriness is pervasive. You can’t shake it. It scratches something. And the exactness of his annunciation… it haunts. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You feel it. You try not to admit it. You try to smile and laugh it off. You dismiss the guy as a crackpot. That’s all he is. He’s just a crackpot. Right?

[Looking over shoulder. Turning on lights. Double-checking door is locked.]

He’s just a crackpot.

Forgotten Characters: Tracy in Wag the Dog

My friend Andrew has a regular piece at his site, Encore's World of Film & TV, where he examines Forgotten Characters, those who made a significant impression despite minimal screen time. Today, I once again pay homage (rip him off).

Kirsten Dunst in "Wag the Dog"

as Tracy Lime

It’s the image we remember, which is the whole point since the characters in the film are specifically crafting a false image to provide evidence of a war that doesn’t actually exist. So we remember her as the phony Albanian refugee fleeing the phony reprisals with the phony Calico kitten in tow as the phony Anne Frank sirens wail. Do we remember that her name was Tracy? Do we remember that she was played by Kirsten Dunst? Do we remember in a film that has roughly 775 lines of pure comic gold she might have delivered the single best one?

There is a moment early in the film when White House Spin Doctors Conrad Brean (Robert DeNiro) and Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) have sought out Hollywood producer Stanley Motts (Dustin Hoffman, riffing on Robert Evans but still crafting a wholly original character) for aid in staging the phony war that will distract the American people from a Presidential scandal a couple weeks ahead of the ensuing Presidential election. To prove they have the White House’s ear, Conrad and Winifred dial up an aid in the midst of a televised West Wing press conference and Stanley feeds him lines. The aide repeats them word-for-word but Stanley is unimpressed. “He didn't phrase it right. He didn't sell the line.”

Well, how do you sell your walk-on/walk-off performance amidst Dustin freaking Hoffman and Robert freaking DeNiro? As Tracy Lime (lime, the critical garnish to the cocktail), Dunst plays her as a genial if in-over-her-head and pointedly young struggling L.A. wannabe starlet. She knows enough to know she shouldn’t be signing something without her agent’s consent, but she also knows she wants to pad that resume. And when she asks Conrad, smiling sweetly, about that very thing, he advises she can’t tell anyone that she ever did this. “Is it a guild thing?” she wonders earnestly. “They can come to your house and kill you,” he says, still smiling sweetly. She turns away while simultaneously being doused with makeup and Dunst’s expression says it all – not fear, not at all, but confusion.

That confusion is underscored by what she's carrying in her arms. Moments earlier, in lieu of the kitten she was told she’d be getting to hold, into her arms is plunked a bag of tortilla chips. Her response is matchless, possibly's the film's funniest three words, though the delivery of the words is specifically what makes them so funny. She says: “These are chips.” And she sells the line. She sells it. She sells it precisely because she isn’t selling it – she’s just saying it. She was told she would be holding a cat and well, hey, these? These are chips. So she asks about the cat. “We’ll punch it in later,” she’s told. “You’ll punch it in?” she asks, not entirely up to date on post-production lingo. And that's the last we hear from Tracy, aside from the souped-up news report casting her as a war refugee, just another actress nobody knows left to wander around haplessly in the green screen wilderness.

I imagine Daisy Ridley showing up for her first day of “Star Wars: Episode VII” filming and being told she will be wearing a sort of exotic traditional Alderaanian headdress only to have J.J. Abrams nix all headdress choices and then some intern plunks a pot roast on top of poor Daisy's head and tells her they'll just punch in the headdress later.