Remember The Titans Film Essay

As times have evolve, stories regarding the struggles of many minority athletes have been used to motivate different sports teams. Football players watch Remember the Titans to realize the power of selflessness while being on a team, while basketball players might watch Coach Carter to remind a team that practice makes perfect. However, many that view these movies fail to realize that as much as directors and producers try to accurately portray these stories of hardships and overcoming adversity, there is still a degree of falsity when translating these films from reality to a moving picture. Pride is a movie starring Terrance Howard who portrays Jim Ellis, a swim instructor, once was a competitive swimmer, in which he sees potential in an old abandoned recreational swimming pool in the inner city of Philadelphia, so he renovates and reopens the pool establishing a new predominately African-American swim team. Ellis constantly goes back and forth with the city of Philadelphia fighting demolition of the very facility that holds their practices. Facing racism, violence and a hostile city …show more content…
Remember the Titans represents the story of the newly integrated T.C. Williams High School and its undefeated football team that won the 1971 Virginia State AAA Championship. Already at a boiling point, racial tensions threaten to erupt when the school board names Herman Boone, an African American, as head coach, passing over local favorite Bill Yoast, who is white. In the film, it appears as though federal mandate forced two schools, one white and one black, to consolidate, which created the Alexandria school in 1971. In reality, T.C. Williams opened in 1965 with an integrated student body. Yet the opening voiceover tells viewers, “up until 1971 in Alexandria, there was no race mixing,” which further heightens its inaccuracies (Schultz, p.