Media

...Middleness and small townness also mean "Heart...

...On the day after I saw Breaking Away I discovered a pleasant glow covering the phenomena of local life shown in the film: the university library, and other limestone buildings...

...now it's a picture of the quarry...

...My youthful measure of a city's size was different: the number of movie theaters...

...Whatever the limitations of Yale men—I do recall a beer-soaked group of them demolishing a piano—I do not remember having seen a student at that institution riding a tricycle...

...I avoided the movie-making, insofar as it was possible to avoid it...

...How many Bluebird theaters, in which to seek happiness...

...I wonder," he said, "if we could see the quarry...

...I spent one summer in Winnebago, Nebraska, another Commonweal: 306 epitome of middleness, which was then a one-theater town, and, more important, a one-saloon town by law (Winnebago is the center of an Indian reservation...

...23 May 1980: 305 I did not look forward to a motion picture made on our campus from these materials...

...I believed that the sole contribution to human civilization of that endless Memorial Day concoction of beer and piston oil was its service in the one joke produced by the Nixon administration...

...Oh, but you should see the pictures...

...At home again I finally went to see the picture, after absolutely every cosmopolitan column had told me how good it was...

...This is the first of what will be a regular column...

...With a vicarious hubris (none of us here had anything to do with the excellence of the movie) we were rooting for it to receive the Oscar as the best movie of last year...

...the disposal unit at a local pizza parlor, the french fries emporium in the student union...

...At Indiana University, I did...

...The race is called the little 500, after the big 500 in Indianapolis— an automobile race, in case you have been spared this knowledge...

...As Red River is to Tom Mix so Breaking Away is to Andy Hardy...

...When it was released to the larger world I was in Williamstown, Massachusetts, teaching great ideas to an NEH seminar...

...In Laramie I learned about horseback riding, sagebrush, cattle ranches, tumbling tumble weed, ghost towns high up in the mountains not from any of the ranches, horseback riders, sagebrush, cattle ranches, ghost towns, or Rocky Mountain ranges by which Laramie is in fact surrounded, but rather by sitting in the front row of the balcony at the Empress Theater on Second Street...

...Perhaps there is not much to be said for sagebrush in the raw, but the sagebrush of the imagination is transformed for anyone who has read Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, or seen any Western movie...

...My anticipatory disdain for the film was not diminished by the knowledge that it featured our student bicycle race, an event not noted for its contribution to Lux and Veritas...

...New Haven had already been getting ready to be American for a century and a half while Bloomington consisted of trees and limestone hills...

...To return to urban Bloomington, the extraordinary review of Breaking Away in Sports Illustrated concluded, after columns of praise, this way: "The President said to say something nice about America...

...I said, incredulously "Bloomington must be a nice town," one of them remarked...

...While I was there rival factions contending for the ownership of the saloon, and doing their duty to the legend of a Western town, had a fight on Main Street, with an actual shooting...

...Bob Thomas of the Associated Press said the film is "as American as the Fourth of July and `Yankee Doodle Dandy.' " There seems to be a much convenient spillage back and forth between the film and its location...

...Once I was jogging on the outdoor track while they were filming an actor riding a bicycle around it, but by deft backings and circlings and stallings I managed to keep at least one-sixteenth of a mile between us...

...The making of this popular entertainment generated more excitement, I believed, than the dignity of a distinguished institution of higher learning ought to allow it to exhibit...

...Now the National Society of Film Critics has gone so far as to say it was the best picture of 1979, and the Academy Award people gave it six nominations and eventually one Oscar, for the best original screenplay...

...A Bloomington friend who had seen the picture in a New York theater told me, to my astonishment, "The New York City audience loved it...

...The film was produced by an Englishman (Peter Yates) from a script by a Yugoslavian-born writer (Stephen Tesich), who was attending Columbia University when the two of them met in New York City...

...Explaining the geology of the state to Richard Reeves, a coastal person, as we drove south from the Indianapolis airport, I said: "The glacier stopped at Indianapolis...

...Or rather a shot...

...I guess "rural" for that writer means any place under 100,000 in population...

...Secretary of State William Rogers was reported to have said, in the days of the Chicago Ten and the Catonsville Nine, that Kissinger is so tough that when they asked him about the Indianapolis 500 Henry responded, "They're all guilty...

...Too bad it's located where it is...

...It is...

...The picture benefited from a romanticized notion of the American middle west, and the town and university from the good luck of having so pleasant a picture made here...

...How many Paramounts, Foxes, and RKOs, are there in which to find life heightened, rearranged, and improved...

...Bloomington has ten theaters not counting drive-ins...

...I was born here, and my parents reared me with a pleasant humming of the Indiana University fight song in the background, but I didn't realize how attractive this university town is until I had that shown to me by 20th Century Fox...

...I could see it on my way to watch a Western shoot-em-up or an Indian picture in the Ramona Theater...

...They made a film that the Washington Post reviewer described (although I didn't know the word "indigenous" admitted of degree) as the "most indigenous" picture of the year...

...When I congratulated the owner (who was also the projectionist and the maker of the popcorn) on a delicate film the distributors had made him show he made a sour face...

...23 May 1980: 307...

...Laramie, Wyoming, where I lived as a boy and attended my first movies, was then a two-theater town...

...A local newspaper once ran a photograph of my son, then by definition a townie, diving feet first out over the quarry that appears in the film...

...Hutchinson, Kansas, to which we moved when I was ten (my parents searching, I guess, for absolute middleness) was then afive-theater town, and therefore dazzling...

...The Ramona was a mom and pop operation just like the theater in The Last Picture Show (thus I explain what a movie theater was like by referring to a theater in a movie...

...Sports Illustrated's remarkable review was entitled "A Joyous Ride to the Heart of America...

...he said...

...When we have visitors we do, sometimes, show them the campus...

...One reason for our heavy supply of Americana seems to be our secure middleness...

...Perhaps Breaking Away is the High Noon of the Middle western...

...I learned about the romance of gold mining by visiting the Tabor Theater in Denver, a city of such unspeakable sophistication as to have movies already available to the public before noon...

...What we like here is a picture about horses...

...A recent visitor seemed a little disappointed as the tour came to its end, with nothing to show for it but college buildings...

...It takes a powerful work of art indeed to make a professor look with favor upon a motley and anonymous collection of undergraduates at play...

...A reviewer for the Gannett News Service wrote that the movie presents "a charming, irresistibly endearing slice of rural Indiana life...

...It became apparent that what he really wanted to see was not the university but the movie set—the houses and the roads, the racing track and the sorority house, that had been lifted into a superior reality by appearing in the film...

...Well, the wonderful thing about Breaking Away is that you leave the theater very proud that America has both an Indiana and a Hollywood...

...and even the students themselves...

...It's good," they said...

...I loved them all because they were in that film...

...And who is there in the civilized world (Les Hombres de Texas showing there in Paris) who hasn't seen a Western...

...I left the theater reminded of the story Daniel Boorstin tells in his book The Image: "That's a lovely baby...

...As a matter of fact while the movie was being made, just as the fall semester started in 1978, I regarded it as a menace...

...I looked out the window of my office the first spring I was teaching here and saw a group of women students interrupting their studies to practice the hand-off of the tricycle...

...When the movie had its premiere in Bloomington I did not attend...

...One reviewer, after seeing this motion picture, was moved to say that Bloomington itself is a "pure . . . slice of Americana," although it is not clear how we acquired that purity of our slice as compared with, for example, New Haven...

...And I didn't know that the movie Fox made here—Breaking Away — was a good one until I learned about its merits from the New York Times...

...Well, maybe you do, although it is not quite clear to me what we in Indiana contributed to that charming little motion picture, except the rumors that we represent a high grade of Americana...

...Janet Maslin of the New York Times said the movie reflects "those aspects of Indiana life that seem most incapable of changing," by which I hope she didn't mean the practices in the used car business...

...Nah," he said...

...Critics called Breaking Away "an authentically stirring piece of Americana...

...and "a hip piece of Americana...

...In addition to the bicycle race there has also been a relay event for teams of women which features tricycles . . . the mini-500...

...Being superlative in indigenousness seems also to include large amounts of "Americana...

...Seminar participants from Providence, Washington, San Francisco and other places had seen Breaking Away...

...the downtown parking meters...

...The bullet missed everybody but lodged in the wall of the bus station, behind the Indians waiting for the bus...

...It used to be a picture of David...

...America rediscovers its enduring heartland" said the Chicago Tribune's review...

...With that guidance to my critical faculties I liked it, too...

...Oh...

...In the real world the students are indistinguishable from the townies who are the central figures in the movie...

...WILLIAM LEE MILLER (William Lee Miller, director of the Poynter Center on American Institutions at Indiana University, is the author of Piety Along the Potomac, Yankee from Georgia: the Emergence of Jimmy Carter, and other books and essays...

...When will it leave...