He Knows Why Mr. Holland Went to Head of Class

Hollywood is scratching its head over the box-office success of “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” Apparently any movie that does well without buildings, bad guys or house pets that explode is automatically a “surprise” hit.

In analyzing public response in these pages recently, experts have resorted to such phrases as “counter-programming” and such explanations as “they went for the heart at a time when nobody was going for the heart.”

At the same time, many critics have brushed off the movie because of its emotional excesses.

Largely missing from the debate has been the possibility that people are flocking to theaters because they appreciate a story about a teacher who makes a difference in the lives of his students.

Given that a teacher’s role in a child’s life is second only to the parents’ in terms of prominence and authority, moviegoers’ emotional response to Mr. Holland’s story shouldn’t be surprising.

The odds-makers should have recognized from the outset that the potential audience for “Mr. Holland’s Opus” would have two main components: students (and most moviegoers are students, or have been) and teachers.

Even if you only considered teachers--and there are nearly 3 million in public schools in this country--you could count on them attending in droves. Few movies have given due credit to this essentially thankless profession, as this one does.

Who wouldn’t empathize with every man or woman who ever stood in front of a blackboard when Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) tells his wife during his exceedingly frustrating first year: “Nobody can teach these children, nobody. . . . There’s no there there”? And when, 30 years later, he sees something of the effect he’s had on those he’s taught in a way that too few real-life teachers ever do?

As for the other component--some 42 million students ages 5 to 17 currently enrolled plus a couple hundred million more former students--who hasn’t had at least one teacher who inspired a love for music, literature, history, math, or even football?

While the story is universal enough to be appreciated by anyone who ever encountered such a teacher, it holds extra resonance to those of us for whom that special person was, like Mr. Holland, a music teacher.

The scene in which Holland hears his school orchestra for the first time, committing heinous acts upon Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, took me back to the first school band I played in.

It was fourth grade, and there I sat, in a humid classroom in Orange in the middle of summer, struggling with the 4th clarinet part to the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”

In putting one of the most intensely sensual pieces of music ever written before a bunch of fidgety 9- and 10-year-old beginners, Mr. Kraft--at this point I don’t even recall his first name--was, for all I can figure, either a masochist or he hated Wagner--maybe both.

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Actually, he probably loved Wagner, as Mr. Holland does Beethoven, so much that he was willing to hear his music mangled in the hope that one day we might also learn to love it.

It worked for me. Through elementary, junior high, high school and college, band became my main reason for going to school; my band directors became the teachers I most respected and whose respect I most coveted.

In my case, Mr. Holland had two names: Randy Coleman, the band director at Cerro Villa Junior High and Villa Park High School when I was there, and Ben Glover, who taught instrumental music at Santa Ana College (now Rancho Santiago College). They were key figures in my life for something on the order of 15 years.

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While I don’t remember Coleman or Glover ever playing, as Mr. Holland did, the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” to illustrate how much fun music can be, they were the ones who introduced me to Duke Ellington’s maxim that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. They did so by putting Lennon-McCartney in our music folders along with Tchaikovsky, Count Basie along with Sousa, Oscar Hammerstein along with Kurt Weill.

Near the end of ninth grade, Coleman helped keep me tootling my clarinet at a time when my allegiances were split between sports and music. He leaked word to my mother that I’d be receiving a band award at year-end ceremonies, and as a result, she applied a little extra “support” on me not to give up band in favor of track and baseball.

But it wasn’t a big sacrifice. Band always made everything else tolerable: social studies classes, dry history lectures, insomnia-curing English courses. It became the center of my social life too. The band room was where I met my first girlfriend, where I established my closest friendships and where, with the help of Mr. Coleman and Mr. Glover, I came to excel at the one thing that really touched my heart: music.

It was Coleman who first encouraged me to try my hand, as it were, on sax and play in the school’s fledgling jazz band. Then, on a visit to Santa Ana College while in my senior year in high school, Glover cannily complimented my extremely rudimentary jazz skills. That was all I needed to hear to choose that school over the others I was considering, and enough to start me on a long and very rewarding tutelage under Glover.

Today, when I’m playing sax with my pals in a local bar for fun, or when I’m giving a clarinet recital with a pianist friend, I still tacitly pay respect to my two Mr. Hollands.

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Some of those I played alongside have become professional musicians; most didn’t. Some have become political movers and shakers--no governors among my former classmates as in “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” although we now have an erstwhile band student in the White House.

Regardless of where each of us was headed, our own Mr. Hollands taught us about working as a team, about listening to one another as we played, about when to step into the spotlight and when to blend with the group, about persevering through disappointments--lessons that have served us throughout life.

Forget about the melodramatics that make “Mr. Holland’s Opus” gooier than necessary, his uncharacteristic insensitivity to his deaf son, the unbelievably quick turnaround of their stormy father-son relationship, the lingering shots of his unfinished symphony. Forget that it’s just a variation on a theme from an old “Twilight Zone” episode called “The Changing of the Guard.”

What makes it work for this moviegoer is simply the portrait of a teacher who truly cares about his students and finds a way to share his passion for music with them--and that those students find a touching way of saying “Thanks for everything.”

A surprise hit? I could have taken one look and told Hollywood that this was a movie to beat the band.