A CONVERSATION WITH FILM PRODUCER JOHN BALLARD, ABOUT HOOPS, BASED ON HIS ORIGINAL MOVIE SCREENPLAY

Question: What inspired you to write a film on this subject?

John Ballard: It needed to be told. There was nothing like it. The movie, industry, Hollywood in the sixties and seventies, had turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the plight of inner-city black youth. Literally turned their backs on black teens.

Q: Why about teens?

JB: As a teen myself, I went AWOL from college (an expellable offense) to help set up Dr. King’s historic civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. If you were black, you couldn’t vote. We had our lives threatened at gunpoint; I was jailed. When I got out, I vowed to write about what I’d witnessed—black teens growing up under a virtual apartheid situation in America’s cities. I wrote my senior thesis on kids locked out of the system. I had to do all the work on my own, because at that time, there was absolutely no Black Studies department at Harvard.

Q: One of the world’s best colleges had no Black Studies program?

JB: None. No Black Studies department. No Black Studies major. And very few black students. And that summer I worked a job in Harlem side by side with youngsters whose dreams were being crushed, whose obvious singing, acting, and writing talents were being ignored by the entertainment industry—young hopefuls like Melba Smith (later known as Melba Moore, Tony Award-winning actress and four-time Grammy award-nominated singer). I saw the toll it took on my friends. So if I was going to make a film, I vowed it would be with an all-black cast that would reflect the stark realities of growing up black in Harlem.

Q: What was the market like then for a film like that?

JB: There were virtually no mass-marketed features being made that depicted urban black youth realistically. For mainstream Americans, there was one well-meaning, feel-good film focused on a white teacher coming to the rural South to help poor, illiterate black kids, Conrack. The few other big films that had black actors were set in a totally different time period—like the Civil War, or the 1930s Depression-era South, as in Sounder.

Q: This was before Spike Lee?

JB: A decade before. Spike would have loved this film. He’d have been eighteen.

Q: So there was little in films for black kids to relate to.

JB: There was a wave just starting of indie “blaxploitation” films, limited supposedly to a black audience. Often well-acted, with dealers or over-the-top pimps as leads, they reflected the anger many of us justifiably felt, but glorified bloody payback as a final solution—most all ending with a guaranteed mass-murderous bloodbath. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Black Caesar, Hit Man, The Mack, Super Fly, Willie Dynamite being prime examples. I thought we could deal with those exact same legitimate street realities, but in a deeper, different way.

Q: How different?

JB: I wanted to show the hard choices confronting young black kids trying to break out of Harlem. With characters who become heroic not just by fighting the oppressive caste structure, but also by fighting through their own strengths and weaknesses. For me, it had to be a story centered on the father-son strife at the heart of too many families I knew. Being an athlete myself, I thought the court would be a good battleground to play out the story.