The road to 'Glory Road'

As Walt Disney's "Glory Road" opens today across the nation, it marks the movie-directing debut of former Utahn James Gartner.

The movie is about the 1966 Texas Western basketball team that won the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship by defeating the University of Kentucky. Adolph Rupp coached Kentucky, and Texas (soon to become UTEP) was coached by a relative newcomer, Don Haskins. What makes the contest memorable is that Rupp's starting lineup was all white, while Haskins' was all black.

Gartner says he has had other opportunities to direct full-length movies but never before was the script right.

He was drawn to this script because the story is true, and also important, he says. Gartner remembers what the world was like in the 1960s. He wants younger generations to know what happened then as well.

Born in Michigan in 1950, Gartner was in college in Detroit in 1968 when race riots broke out in that city. The racism the black basketball players face in "Glory Road" was quite real, Gartner knows.

Some of the incidents depicted in the movie — such as the scene where a player has his face shoved into a toilet — didn't happen to anyone on the 1966 team, but Gartner knows things like that did happen to blacks in America. And happened just because they were black.

Gartner worked closely with the writers and the producer of "Glory Road" as they decided where to fictionalize and where to remain true to the times, if not to the actual events.

In Salt Lake City earlier this week on a coast-to-coast press tour, Gartner talked to the Deseret Morning News about his career, and how his road to "Glory Road" actually may have begun in 1975 when he came here to work for Bonneville Communications.

He had majored in advertising in college and was working as a DJ in Atlanta, where he joined the LDS Church and began noticing the church's "Homefront" ads. He decided he liked the ads and wanted to work on them. So Gartner called Bonneville.

After he was hired, he started doing things he'd never done before, Gartner says. He'd never worked in TV, but his bosses said, "Why don't you try TV?" He began doing a little bit of freelance directing and his bosses said, "Why don't you direct something for us?"

Gartner recalls, "The wonderful thing about Bonneville was the freedom."

Eventually an L.A. producer named Don Block noticed his work. Gartner started working with Block while also working at Bonneville, but it wasn't long before he left and went into business with Block, making commercials for Pepsi, Visa, AT&T, Federal Express and Coca-Cola.