Everybody's All-American (film)
Everybody's All-American | |
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Directed by | Taylor Hackford |
Written by | Thomas Rickman |
Based on | Everybody's All-American by Frank Deford |
Produced by |
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Starring | |
Cinematography | Stephen Goldblatt |
Edited by | Don Zimmerman |
Music by | James Newton Howard |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date |
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Running time | 127 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $22 million[1] |
Box office | $12.6 million |
Everybody's All-American is a 1988 American sports drama film, released internationally as When I Fall in Love, directed by Taylor Hackford and based on the 1981 novel Everybody's All-American by longtime Sports Illustrated contributor Frank Deford.
The film covers 25 years in the life of a college football hero. It stars Dennis Quaid, Jessica Lange, Timothy Hutton and John Goodman.
Plot
Gavin Grey is a 1950s star athlete known by the moniker "The Grey Ghost," who plays football at the [fictional] University of Louisiana. His campus girlfriend Babs Rogers, nephew Donnie "Cake" McCaslin, and teammate Ed Lawrence adore his personality and charm. During the Sugar Bowl game, Gavin's play, defining his competitiveness throughout his career, causes a player from the opposing team to fumble the ball, which he returns to score a game-winning touchdown.
As his college days come to an end, Gavin ends up marrying Babs, starts a family, and gets drafted by the
Babs does her best to keep up with her husband's career and mood swings, and in doing so inherits the role of the wage earner in their household after he briefly retires. A sympathetic Donnie finds her frustrated and lonely, as his lifetime attraction to her brings them together for a brief
During his retirement, money issues convince Gavin to accept a comeback offer from the Denver Broncos. The new NFL has passed him by, though, and Gavin is forced to accept that his playing days are over. He enters a failed business relationship with entrepreneur Bolling Kiely, whom he despises, spending countless hours telling old college football stories to clients. Donnie moves on with his life, becoming an author and getting engaged to a sophisticated woman named Leslie Stone, while supporting Gavin and Babs through a marital breakdown. A lost and pathetic figure, in the end, Gavin mends his relationship with Babs as he spends his withdrawal from professional sports reminiscing about his famed athletic youth.
Cast
- Jessica Lange as Babs Rogers Grey
- Dennis Quaid as Gavin "Grey Ghost" Grey
- Timothy Hutton as Donnie "Cake" McCaslin
- John Goodman as Ed "Bull" Lawrence
- Carl Lumbly as Narvel Blue
- Ray Baker as Bolling Kiely
- Savannah Smith Boucher as Darlene Kiely
- Patricia Clarkson as Leslie Stone
- Wayne Knight as Fraternity Pisser
Production
Filming was stopped for weeks when
The game scenes were shot in
Michael Apted was all set to direct Thomas Rickman's script in 1982 until Warner Bros. balked at the $16 million price tag, leading man Tommy Lee Jones and the fact that American football movies never do any business overseas. During its six years in development hell, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and Robert De Niro all circled the project.
Despite the fact that the novel was written about the University of North Carolina (which refused to allow filming because they suspected the story defamed campus legend Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice), when it was filmed at LSU, rumors started that Gavin Grey was based on the former LSU All-American Billy Cannon. He won the Heisman Trophy in 1959 and played eleven seasons for three professional teams, but served two and a half years in federal prison in the mid-1980s for his role in a counterfeiting ring. Deford himself denies this, saying: "Never met Cannon and knew nothing about him personally," he says. "Gavin was strictly a composite of many athletes from several sports that I had covered."
The film contains a much more hopeful and upbeat ending than the book, where Gavin takes his own life after trying to kill Babs as well.
Reception
Reaction to the film was mostly mixed. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 44% rating based on 32 reviews, with an average rating of 5.2/10.[4] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[5]
See also
References
- ^ "AFI|Catalog".
- ^ Wulf, Steve (November 14, 1988). "Whatever happens to heroes?". Sports Illustrated: 103.
- ^ Hurt, Cecil (November 8, 1987). "It's no fluke! Alabama whips LSU". Tuscaloosa News. (Alabama). p. 1B.
- ^ "Everybody's All-American". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved December 1, 2022.
- ^ "Home". CinemaScore. Retrieved 2022-12-01.
External links
- Everybody's All-American at IMDb
- Everybody's All-American at AllMovie
- Everybody's All-American at the TCM Movie Database
- Everybody's All-American at Box Office Mojo
- Everybody's All-American at Rotten Tomatoes
- Interview with Dennis Quaid from Everybody's All-American press junket at Texas Archive of the Moving Image