Angelo Pizzo, who wrote 'Hoosiers' and 'Rudy,' is back to writing sports movies

Lots of people approach Bloomington’s Angelo Pizzo about potential movies. Every few weeks, he receives a request to write a screenplay.

He has written dozens of them, a few having been produced, and is writing two right now, simultaneously. Maybe his nearly completed doctoral degree in film studies from the University of Southern California helps, but more likely it’s Pizzo’s expansive reputation.

“Because of the movies I’ve done,” he said over the phone, “people reach out to me.”

Two of those movies are “Hoosiers” (1986), written by Pizzo and directed by Bloomington’s David Anspaugh, and “Rudy” (1993), an American biographical sports film also directed by Anspaugh.

Starring Dennis Hopper and Gene Hackman, “Hoosiers” is a basketball movie, starting with a team that’s down-spiraling and then gets a new coach. In “Rudy” the protagonist is rejected by Notre Dame, for whom he wants to play football, because of his low grades. With help from an empathic priest in the school that does accept Rudy, Notre Dame ends up taking him. As do many of Pizzo’s scripts, these tell about dreary (and hopeful) times.

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Many have cubby-holed Pizzo into the sports-story writer. “I’m already typecast. We’re way beyond that,” he said, so for two years he turned down any offer that had to do with athletics.

But Ray Halbritter, Oneida Nation representative and Oneida Nation enterprises chief executive officer, loved “Hoosiers” growing up and wanted Pizzo for a big project. Halbritter has optioned a film property — his first — and Pizzo is writing the film.

It’s based on a book by popular Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins. “The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a Team, a Nation,” is the true story of the Carlisle Indian School football team in 1911 and 1912, playing in the Pennsylvania.

As the 1900s began, the Carlisle team was a national powerhouse football program, featuring coach Glenn “Pop” Warner along with his best player, Jim Thorpe, who also won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics — in both the pentathlon and decathlon.

Abolitionist Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt had fought for recognition and respect for Native Americans, and in 1879, he traveled to the Dakota Territory. The trip was perilous but successful: he recruited Carlisle’s first students.

Three students asked Pratt if the school could set up a football team, and in fewer than 20 years, the Carlisle football team was beating their Ivy League competitors. The whole game, in fact, was changing.

Jenkins details Carlisle’s background, along with the era’s bigotry that the students endured and which echoes today more than 100 years later. Unenlightened opposers had worked hard and brutally to obliterate an Indigenous culture during a time when football was beginning to grab and tackle Americans’ focus.

Halbritter’s grandfather was an Oneida leader. Halbritter, living in an underserved neighborhood on the Oneida Indian Nation’s sacred homeland, witnessed family members die, as government officials ignored residents’ needs. Employed as an ironworker, he later attended Syracuse University and Harvard Law School.

After Pizzo’s “Rudy,” a producer asked Pizzo about doing a story on the Carlisle team.

“Yes, I want to do this story,” Pizzo said. It was 1995, and after all, Pizzo had spent much of his childhood going alone to Bloomington’s three movie theaters, and he had nearly idolized Jim Thorpe.

“I wouldn’t miss a movie. I always loved stories,” Pizzo said.

Plus, there had never been movie about the football team itself.

So now Pizzo is writing the story he has been wanting to reveal for more than 26 years.

When Lt. Col. Pratt assembled the Carlisle team, football was just emerging.

“Football was full of rage and aggression,” Pizzo said. “From 1900 to 1910, 30 students died (playing it) per year.”

Pizzo has done enough research on Carlisle to write “five movies,” he said.

“For what it is worth,” said local Emmy Award winner producer and filmmaker Jo Throckmorton in an email, “I’ve read an early version of (Pizzo’s) script and it is really awesome.”

Pizzo said all of his scripts follow people’s journeys. “I make the movies in my mind. I imagine myself as an architect. You’re getting on this train with the protagonist.”

The other script Pizzo is writing in his “spare” time inspects the personal journey of a professional wrestler. So much for Pizzo’s pledge to reject sports stories. His two-year hiatus seems long forgotten.