It was 35 years ago today that Stand and Deliver (1988) made its television debut on American Playhouse on PBS. At the time it may have seemed strange that a feature film that had only been released to theatres a little over a year earlier would be shown on PBS. What some at the time may not have known is that Stand and Deliver (1988) was produced in part by American Playhouse and it was originally meant to only air on television.
Stand and Deliver was based on the true story of math teacher Jaime Escalante, who successfully taught calculus to his students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. Lou Diamond Phillips played Angel Guzman, a cholo who proved to have a talent for math. Other cast members included Vanessa Marquez, who played the brilliant but shy and soft spoken Ana Delgado; Will Gotay, who played Pancho, a talented mechanic who struggles with calculus; Ingrid Oliu who played Lupe Escocbar, a self-assured and ambitious student; Karla Montana as Claudia Camejo, the fashionable girl with plenty of boyfriends; Mark Elliot as Tito, the rock musician of the class; Patrick Baca as Javier Perales, a brilliant student who is a whiz at math; and Lydia Nicole as Rafaela Fuentes, an immigrant who tends to be quiet.
As to American Playhouse, it was a television anthology series that aired feature length works on PBS from 1982 to 1996. In many ways it was PBS's equivalent of the commercial broadcast networks' many movie anthology series that were so prevalent at the time, such as NBC Monday Night at the Movies. Stand and Deliver was not the first theatrical release to air on American Playhouse by any stretch of the imagination, nor was it the first feature film produced by American Playhouse. Years earlier, American Playhouse had produced Northern Lights (1978), which actually won the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. As to theatrical releases that aired on American Playhouse, these included Heartland (1979), City News (1983), Testament (1983), and My American Cousin (1985), which aired two weeks before Stand and Deliver made its television debut. Of course, here I must point out that not every feature film aired on American Playhouse was produced by American Playhouse, and it showed quite a few that weren't.
The origins of Stand and Deliver go back to 1984 when recent UCLA film school graduate Ramón Menéndez read an article about Garfield High School teacher Jaime Escalante in a newspaper. It occurred to him that Mr. Escalante would make a good subject for a film, and so he turned to his friend Tom Musca to co-write the movie and produce it. It took six months before the two of them could persuade Jaime Escalante to sell them the film rights to a movie based on him. Several production companies turned Messrs. Menéndez and Musca down, as they thought a film about Jaime Escalante would not be commercial enough. At last they received a $12,0000 grant from PBS's anthology series American Playhouse.
Once they completed the script they were able to interest Edward James Olmos, then on the hit series Miami Vice, in playing Jaime Escalante in the movie. His production company, Olmos Productions, would produce Stand and Deliver alongside American Playhouse. Additional financing for Stand and Deliver would come from a variety of sources, including the National Science Foundation and the Atlantic-Richfield Corporation.
Stand and Deliver premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 10 1987 under the title Walking On Water. Warner Bros. bought the distribution rights for the film, so that what was originally meant to be a television movie to be aired on PBS was now a feature film to be released to theatres. In the process the film received a new name. Titled Walking on Water, Warner Bros. renamed it Stand and Deliver. It was released to theatres on March 11 1988. It not only received positive reviews from critics and various awards, but it also did fairly well at the box office. It would be a little over a year later, on March 15 1989, that Stand and Deliver made its television debut on American Playhouse.
While I know that I saw Stand and Deliver on American Playhouse in 1989, I cannot remember if it was on the night of March 15 of that year. It might well have been. I do remember that our local PBS station repeated it on the afternoon of Thanksgiving in 1989 and I know I watched it then. Either way, Stand and Deliver became one of my favourite movies of all time, this coming from someone who has no real fondness for mathematics, let alone calculus. Of course, now watching Stand and Deliver on American Playhouse in 1989 is even more significant for me than it was at the time. It marked this first time that I saw actress Vanessa Marquez anywhere. Vanessa Marquez would later become one of the original members of the TCMParty crowd on Twitter and she live-tweeted Mad Men and Downton Abbey as well. It was that way that we got to know each other and that we became close friends. For many years we were in contact every day, either through social media, phone calls, or text messages. Once one of my favourite movies, Stand and Deliver then became a movie starring one of my dearest friends.
Of course, I am not the only person for whom Stand and Deliver would be a significant movie. There are many people who went into mathematics, teaching, and the sciences because of the film. Over the years Stand and Deliver has proven to be an inspiration for many, particularly Mexican Americans who had rarely seen members of their ethnicity in anything but stereotypical roles prior to the movie. Now considered a classic, there can be no doubt that many first saw Stand and Deliver for the first time on American Playhouse.
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