Great movie, not completely based on fact

Rating: 8/10 (24 January 2006)

I couldn't help but enjoy this movie, and it is still in heavy rotation on my 12-year old daughter's DVD selection. But, having lived 17 blocks from Richmond High in 1999 when the actual events were taking place, it's tough to ignore a lot of the differences between fact and fiction.
For starters, the Oilers school colors were changed from Red, White and Blue to suspiciously Hoosiers-like maroon and gold. While Richmond High is a rough school, its gym is hardly the bleak facility depicted in the movie. In reality, it is well-lit if shopworn version of a typical California suburban 1960s-era gym. Its as though director Thomas Carter wanted to out-ghetto the "Carver High" gym he grew up in as Hayward on "The White Shadow." Although the movie does touch on this with the "hearing" scene and the scene in which the players mock Carter's press conference, Kenny Carter and his antics were not universally appreciated. Nor was he, as shown, the sole positive force in these kids' lives. The true athletes' names, with the exception of little Carter, Damien, were changed in the movie. One actual player, Chris Dixon, played in the NFL later for the Oakland Raiders... makes you think there may have been an influential football coach somewhere in his life, don't you think? Also, the whole time line was screwy. As a long-time high school and college coach, I had difficulty with the old coach -- a pretty close depiction of one-time Oiler coach Roy Rogers by the way -- working the first game while Damien plays for "St. Francis" (another fiction, the only St. Francis in the Bay Area is down on the Peninsula in the Central Coast Section and would not have met RHS in the North Coast Section playoffs; nor for that matter would any of Richmond's playoff games have taken place in San Francisco. The NCS is all East and North Bay schools) only to see Carter step in in mid-season and his son transfer in mid-year and play for Richmond (illegal by California Interscholastic Federation rules). The movie shows a school dance held on campus. That is not something most inner-city schools in California attempt; they have the annual proms like everyone else... off campus in classy venues. Friday night school dances have become a casualty of the same crime-ridden social setting "Coach Carter" portrays. It was also irritating to have the singer Ashanti play Kenyon's girlfriend with a thick New York accent... and to have the entire movie shot in Long Beach and other LA-area locations rather than making the 350-mile trip up to Richmond to shoot it where it happened.
On an emotional level, the movie was awesome. When movies are portrayed as true stories, though, I wish more attention to detail was paid. Socially-conscious dramas seem particularly prone to poetic license. In "Hurricane" the white fighter who beats RUBEN Carter is depicting as getting a scandalous we-wuz-robbed decision. In Ruben Carter's autobiography, though, he bitterly blames his manager for putting him in that fight, one in which he knew he was over matched. Now, as I understand it, the new blockbuster "Glory Road" manipulates the facts of Don Haskins coaching career and the score at various points of the 1966 NCAA championship game.
Making "true" sports movies is a bit like fudging the facts of one's one playing career... those box scores are out there in black and white, waiting to disappoint those who believed you. The same for "period" pieces in which the "period" is less than a decade back and a lot of people who were there are still around.
Still, Coach Carter reaches a lot of people... We now live in a suburban neighborhood in another state, far from RHS and the kids my daughter plays AAU ball with like to do the "Rich-WHAT? Rich-MOND!" chant and are amazed that we lived near such a fabled place.