The movie Gene Hackman was convinced would end his career: “We’ll never work again after this film”
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to scoff at Gene Hackman being utterly convinced his career was over after starring in a movie he didn’t make with the best of intentions, especially when he continued acting for almost two decades afterwards.
After all, when he retired from the industry following the unfitting swansong that was 2004’s woeful comedy Welcome to Mooseport, his status as one of America’s greatest-ever screen actors was about as bulletproof as it gets. It goes without saying that Hackman’s professional life didn’t hit the skids in the mid-1980s, regardless of how adamant he was that he’d signed his own performative death warrant.
In fairness, he had every reason to believe he was doing serious damage to his reputation. He wasn’t interested in starring in the film, he wasn’t the first choice for the lead role, and only ended up with the part after scheduling conflicts had ruled Jack Nicholson out of the running. More than that, though, there was only one reason he agreed to lead the ensemble, and it was his bank balance.
Hackman was still regarded among the best in the business, but due to his precarious financial situation, he was forced to accept parts he wouldn’t normally consider because they paid significantly better than the ones he’d typically be drawn to. The most prominent case in point was Hoosiers, where he made life a misery for director David Anspaugh.
History remembers the story of Hackman’s Norman Dale seeking a shot at redemption when he agrees to coach a small-town basketball team as one of Hollywood’s most popular and widely beloved sports flicks, but the star didn’t see it that way. He viewed Hoosiers as a means to increase his personal wealth by a couple of million dollars at a time when he desperately needed it, and he was so disenfranchised by the whole experience that he was confident it would put a dismal exclamation point on his career.
Ironically, it was co-star Dennis Hopper to who Hackman voiced his concerns, only for the former to earn an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his turn as hard-drinking assistant coach Shooter Flack. During an appearance on The Rich Eisen Show, Anspaugh recalled hearing about the two actors discussing the misery that was to come.
“I didn’t find this out until just a couple of years before Dennis passed,” he explained. “He finally told me, ‘Don’t you know what happened there? Hackman said to me, ‘Dennis, I hope you’ve invested well because we’ll never work again after this film’. He had no belief in that movie or me at the time.”
Hoosiers would ultimately recoup its production budget more than four times over at the box office and was even inducted into the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress in 2001. Needless to say, Hackman’s prediction that it would mark the beginning of the end for his chosen profession was far from a slam dunk.
