Irony of Quayle and ‘Hoosiers’

The irony of Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle invoking the small-town values of “Hoosiers” was not lost on the film’s star, director and writer--Democrats all.

“I come from a small town too,” Gene Hackman, who played the down-on-his-luck coach, said through a spokesman Friday. “So Republicans don’t have a lock on small towns or small-town values.”

Hackman, who grew up in Danville, Ill., is on location in North Carolina shooting “The Von Metz Incident.” The actor plans to work hard for the Democratic ticket this year, and his voice can be heard in commercials for Michael Dukakis, his spokesman said.

Writer and co-producer Angelo Pizzo said he broke into a sweat as he watched on TV fellow Indianian Quayle’s acceptance speech before the GOP convention Thursday night in New Orleans.

“When he first mentioned ‘Hoosiers’ and then kept going on, there was something inside of me, saying, ‘Stop, that’s enough,’ ” Pizzo said Friday.

“To have your work mentioned in a forum that has as much impact and import as a vice presidential acceptance speech, you can’t help but take some pride in that. But politically, Dan Quayle is on the complete opposite spectrum from me. I only hope my work was not aggrandized for the wrong purposes.”

As he introduced himself to a nationwide television audience, the conservative junior senator said: “I identify with that movie ‘Hoosiers’ because it reflects the values I grew up with in our small town. . . . Yes, we love basketball, we love underdogs, but most important, we love our country.”

David Anspaugh, director of the 1986 film about a small-town Indiana high school basketball team that beats the odds to win the state title, insisted that his film was not meant to be political in any way.

“I was surprised and flattered that he thought to invoke images of the film as being representative of Indiana,” Anspaugh said. “It’s nice to know you made a film that affected people in that way. I just hope that the film is not now seen as an endorsement for him or the Republican ticket.”

Pizzo, who hails from Bloomington, Ind., and who at 41 is the same age as Quayle, pointed out that there were no rich media heirs depicted in “Hoosiers”--no country club element, he said, “like you see in many small towns in Indiana.”

Quayle, the grandson of newspaper baron Eugene Pulliam, is from a wealthy and influential Indiana family.

“One of the things in the movie that contrasted with Republican philosophy was that there was no class system at work,” Pizzo said. “How much money you had was irrelevant.

“The community involved in putting together the team were all of the same ilk, and the fact that they worked together and used their own resources to become victorious, seems to me much more in the spirit of the Democratic party.”

Anspaugh and Pizzo said that it would bother them immensely if Quayle continued to champion their film out on the campaign trail.

They bristle at the thought of his using the theme music from “Hoosiers” to accompany him across the country or his continuing to draw parallels between his life and the movie’s homespun depiction of the underdog community’s working together to achieve a dream.