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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Dennis Quaid on His New Football Movie
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I met Dennis Quaid this morning at one of those generic Buckhead high rise hotels. With football on his mind, he’s in town to promote his latest movie, “The Express,” about the first African-American Heisman Trophy winner, Ernie Davis, and hard-driven Syracuse University coach Ben Schwartzwalder.
It’s set in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Quaid plays the coach, Rob Brown is Davis.
Later today Quaid will workout with the Falcons. He joked that growing up in Houston he was “too small for high school football, and that pushed me into the drama department.” Golf is his sport of choice these days.
Asked about the film, he said: “My character, Ben, was part of the status quo, and he followed those unwritten rules of a racist and segregationist society. But he also was one of the first coaches to actively recruit African-Americans in football, and ultimately Schwartzwalder and Davis developed almost a father-son relationship. It’s not a story you can wrap up neatly with a bowtie on top.”
Quaid first came onto my radar in “Breaking Away,” the bicycle racing movie where he was one of the “cutters” — the blue-collar townies who feel like second-class citizens in a college town. It’s a movie about class status and self-esteem and the triumph of the heroic individual. I also recall it as a pretty exciting sports flic.
What’s your favorite Dennis Quaid movie? What’s your all-time favorite football movie?
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