‘Hoop Dreams’

By focusing on the personal side of the quintessential city sport, basketball, filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert tell us more about what works and doesn’t in our society than a shelf full of sociological studies. They shot approximately 250 hours of footage over five years, staying with a pair of promising teen-age basketball players (William Gates, pictured, and Arthur Agee), from before their high school careers to post-graduation. The result is this 1994 film that is as rife with the ups and downs of outrageous fortune as any Victorian triple-decker novel. By adroitly eavesdropping on reality, the “Hoop Dreams” team produced the kind of unvarnished home truths that make for the most engrossing viewing (KCET Wednesday at 8 p.m.).