As Walt Disney's "Glory Road" opens today across the nation, it marks the movie-directing debut of former Utahn James Gartner.
The movie is about the 1966 Texas Western basketball team that won the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship by defeating the University of Kentucky. Adolph Rupp coached Kentucky, and Texas (soon to become UTEP) was coached by a relative newcomer, Don Haskins. What makes the contest memorable is that Rupp's starting lineup was all white, while Haskins' was all black.
Gartner says he has had other opportunities to direct full-length movies but never before was the script right.
He was drawn to this script because the story is true, and also important, he says. Gartner remembers what the world was like in the 1960s. He wants younger generations to know what happened then as well.
Born in Michigan in 1950, Gartner was in college in Detroit in 1968 when race riots broke out in that city. The racism the black basketball players face in "Glory Road" was quite real, Gartner knows.
Some of the incidents depicted in the movie — such as the scene where a player has his face shoved into a toilet — didn't happen to anyone on the 1966 team, but Gartner knows things like that did happen to blacks in America. And happened just because they were black.
Gartner worked closely with the writers and the producer of "Glory Road" as they decided where to fictionalize and where to remain true to the times, if not to the actual events.
In Salt Lake City earlier this week on a coast-to-coast press tour, Gartner talked to the Deseret Morning News about his career, and how his
road to "Glory Road" actually may have begun in 1975 when he came here to work for Bonneville Communications.
He had majored in advertising in college and was working as a DJ in Atlanta, where he joined the LDS Church and began noticing the church's "Homefront" ads. He decided he liked the ads and wanted to work on them. So Gartner called Bonneville.
After he was hired, he started doing things he'd never done before, Gartner says. He'd never worked in TV, but his bosses said, "Why don't you try TV?" He began doing a little bit of freelance directing and his bosses said, "Why don't you direct something for us?"
Gartner recalls, "The wonderful thing about Bonneville was the freedom."
Eventually an L.A. producer named Don Block noticed his work. Gartner started working with Block while also working at Bonneville, but it wasn't long before he left and went into business with Block, making commercials for Pepsi, Visa, AT&T, Federal Express and Coca-Cola.
Somewhere along the way, producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Remember the Titans," "Pearl Harbor," "Black Hawk Down," "Pirates of the Caribbean") began calling Gartner. Gartner turned down several films. "The work he presented to me wasn't quite what I felt my place was," he said.
After years of making commercials, Gartner has come to understand how he works best. He knows what type of humor and what emotion underlies his work.
What attracted him to "Glory Road" was not the sports aspect, he said. In fact, now, he says, he wouldn't care if he never saw another basketball court. It was the underlying emotional tone that resonated with him.
The main difference between making commercials and making a movie is just the amount of time you spend working 12 or 14 hours a day, Gartner has discovered.
Commercials take three weeks, and then you can take time off and think about something else. Making "Glory Road" required him to work incredibly hard and to think about one project, constantly, for two years.
Gartner has never wanted to live in Los Angeles, he says, even though his three grown children live there now. He and his wife have a home in Traverse City, Mich. Living in a small town keeps him grounded, Gartner said. "It is reality, versus the whole L.A. thing."
But he hasn't been home enough in the past two years. And now, he said, he is exhausted. Still, he is also excited about the prospect of having audiences, and a live response to his work.
He received awards for his artistic commercials but he didn't get a lot of feedback. People watch commercials in their own home, he said.
So, tired though he may be, Gartner finds it exhilarating to sit in a theater and watch "Glory Road" with a live audience.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com