Behind the Scenes: Shooting “The Basket”

By: Stephen Wistar; ©2001

An interview with Rich Cowan, co-writer and director of the movie The Basket. A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of a movie script.

BEHIND THE SCENES: SHOOTING ThE BASKET

The following is an interview with Rich Cowan, co-writer and director of the movie, The Basket, and president of North by Northwest Entertainment in Washington and Idaho.

MOVIEGUIDE® (MG): An original opera, DER KORB, was written for this film. How did the idea of writing an original opera for an original film come about?

Rich Cowan It’s sort of an interesting story. I had always wanted to do a film about the early days of basketball. There are a lot of basketball buffs out there. There have been a lot of films written about the early days of baseball, but no one has done anything like this about basketball. I also wanted to do a film about a one-room schoolhouse in a rural setting. I wanted to combine those two themes.

For some reason . . . I can’t explain that . . . I thought it would be fun to combine that with opera . . . I mentioned that strange idea to some people at the production company here, and they asked if they could help with the project . . . It just so happened that our resident music composer, Don Caron, took an interest.

MG: What was Don’s role at North by Northwest Entertainment?

Rich: He composed the music for our commercials. We’re a commercial production company here in the Pacific Northwest, with offices in Spokane, and Boise. We do a lot of commercials, and corporate videos. We’ve been in business for 11 years.

MG: Are you a principal in the company?

Rich: Yes, I am. I and four others. There are five of us total.

MG: How did Don come to compose an entire original opera for The Basket?

Rich: What happened is that he wrote this opera from scratch. He did a marvelous job. It was such a big project for him, writing 63 minutes of original music, that he had to take a leave of absence from the company as an employee. He couldn’t both compose an original opera, and the next day, write a jingle for a commercial or something. He spent a year and a half writing the opera.

MG: How did he finance the year and a half?

Rich: He lived fairly modestly. He’s not married. And, he was being paid to do it. It worked out for him, but then he had to translate it into German.

MG: Come on.

Rich: No. The opera is actually sung in German. We used local singers in Spokane.

MG: You backwards translated an American opera into German, to make it appear as if there had been a story involving a German opera coming to America in 1917 to form a basis for The Basket?

Rich: That’s right.

MG: You invented a German opera for the film; do the basketball scenes have any connection with the reality of the invention of the game?

Rich: We actually have a lot of historical accuracy about the game. We have a flash­back scene in the movie that depicts the first game of basketball with Dr. James Naismith, who was the inventor of basketball at the YMCA College in Springfield, Mass. The way our story goes is this schoolteacher who comes out is one of the original students of Dr. Naismith. He is one of the original players. The character Martin Conlon plays in the movie.

MG: What does he do?

Rich: He comes out to Waterville, Washington. He was involved in a gambling scandal back East, which was quite common then. Basketball was actually like boxing is today. There was a lot of gambling involved, fixing games, things like that. No major scandal, but trouble nevertheless.

MG: And he ends up becoming the hero for the Waterville basketball players?”

Rich: Yes. Basically. Coaching the boys of Waterville did not start out as his intention, but he was talked into it by the townspeople.

MG: Is this your story?

Rich: There were actually four screenwriters. Don Caron, then me, and then Frank Swoboda, one of the producers around here, and his wife, Tessa. All of them wrote the screenplay together. It was a group effort. We all worked on the scenes together.

MG: What is the fate of the opera? Will it be performed in Germany?

Rich: Probably not. We do have a CD of the soundtrack. It’s been well received. We recorded the whole score in Budapest, Hungary.

MG: Why?

Rich: Because they’re marvelous musicians there. We wanted a real European feel to the opera. We used the Hungarian National Symphony in Budapest. They were very de­lightful people to work with. We recorded a four day session in 1999. They actually use slightly different tuning than American musicians do.

MG: So you invented a story about the coming of basketball to Spokane, amidst the anti-German prejudices which accompanied the Americans fighting WWI?

Rich: We thought it would be very interesting to explore the whole idea of cultural racism, or cultural intolerance. That kind of thing has not been depicted very much in con­temporary cinema. We thought it’d be worth exploring.

MG: Many recent films have dealt with white-black racism; look at Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans.

Rich: Yes, but few films have dealt with white-white racism and intolerance. There was a lot of that kind of stuff going on in Eastern Washington during that time. You have a lot of communities that were very segregated: some all-German, some all-English. It took a while for people to mix.

MG: So what are some of the overlying themes of The Basket?

Rich: We have Der Korb in the opera, which is the magic basket. We tried to de­sign the story of the opera to parallel some of the issues which were going on in the town. And so, we have some of that going. Then, the whole game of basketball is the unifying theme for the town. Our whole goal was to write a script and to write a movie which had layers to it.

MG: Such as?

Rich: You can enjoy this movie at different levels. There is a theme for kids to enjoy, and a theme for older people, and sort of a theme for grandparents. We tried to weave these stories together so that everyone can get something out of it.

MG: So you intentionally crafted a film to portray a character making a moral choice in a dire situation?

Rich: Our goal as a company is to produce films which have life-affirming values. Our goal is to present Christian-type values to the public.

MG: Why?

Rich: Because I think there is a total imbalance in films right now. I don’t think it’s im­portant to identify a movie as a Christian movie, but to make a movie that has mainstream entertainment value and to weave in life-affirming values in that.