MOVIES : With a Hoop and a Prayer : A pro basketball career is the dream of two Chicago students, and their day-to-day story is dramatized in the documentary ‘Hoop Dreams.’ But there’s more to it than that, sports fans.

The production notes given out to the media about the film “Hoop Dreams”--the story of two underprivileged African American high school kids questing for the elusive ideal of a pro basketball career--begin with an admonition to journalists not to blow the twists and turns of the narrative for potential viewers.

“The filmmakers and distributor would like to ask you to use discretion when discussing the plot of the film,” the press kit gingerly requests. “We believe that each audience member will find the story of Arthur Agee and William Gates more compelling if they approach the film without knowing the outcome of particular games or details of how their lives play out in the film.”

But director Steve James, in an interview, can’t resist pretending to let the cat out of the bag: “Arthur’s actually a woman,” he quips, mindful of the last time an art-film distributor made such an insistent caveat.

No, “The Crying Game” this isn’t, although there are game scenes that end with weeping. In fact, there are no terribly startling surprises about the picture’s two adolescent leads under wraps. And the plot twists of “Hoop Dreams”--which is a (gulp) documentary, one that lasts nearly (double-gulp) three hours--are only the small ones that real life metes out: a crushing disappointment here, a stirring underdog triumph there, ironic reversals of fortune everywhere, on- and off-court upsets and, inevitably, anticlimaxes to spare.

Yet a narrative film it assuredly is, with plenty of suspense in just how well the two kids will fare, in ball and in life, during and beyond the 4 1/2-year period James and his partners filmed these two kids and their families, coaches, scouts, et al. And this strong sense of storytelling--strong enough that fictional remake rights to the picture have already been sold--is a key reason “Hoop Dreams” is being touted as the latest great hope of mainstream documentarians, who have their own dreams of escaping ghettoization.

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Picked up by Fine Line for distribution after winning the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Hoop Dreams” opened in New York last week, begins its Los Angeles run on Friday, makes a pass across to 20 other top markets the following week and a presumed full-court press before the end of the year if early box office dictates the hundreds of screens hoped for.

Not since “Roger & Me” . . . etc.

Is this sort of wide-release talk too heady when not just the dreaded D-word but the dreaded three -word is also at play? Perhaps. No one knows better than the three filmmakers--all major basketball fans themselves--that there may be a limited amount of overlap between sports buffs and art-house denizens, the two most obvious audiences for “Hoop Dreams.”

But in Park City, Utah, interested distributors saw the intriguing sight of avowedly sports-phobic cineastes who would much sooner watch the IRA than the NBA gradually losing their reluctance, becoming involved and loudly cheering during the game scenes by about the halfway point.

“Prior to Sundance, we couldn’t get anybody to look at it,” James says of his 2-hour, 49-minute film. “There were a lot of people who passed just because it came in the door on two cassettes. It’s a terrible thing when it comes in on two cassettes.”

But in Park City, where “Dreams” emerged as the buzz film of the industry’s favorite festival, the buyers started lining up, and, James gloats, “I’d like to believe a lot of the people who’d passed before without even watching it were kicking themselves.”

Fine Line President Ira Deutchman was impressed at the festival that “above and beyond its important message, it’s a movie that thrills audiences, who we saw cheering and responding very much the way they would to a fiction film”--no small factor to a commercially motivated company that had never even picked up a documentary for distribution before.

Ultimately the filmmakers opted to go with Fine Line in part because the imprint’s parent company, New Line, is now owned by Turner Entertainment, which can handily cross-promote the picture during National Basketball Assn. broadcasts on the TNT network. Not that they’re too eager for the planned sports tie-ins to get “Hoop Dreams” tagged as a sports movie.

“Obviously basketball is the driving force and surrounding scope of the film, the prism through which you look at it,” says Peter Gilbert, the cinematographer and co-producer. “But it’s a film really about families struggling to try to better themselves and to get ahead.”

Hyperbolic or no, Fine Line’s president says he actually thinks of the epic documentary “in some ways as the ‘Schindler’s List’ of this year.”

“It addresses one of the most important topics from a social point of view we can talk about in this country right now,” Deutchman says, “approaching what could be a depressing subject--the plight of people who live in the inner city--in an uplifting manner.”

It is to the filmmakers’ credit that a lot of the uplift is very much subjective. Some viewers will undoubtedly appreciate the picture as inherently indicting the ethics of American athleticism and its exploiting of youngsters whose odds of realizing their pro dreams are on par with a lottery jackpot. Others will see it as more of a mash note to a system that helps keep some lifeline of hope alive in the ‘hood.

Either way it’s an ode to survival. And though the film obviously has a male-centric scent about it--with its supporting cast of mercenary coaches and deadbeat dads and disappointed older brothers--there is a strong sense of woman-as-rock as well in the movie’s urban maelstrom.

Asked about their favorite scenes from 4 1/2 years of shooting, the filmmakers tend to come back to the sequences involving Sheila Agee, Arthur’s enduring mother, who is laid off, sees her husband leave her and watches the family’s power and phones turned off during the course of the film.

Says director James: “The scene I always think of is Sheila in the kitchen, making Arthur’s birthday cake, and she says--with total sincerity, with no trace of bitterness or irony--’He made it to 18, and that’s great. That’s something.’ To be 18, that’s good , and she is elated at that. That moment just devastates me every time I see it.”

Cinematographer Gilbert: “One of the moments for me is again Sheila, who clearly is one of the stars of the film, after a key game when she’s overjoyed with Arthur’s success. She says, ‘You always try to raise your kids to grow up and believe that they can do anything and that they can be anything. But you’re always at some level sort of lying on the inside a little bit.’ ”

And executive producer Gordon Quinn: “There are things that Sheila says in the film that you think, ‘There are people in Hollywood who get a lot of money to write lines like that.’ ”

A sk the trio if they’ve ever seen Albert Brooks’ 1979 comedy “Real Life,” which satirizes the intrusion of documentary filmmakers into their subjects’ lives, and they all laugh in acknowledgment.

“Ah, yes, the helmet-cam,” Gilbert says with a chuckle. “My favorite part of that film is when (Brooks) is in the car with the wife because they have to be alone. She’s spilling her guts about her divorce, and suddenly the camera rises up from the back seat.”

There were no hidden cameras on this shoot. But, says Quinn, “we all come out of that tradition”--that tradition being the privacy-invasive, capture-the-small-moments cinema verite documentary style largely instigated by “An American Family,” the 1973 PBS series that Brooks was spoofing, the one in which cameras followed the middle-class Loud family through its daily routines.

The trio of James, Gilbert and Frederick Marx had originally teamed up with the intention of just doing a short film, using as their initial focus a part-time scout in Chicago who recruits junior high kids from the inner city for top-ranked private high schools. Their cameras were tagging along with the scout when the scout came across Arthur Agee, a small but incredibly wiry player, showing up his peers in a game on a playground court.

The scout took young Arthur (and by extension, the filmmakers) out of his neighborhood to St. Joseph’s, a mostly white high school famous as the place where Isiah Thomas got his start. There, the crusty coach agreed that Arthur had promise but informed the cameras that he had another kid, William Gates, who could well be “the next Isiah,” that they ought to check out.

(Officials from St. Joseph’s filed suit this month against New Line, claiming that the film portrays the school in “a bad light” and alleging the producers promised the documentary would be used for nonprofit purposes.)

In these two freshman aspirants, the filmmakers soon enough decided they had the makings of a full feature and determined to patiently follow the pair through their entire high school careers and into college.

Says Gilbert, in an understatement that draws knowing laughs from his colleagues: “I think there was this point where our wives were thinking, ‘Another high school basketball game tonight?’ ”

The three started off the project in earnest armed only with about $2,500 in PBS grant money, financing most of the filming from their own pockets. It helped that Gilbert, who probably has the longest resume of the three (including shooting documentaries for Barbara Koppel and Michael Apted, plus rock videos and network series work), owned a lot of the equipment they were to use. Not until their subjects were in their junior year were the filmmakers really able to win more grant money and devote themselves to the project.

There were only about 30 days of shooting spread out over the boys’ first two years of high school--then about 110 filming days in the last two years.

“The other side is not just the shooting,” Gilbert points out. “We were in contact with them every day or two, and that’s a lot of work. And we’re still in contact with them all the time. These are people who are gonna be with us the rest of our lives--it’s that kind of relationship. That, in a way, was a very difficult thing, because a lot of times they would be going through problems it was very difficult for us to help with.”

Recalls James: “The Agees didn’t even have a phone for a year and a half. That meant dropping by.”

“The nice thing was that we matured as filmmakers along the way, as the kids matured and got more articulate about how they felt about things too,” Gilbert says. “They would question what we were doing more. It was a very courageous thing for them to go along with us. To have somebody film you through high school, it’s pretty amazing. It’s a rough time for most kids.”

The final film is a warts-’n’-all portrait--with the full consent of the two families involved, who did successfully request that a few private moments be edited out. Among the sadder and more vivid vignettes that remain is William’s older brother talking about being a has-been in his hometown after his own dreams of basketball stardom fell through, or the sight of Arthur’s estranged father (before he found religion and cleaned himself up) making a drug deal at the edge of a playground while his son stops and watches the transaction from mid-court.

“All of Arthur’s most important interactions with his dad in the film happen on a basketball court,” James points out. “From the opening scene with their playing together, full of hope about his going to St. Joe’s when he’s young, to seeing his dad buy drugs on the playground, to his ‘Great Santini’ scene at the end where he finally has that rite of passage and expresses directly to his dad his feelings about him when they’re playing one-on-one: ‘You can’t con me anymore.’ That’s the film, in a sense, in those scenes.

“But the way both families handled adversity continued to amaze us. It’s not something you see in movies about that community a lot. You see the destruction and people losing it, but you don’t see that kind of perseverance that we witnessed. It happens a lot, but I guess it doesn’t sell tickets or something.”

Without giving too much away, William and Arthur are both playing college ball right now, and one of them still has NBA dreams, but it’s unlikely either one--whatever his past triumphs--will find a career in the pros.

So, as these kids are made to grow up too fast in an “amateur” system that’s just as ruthless and dictated by economics as the adult version, yet perhaps are caused to stay in school because of their basketball prowess, are we to see the sports ethics glass as half-empty or half-full here?

“I think we were committed to the film not being a polemic either way,” James says. “When you spend 4 1/2 years with people who have the dream, I think it would be a disservice to not show it in its complexity and really let people see it for the double-edged sword that it is.”

But, for all the film’s implied cynicism, James (who played a year of college basketball himself at Virginia’s James Madison University in 1977) clearly thinks the promise of pro-sports stardom for ghetto kids beats no promise at all.

“You see the trade-off and the potential for exploitation--and having to grow up fast and understand it’s a business--and you don’t want to see that happen to a kid. But when they don’t feel like there’s any other dream that’s palpable and real for them, do you want to be the one to shoot that down and take that away from a kid like Arthur or William?

“In fact, kids like William and Arthur are not stupid. There’s a reason why they chose basketball. And far before they’ll ever play--if they ever get so lucky as to play--a pro game, basketball will have done a lot of good things for them, along with some things that are not so good. It got them to schools that provided a better education. It got William and his brother jobs. . . . The people in the media who talk about the long shot of the dream I don’t think understand that it’s about a lot more than that for these kids.

“Maybe then we have to take the next step and ask, ‘Why is sports one of the few vehicles that these kids can even hope to use?’ ”

If anything, the “Dream”-makers say, the ethics of pre-pro recruiting and play have been policed better in recent years. And with basketball interest at an all-time high, the issues won’t be going away.

“It is the world’s second-most-popular sport, second only to soccer, and rising fast,” Gilbert says. He immediately corrects himself: “Well, actually the most popular sport in the world is not soccer, it’s fishing.”

“Which is the story of our next film, by the way,” Marx adds. “It’s the story of two young fishermen, one from Virginia . . . “

“It’s called ‘Fishing Lures,’ ” James says.

In fact, the name of James’ and Marx’s next film is “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992”--an adaptation of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman show about the aftermath of the L.A. riots, to be co-directed as a theatrical feature by the pair and executive-produced by Jonathan Demme.

James and Marx have also been assigned by Disney Studios Chairman Joe Roth to put together a dramatic film about baseball legend Roberto Clemente and have initiated negotiations with Clemente’s son for the rights to the late Latino hero’s life story.

Planned as a TV movie to air in 1996, meanwhile, is a fictional “Hoop Dreams,” which no less a basketball fan than Spike Lee is set to executive-produce (and hasn’t ruled out directing).

And of the real-life dreamers? William Gates and Arthur Agee have had peers knocking on their doors for autographs ever since the trailer for “Hoop Dreams” started appearing in theaters before New Line releases such as “Above the Rim” and on the “House Party III” home video.

“I told William the other day his head’s gonna be 50 feet tall in New York,” says James, referring to plans to run the trailer four times an hour on the video screen in Times Square.

On a practical level, Marx points out, the experience of the two “stars” being filmed “will rebound to their benefit in the sense that, at the very least, it’s gonna be relatively easy for recent college graduates to get their phone calls returned for job interviews. I mean, what could be a better resume? Everybody who’s a potential employer not only knows the person they’re getting, but everything they could want to know about their character and background.”

“That could be scary, though,” counters Gilbert, mentioning one embarrassing scene a prospective young employee might not want on his permanent record: “Arthur in Spanish class.”

More laughter: Maybe they have ruined this kid’s life after all. But not likely. And the families involved seem not to have overly minded the warts in mind of the larger service of a rare dream recorded.

“After the first screening,” James recalls, “I asked William, ‘Well, what did you think of the film?’ And he said, ‘I thought it was great. You captured how I became a great ballplayer (and then went) to just being an average ballplayer.’ I said, ‘You liked that?’ And he said, ‘It’s what happened to me.’ ”