There were also two super-talented newcomers to the feature-film world: Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, two great guys the studio discovered through Second City, the comedy troupe based in Chicago. This was the first big Hollywood feature film for both of them. They had basically only done some extra work and TV work before this, so for both of them, it was like playing the Super Bowl fresh out of high school! It was a big leap, and they loved every minute of it. Vince’s part was smaller; he played the All-American football player who cut me down on the field and nearly made me quit the team (based on the fifth-year senior who pushed me in the locker room). Favreau played D-Bob, which was a composite character in the film, a combination of both D-Bob and Freddy. There were lots of composites in the film, and that was part of the genius of Angelo’s script. When they say “based on a true story,” that’s exactly what it means. All the elements of my story were true, but they were adjusted to their finest moments and reduced to the finer elements to drive home the meaning of the scenes and situations. It would take too much screen time to set up two friends, so why not combine the best of both—the comedic relief of D-Bob and the tutoring ability of Freddy? It worked.
Despite his relatively small role, Favreau was on that set every day, quietly observing the whole process. He peppered people with questions now and then, and he kept his eyes close on David Anspaugh. It was clear he had ambitions that extended far beyond acting. Of course, he and Vince would go on to make Swingers just a couple of years later, an inside story about young people trying to make it in Hollywood, which would become a huge cult hit and launch both of their careers to new heights. Vince would become one of the biggest actors of the ’90s and early 2000s, and Favreau would go on to become one of the most bankable directors in all of Hollywood, anchoring the Iron Man franchise. It’s amazing to think they got their starts in my little movie.
On the other end of the spectrum, everywhere I looked there was an actor I recognized. Robert Prosky was Father Cavanaugh (a composite of Cavanaugh; Father Burtchaell, the University Provost; and a couple other influential members of the order of Holy Cross). John Beasley was one of the assistant coaches. Charles S. Dutton perfectly embodied all the heart of the old janitor, Rudy, ACC director Joe Sassano, and some of the other staff who helped me out with jobs and living arrangements and advice around campus all combined into that wise, almost mystical character Fortune that Angelo crafted so brilliantly.
Then, of course, there was Ned Beatty, who I swear could have passed as my dad’s real-life brother. My parents and siblings were on set often, and seeing my dad and Ned Beatty side by side was a treat. Ned picked up on the timbre of my dad’s voice and some of his mannerisms. It was wild! Everyone loved my parents, and it brought back that whole glowing feeling of pride they had when they first came to visit me on the Notre Dame campus. Their presence made the whole film feel like a family affair as well. It was as if it was something we were all a part of, a dream come true. It was an accomplishment we could all share in. There was a scene that mentioned my birthday, August 22; Sean Astin got to talking to my mom, and he wanted to be sure the script was accurate, so he asked her when my birthday was. She answered August 23! Once again making the same mistake that she’d made since I was a baby. Sean listened to her instead of following the script and changed the date, so my birthday is stated incorrectly on screen now for all eternity.
My parents were interviewed for TV. There were news crews that came around and reported on the filming—not only local news crews, but national crews. There was something magical about this story and this film that was catching attention everywhere, even during the filming process. That’s pretty unusual. Most films don’t get much hype or publicity (or at least they didn’t back then) a whole year before they hit theaters. But we couldn’t keep the press away. These crews wanted to talk to me, go back to Joliet with me to see the old neighborhood, and shoot all over Notre Dame’s campus. It was awesome, and I really got into it all. It was fun for me to tell the tale again and again. I think it was fun for the whole cast to see that kind of attention being paid so early in the process. It helped contribute to the feeling that we were all involved in something important.
I could go on and on about the cast. They were all so good. From Lili Taylor as the girlfriend (who mirrored the girlfriend I had back when I first laid eyes on Holy Cross), to Scott Benjaminson, who played Frank—a completely fictionalized version of a brother, created by Angelo, since none of my brothers were adversarial. He was a character whose purpose was to symbolize all the tension I felt with the naysaying crowd back in Joliet. And then there was Jason Miller. I was real excited that we were able to bring Jason on to play Ara Parseghian. Despite the fact that he never wound up writing my script, I had great affection for the man. He was such a Notre Dame fan and such a passionate, artistic guy. He still knew all of Ara Pareseghian’s mannerisms. He had the guy down pat! I don’t know how he did that just from watching him on TV. He was such a gifted actor. Now here we were all these years later and he was pacing the sidelines with his whistle in hand; we couldn’t have had a better guy for the part.
Jason almost got us into trouble one morning right at the beginning of the shoot, though. The call came at 4:00 a.m. The football players were all called to set that early so they would be there at first light. The cinematographer wanted all of the football practices to be shot in that early morning glow. The “magic light,” they call it, just before the sun actually peeks over the horizon. Well, on this particular morning, we walked out onto one of the practice fields and the whole place was filled up with this beautiful morning mist like a radiant fog. It was spread all over the campus, and the cinematographer went nuts for it. He knew how rare and beautiful it was, and he wanted to capture every second of it. He and his crew started shooting all kinds of visuals right away while they rushed everyone into costume and hurried the football players onto the field faster than anyone anticipated. There was just one problem: some of the cast and crew had been out drinking the night before, and Jason Miller was among them. He was nowhere to be found, and filming the team without Ara Parseghian on the sidelines just didn’t make any sense.
There were frantic phone calls and knocks on doors. Finally, they found him in his hotel room fast asleep with the phone unplugged.
When they got him up and into costume, he showed up on that set. I swear, it was like he had slept for eight hours and prepared himself to win an Oscar. He was perfect! He knew his part so cold, he just became Ara as soon as the cameras started to roll, and the cinematographer got his shots, which in some ways set the tone for the whole film. The beauty, the majesty of the campus, highlighted in all of that mist and beautiful early morning light, set the tone for everything.
We couldn’t use the real Notre Dame football team for any shots because of NCAA rules. I don’t think Notre Dame would’ve risked their real guys getting hurt in our practices anyway. But there was no way David Anspaugh was going to cast a bunch of extras with no football experience to put on those uniforms and play the parts. It wouldn’t look real. Even paying a bunch of stunt people to do the football scenes would have failed, for one big reason: TriStar had hired NFL Films to shoot all of the big football sequences. NFL Films has special cameras and patented techniques for shooting real football games. They have super-slow-motion capacity, where you see the ball flying through the air, and the guys’ faces through their face masks, and the sweat pouring off of them. Their shots all have that grainy, feature-film look that takes you right down on the field and makes it seem like you’re right there in the game. Other football movies might get by with extras filmed from afar, or by using trampolines or other tricks to get guys jumping and flying through the air when they take a hit, but the NFL Films crew didn’t know how to work with any fakery. It could have been a problem, finding enough real football players to fill the film’s teams. But the beauty of all those chalk talks at my condo and the fact that I had spent so much time dreaming about this film and pl
anning for this film—even before we had a script that worked and Hollywood finally stepped in—is that my friends and I were prepared for every question that could possibly arise.
The studio had brought Al Cowlings in to coordinate all the football sequences, and he was a super-talented advisor when it came to working under traditional Hollywood setups. But when we decided that the football needed to be real, and I mean “really” real, I introduced David Anspaugh to my friend Paul Bergan. He and his son, Bill, put the word out, and they wound up pulling in forty-four ex-college and semi-pro football players from all over the region. These were massive guys—like six foot six, 310 pounds—who had all played football in recent years and were now working, teaching, or coaching all over the region. The magic of it was that all of those guys had had dreams of playing for Notre Dame, and now, in a small way, they were going to get the chance to do it. You can imagine how pumped they all were.
David and Paul agreed that if we wanted it to look real, we’d have to practice with the guys, come up with real plays, get them playing like a real team. David had taken a similar approach with the basketball teams on Hoosiers, so he knew what needed to be done: five days of practice, treating all of these guys as if they were full-on Notre Dame legends.
They passed out uniforms, and most of them were too small, which left the costume department scrambling. They weren’t expecting such giants! The biggest pair of shoes they had was a fourteen, and one of our guys was a size seventeen. We blew out a dozen or more pair of those gold pants before shooting even started in earnest. We were using period helmets from the early 1970s, and these guys were hitting each other so hard, we cracked half the helmets on the first day! We had no choice but to switch to stronger, modern-day helmets, and anyone with a sharp eye will notice that period mistake in the film.
The fact that all of these players had jobs meant they couldn’t hang around for five or six weeks to film on a Hollywood schedule. So Paul arranged for them to come in for a series of four-day weekends. David rearranged the whole shooting schedule around that, so all of the football scenes could be shot on the weekends. Weekdays were dedicated to other scenes. It worked out perfectly for everyone; the guys loved it. This was a union film, with full catering and craft services. At dinner, they’d serve a choice of steak, prime rib, or shrimp, and the guys would order all three! A few of them gained twenty pounds or so over the course of the shoot.
Paul was right in there on the sidelines, doing the real coaching for all the football scenes—and there were a lot. The script only called for about five minutes of football, but we got this team looking so good, we shot something like sixteen hours of football; we wound up filling almost seventeen minutes’ worth of screen time in the final edit, which is huge in the course of a less-than-two-hour film. The fact that Paul was called upon so often led David Anspaugh to finally just ask him to play an “assistant coach” in the film, so we wouldn’t have to waste time clearing him from the sidelines when the cameras rolled. Poor Paul had to shave off his beard and moustache. The crew insisted there were no coaches at Notre Dame in the 1970s with facial hair, and they were constantly looking for period accuracy in the piece. He went home that night and his wife barely recognized him.
Paul’s family got into the filming too. His wife played a nun on screen; two of his sons, Shawn and Nick, showed up as an assistant coach and a defensive back, respectively; and his other son Bill helped pull the team together, was the one-on-one coach for Sean Astin, and played quarterback in the football sequences.
There was so much good energy on this film that I was constantly taken aback when we hit obstacles. Notre Dame had opened up the campus to us, which was remarkably generous; but there were so many departments involved, and various factors made it difficult to get answers and clearances at times. Mid-shoot, they would tell us we couldn’t use certain fields or couldn’t set up our cameras in certain areas. Since I was the local consultant on the film, I’d always be the one left to fix things. I’d scramble and call old buddies around town to get us a space to shoot elsewhere, including a field off campus that wasn’t even a football field. We just mowed the grass ourselves—I was good at that!—and made it look like a football field. In fact, there’s a memorable scene in the film where the guys are playing in the rain and mud, and that whole thing was filmed on that random field, just off the side of the main road into South Bend. They were forced to use a rain machine to pull that off, since we were blessed with so much good weather for the whole shoot.
Of course, the big shoot, the penultimate scene, the moment when I dressed for a game and finally stepped foot inside that stadium to get my twenty-seven seconds of glory on the field—that could only be shot in one place: Notre Dame Stadium. That was one of the greatest challenges of the entire shoot. If we didn’t get that scene right, the whole movie would have failed. That’s a lot of pressure under normal circumstances. Seeing me run out of that tunnel to a stadium full of people, seeing me head into the game for the final kickoff, seeing and hearing that crowd chanting my name, watching me sack that quarterback and get carried off the field was the equivalent of Rocky winning the fight in Rocky II. I can guarantee you they spent days and days filming those fight scenes, getting everything right. Just the final knockdown alone, I bet they shot it from lots of different angles over the course of a series of hours, if not days. You don’t mess around with the climactic scene of a movie.
Well, Notre Dame couldn’t give us days on end with a stadium full of people, and we couldn’t afford to pay sixty thousand extras to fill the stands anyway. So we shot a lot of close-ups on other fields, shots that would be combined in the editing room to make the whole thing come together. We shot a few scenes with approximately four hundred people in the crowd on weekdays, when the stadium wasn’t in use. And then finally we got the Notre Dame marching band to agree to give up part of their halftime show at a couple of games, to allow us to film at the stadium during real Notre Dame home games.
Halftime is only seventeen minutes long to begin with. Do you know how long we had to get the shots we needed? Six minutes. No joke. Six minutes, to film all of it.
Talk about pressure!
Notre Dame was up against Boston College that Saturday. When halftime came around that day, we were just killing the gang from Beantown. It was something like 28–6. So the crowd was all pumped up when the real team hit the locker room and our movie team huddled in that famous tunnel, raring to go.
It’s hard to even imagine the logistics that went into shooting this thing. We had to clear everyone off of the sidelines. Had to hand out 1970s-era Notre Dame banners to people in the front rows, as well as some Georgia Tech banners and shirts, since we had played against Georgia Tech in that final home game back in 1975. NFL Films set up something like nine cameras in the stadium to capture the action from every angle possible. Paul had worked the movie team forever, knowing they’d have to basically nail the plays the first time out—Sean Astin included. Everyone knew there were four things that absolutely needed to be accomplished: capturing the team running out of that tunnel with Sean at the front, basking in the magnificence of that sixty thousand–strong crowd; the kickoff; the two plays I was involved in, including my sacking the quarterback; and the moment when I got carried off the field on the shoulders of my teammates. David Anspaugh made sure it was rehearsed meticulously, so it would all go off like a dance. Like a ballet.
I was up in the press booth looking down at this whole thing. Everyone was wired up with headset radios so we could coordinate everything perfectly.
Paul Bergan was down in the tunnel with the whole gang of players, and he gave them a pep talk to keep everyone focused: “When you go into that stadium, remember who you are. You’re not the schoolteacher or accountant anymore. You’re a Notre Dame football player. It’s the only chance you’ll ever have to be one, so don’t embarrass yourself. Stay in character. Stay in the game. You’re only gonna get one chance to come through this tunnel. So make
it great!”
He told me all of this afterward. I was so psyched that he did that. He drove it home for those guys. After all, if just one of them had stopped or gotten off track, or waved to someone in the stands, it could have messed up the whole shoot.
Little did he know there was a whole other reason that they would need to stay focused: at the last minute, our whole communication system went dead. All of a sudden we couldn’t talk to anyone. David Anspaugh was silenced. I couldn’t hear anyone in the booth. No one could give the signal to Paul to let him know when cameras were rolling so he could send the guys from the tunnel out onto that field. It was awful! To this day we don’t know exactly what happened.
Paul stood down there just waiting and waiting for someone to give him the signal. The Notre Dame band kept playing, waiting for us to get started. The scoreboard had been reset. The sidelines were cleared of real coaches and players and filled up with our movie guys. But then no one knew what to do.
It’s kind of hilarious if you stop to think about it: if you were in those stands and went to the bathroom at the start of halftime, when you returned to your seat, you would have seen the scoreboard reset (to 24–3) and a different opposing team on the field. I’m sure there was more than one person in the crowd who felt like they’d entered the Twilight Zone!
Finally, some Notre Dame official said to Paul, “Forget it. You’ve missed your window. Shoot’s over.”
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