Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1400830
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 71 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M More Productions also convinced Nittany Lion football leg- ends Franco Harris and Lydell Mitchell to help finance the movie as official co-producers. The two stars from the late 1960s and early 1970s are close friends and have been business partners for years. I'm aware of two movies about Penn State football and a third one about a forgotten Nittany Lion wrestler named Frank Gleason, a 136-pound Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling As- sociation champion who went on to become an OSS operative behind enemy lines during World War II. Gleason's courageous exploits for the forerunner of the CIA were turned into a novel by the famous journalist-historian Theodore H. White and then a 1960 movie, "The Mountain Road," starring Jimmy Stewart as a fictionalized version of the former Nittany Lion. No doubt the most popular Penn State football flick is the 1977 made-for-television movie "Something for Joey," which was released by the producers with a companion book at the same time. It's an inspirational film about Penn State's only Heisman Trophy winner, John Cappelletti, who dedicated his trophy at the award dinner in New York to his dying younger brother, Joey. Cappelletti told me a few years ago he had received feedback from all over the world from people, including school- teachers and children, who had seen the movie. The second football movie is a 2018 HBO film called "Pa- terno" about the Sandusky scandal. It stars Al Pacino as Joe Paterno. Like most of my generation, I have been watching movies in theaters since the Saturday afternoon cowboy Westerns of the 1940s. I still watch movies at home, everything from the 1920s through the current ones. What I didn't know until getting in- volved with the Triplett movie were the intricacies that go into making the final product. Sure, I've read books about movies and their stars, and I appreciate the background information provided by the hosts of many films shown on Turner Classic Movies. I've learned that the prime producer and the director frame the final version of the movie for the public. Sometimes they clash over various things, and additional filming or editing is needed. In the end, the one with the most power wins. Naturally. What really has surprised me are the movies that evolve from a true story. Artistic and dramatic liberties are always taken. As one of the Triplett screenwriters, Craig Detweiler, told me, "There will always be tension between Hollywood's dramatic storytelling conventions and the need to compress real events into a tight timeline versus the actual timeline." One must keep in mind that the average movie runs only about 90 minutes to two hours. There are several code words used on the screen in the open- ing scenes of a movie that can delude many viewers into believ- ing that almost everything in the movie is true. Such words as "based on," "adapted from" and "inspired by" are the most prominent ones that precede the words "a true story." I do not know what words will be used in the Triplett movie. As the project was getting underway and before I knew about the movie, Battista set up a meeting with me and Penn State's retired vice president of student affairs Bill Asbury to tell us about it. Before he became an esteemed educator, Asbury was a talented running back who played for Kent State and the Pittsburgh Steelers. He also is an African American. Although 15 years younger than Triplett, Asbury endured his share of discrimination over the years. We were enthused about the movie's prospects, and we were united in another aspect: Triplett, teammate Steve Suhey and their teammates had nothing to do with Penn State's now- famous cheer, "We are … Penn State." I did the original research on the cheer for an article I wrote for Town & Gown magazine in 1999. The cheerleaders created the cheer in the late 1970s and first tried it out at the 1979 Sugar Bowl, but it did not take off until the early 1980s. Rogers and Hart took our advice not to make the cheer a core part of the movie. "Unity both on and off the field is a key theme in the Wally Triplett film being developed and was central to the team on which Wally played," Hart told me. "This was perhaps best modeled by the unanimous vote of the team to not leave Wally and Dennie behind in order to play a segregated game. That spirit of harmony ultimately crystallized into PSU's now-leg- endary cheer, 'We are … Penn State!'" Nittany Film LLC expects to shoot some parts of the movie at Penn State. In his later years, Triplett talked about his desire to have Penn State build a memorial wall on campus that would honor the players of 1946-47. Maybe this movie and my book can help make that happen. ■