Harlow Hickenlooper: One Man, a Striped Jacket, a Straw Hat, Three Stooges, Hundreds of Pies, and Thousands of Adoring Fans

2008 documentary

Rating: n/r

Plot: A look at the life and work of Indianapolis independent children's entertainer Hal Fryar, better known as Harlow Hickenlooper. Includes lengthy stories from Fryar and a ton of old clips.

From what I can gather, a Hickenlooper fan named Steve Pyatte put this together and gave it to Fryar as a gift. It's not exactly a professional work, so I didn't feel like giving it a rating, but I'm sure glad I watched it as a Hoosier. I'm only marginally familiar with Hickenlooper, but it was great watching the 80-something year old Fryar talk about his work and his colleagues with such enthusiasm. Even though his stories were all over the place and at times almost like jokes that only he would get, the guy is so likable and excited that you want to listen to him for hours. From how he got his first television gig (a guy who played a cowboy character quit and at 6'2", Fryar fit in the costume) to working with William Shatner and Shari Lewis (both using the show as a platform to peddle their own work) to behind-the-scenes footage of his work with the Stooges in The Outlaws Is Coming! this is a wonderful look at a time and television genre that won't exist again. As Fryar says, without whining, kids living in a world where everything is automated just wouldn't appreciate this sort of thing. As an Indianapolis guy, I enjoyed seeing crackly footage of Fryar flying a kite at Brookside Park (I've disc golfed there) and walking through a haunted house at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. My favorite moment: Hal Fryar talking about how excited he was when he showed up on the set of the Three Stooges movie and seeing a chair with his name on the back of it.

As a bonus, there was some stuff about another local television personality named Sammy Terry who I remember very fondly. That guy was great! He showed terrible horror flicks and had a terrific creepy laugh.

Breaking Away

1979 Indiana movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Dave and his three friends are in limbo, recent high school grads who have no plans to go to college and no real plans to get jobs either. They're just free-floating in Bloomington, Indiana, swimming in the quarry, brawling with the college kids, and cruising in a borrowed clunker. Except for Dave that is. Dave spends most of his time on his bicycle, dreaming of racing with the Italians and even pretending to be an Italian foreign exchange student to impress a coed. His friends and parents are annoyed with his obsessions.

Filmed entirely in Bloomington, and it's cool to see some familiar sights. This is another well-written story about Hoosier underdogs, but in a way, it's the anti-Hoosiers. There's no way anybody could accuse Breaking Away of being overly sentimental. The story is told unpretentiously, and the characters grow on you naturally with very little trickery. Breaking Away also has a better score, mostly Italian opera pieces accompanying Dave's workouts. There's really no bombast at all with this movie. It's as quiet as a small town, and the human drama and themes are almost submerged beneath the, at times, barely important plots and subplots--the conflicts between the "Cutters" and the college kids, the troubles Dave has connecting to his father, the boys' search for love, their half-assed search for employment, the individual bicycle races including the climactic Little 500. My brother, a cyclist, calls this the best sports movie ever. I'm not sure about that, but I do think it is a great portrait of that confusing time between high school and real life and another chance to root for some likable underdogs.

Hoosiers

1986 Indiana movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Based on the true story of the 1954 high school basketball team from Milan, Indiana, a small-town team that overcame all odds to win the state championship after the hiring of coach Lex Luther.

A real schmaltz-fest, just dripping with treacle, but this Hoosier unapologetically loves it. The synth-laden score fixes it firmly in 1986, but that's one of its few flaws. Solid performances by Hackman and Hopper as the unorthodox and much-maligned coach and town drunk respectively, but the supporting cast--namely, the players--brings a down-home realism to rural Indiana. I'm so glad my state wasn't painted with the same brush that painted the landscape and characters in Deliverance or something. Good dialogue, too. The movie's got a ton of heart. I could have been spared the lackadaisical love story between Hackman and Barbara Hershey's character, but the other main subplot, Shooter's redemption, develops realistically, allowing you to care and root for his character. The basketball action itself, and there's a whole lot of it, is shot well, each of the games becoming their own little stories. I also enjoyed seeing the old gymnasiums. This is a well-written underdog story about second chances, worth seeing even if you have no opinion on whether or not Indiana moving to a class system was the right move or not.