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Three friends. Three bicycles.
Forty-eight hundred miles. One NBA-issue basketball.
Based on the nationally touring film of
the same name, Dan Austin’s hilarious and thoughtful
True Fans details the journey Dan, his brother Jared, and
best friend Clint Ewell started when they hopped aboard their
bicycles and headed east from the pickup court at Venice Beach,
handlebars pointed toward the NBA Hall of Fame. It was a basketball
pilgrimage, shooting hoops on sandlots across the country,
looking for enlightenment under a net. In their bicycle trailer,
which they called “The Ark of the Covenant,” they
carried a few gallons of peanut butter and an unused basketball,
on which they collected the signatures of those who helped
them on their journey, from the Reverend Kevin Smith, who
let them sleep behind his church, to Dick Simmons, a coal
miner who offered them five dollars he could scarcely afford
to part with. They would bring this ball to the Hall of Fame,
and ask that it be included in the permanent collection. What
would America do, the book also asks, if three guys on bikes
with a basketball in tow showed up and begged for a handout?
Not everyone was friendly—the strange “owner”
of Amboy, Nevada, makes for a fairly spooky villain—but
most of the country, they found, would do just about anything
for them. Doors were opened from California to Springfield,
Massachusetts, hamburgers comped, hot tubs proffered. Austin
and his crew knocked, and for one hundred days, America answered.
The result was a classic odyssey.
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