Kevin Hooks Movies

Returning from a sentimental journey to his home town, basketball coach Ken Reeves (Ken Howard) arrives at his familiar stamping grounds at the inner-city LA Carver High School, whereupon he quickly learns that there's been some changes made. Season Three of The White Shadow begins with several of the familiar supporting players no longer part of the action. Gone are team members Carter (killed at the end of Season Two), Hayward, Reese, Goldstein and Gomez. New to the basketball squad are Wardell Stone (Larry Flash Jenkins), Jesse B. Mitchell (Stoney Jackson), Teddy Rutherford (Wolfe Perry), Eddie Franklin (Art Holliday), and Paddy Falahey (John Laughlin). Likewise, Reese's old friend Jim Willis has stepped down as principal, replaced by Ken's "friendly enemy" Sybil Buchanan (Joan Pringle)--and as for Ken's sister Kate and brother-in-law Bill, they're also gone, who knows where? Rounding out the newcomers is Carver's freshly hired wrestling coach, Ezra Davis (Rosey Grier). This final season of White Shadow contains a number of standout episodes. In a followup to a story in the previous season, Warren Coolidge (Byron Stewart) considers trying out with the Harlem Globetrotters. Several prominent sports and showbiz celebrities, including Jimmie Walker, Elgin Baylor, Sparky Anderson and Willie Tyler, show up in an episode wherein Reeves get unexpected assistance while captaining a fund drive. "Salami" Pettrino (Timothy Van Patten) ends up in the slammer after a violent confrontation with an opposing player. Stone gets a dose of celebrity after saving an old lady from a burning car. Basketball great Bill Russell guests in a story involving Coolidge's sudden self-consciousness over his height, which is fine for the basketball court but awkward everywhere else. Michael Winslow, who would later rise to fame as the "human sound effects machine" in the Police Academy films, delivers a searing dramatic portrayal as a delusional student who targets an emotionally fragile teacher for persecution. Coolidge and Franklin are subjected to inordinately rough treatment at the hands of the Law when they're suspected of mugging a senior citizen. And in the series finale "A Day In the Life", an alumni exhibition game finds graduates Goldstein (Ken Michelman), Gomez (Ira Angustain), Hayward (Thomas Carter) and Reese (Nathan Cook) returning to Carver with an arsenal of anecdotes--amusing and not-so-amusing--about what they've been doing with themselves since last we saw them. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

All of the regular cast members seen during Season One of The White Shadow are on deck for Season Two, with a pair of new additions. Joining the Carver High School basketball team under aegis of coach Ken Reeves (Ken Howard) (nicknamed "The White Shadow" by the largely black student body) are player Nick Vittaglia (John Mengatti) and team manager Phil Jefferson (Russell Phillip Robinson). No sooner has the season begun when one of Reeves' best players, Curtis Jackson (Milton Reese), unwittingly falls in with a gang of bookies who want him to shave a few points. Later, an embittered transfer student tries to turn the team against Reeves for making a joke that the student has misinterpreted as a racial slur; Reeves is racked with guilt when a rookie player dies of a hitherto undetected heart condition during practice; it's an inner-city "Odd Couple" when the temporarily homeless Warren Coolidge (Byron Stewart) is forced to share living quarters with the hapless coach; Coolidge and Morris Thorpe (Kevin Hooks) both get a sexually transmitted disease from the same girl; "Salami" Pettrino (Timothy Van Patten) runs afoul of the authorities when he innocently shares his prescription painkillers with his teammates, and later has a brief affair with an attractive young teacher; Reeves suspects that Ricky Gomez (Ira Angustain) is the victim of domestic violence; and the team challenges a group of volunteer workers to a pickup game, little imagining that their opponents are none other than the Harlem Globetrotters! The season ends on a truly shattering note: After helping his team win the LA City Basketball Championship, and on the brink of his graduation, Curtis Jackson is shot down and killed while witnessing a liquor store holdup. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Based on the best-selling memoirs of Lillian Rogers Parks, the NBC miniseries Backstairs at the White House traces over five decades of American political history as witnessed from the vantage point of the servants' quarters. Played by Tania Johnson as a teenager and by Leslie Uggams as an adult, Lillian Rogers Parks served for 52 years as a maidservant at the White House. Though crippled early on with polio, Lillian diligently and loyally stuck to her duties -- and her own rock-solid set of principles and ideals -- through eight highly different Presidential administrations, often (and occasionally reluctantly) acting as friend and confidante to the First Lady of the moment. The large and stellar cast included a number of top-rank film and TV actors, obviously having the time of their lives impersonating such presidents as William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and their respective wives. Also in the cast were several African-American veterans from the landmark TV miniseries Roots. Earning 11 Emmy Award nominations, the nine-hour Backstairs at the White House was seen in five installments from January 29 to February 19, 1979. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The seemingly lighthearted title of this made-for-TV movie obscures the film's somber overtones. Good Times star Jimmie Walker was past 30 when he starred as teenaged athlete Morris Bird III in The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened. Stricken with leukemia, Morris nonetheless intends to play in an upcoming basketball tournament. His own personal tragedy is compounded by the surprisingly aloof behavior of his father (James Earl Jones). Set during the 1950s, the film admirably evokes its time-frame without hitting the audience over the head with its attention to period detail. Based on a novel by Don Robertson, The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened was first aired October 26, 1977. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Originally telecast September 14, 1976, as a CBS "General Electric Theater" special, Just an Old Sweet Song was the first of three pilots for Down Home, a proposed TV series created by filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles. Robert Hooks and Cicely Tyson star as Nate and Priscilla Simmons, the patriarch and matriarch of a middle-class Detroit family. Upon learning that their grandmother (Beah Richards) is not long for this world, Nate and Priscilla pack up their kids and head down South. Eventually, the family rediscovers its African-American roots and elects to stay in their new rural surroundings. Robert Hooks' real-life sons (Kevin and Eric Hooks) appear as his screen sons, Junior and Highpockets. Just an Old Sweet Song was followed by two 60-minute sequels in 1978: Kinfolks (in which Madge Sinclair replaced Cicely Tyson as Priscilla Simmons) and Down Home. Alas, none of the three films yielded a weekly series. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Martin Ritt's big-screen adaptation of William H. Armstrong's Newberry Award winning novel, Sounder stars Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Kevin Hooks as a black family struggling through life in depression-era Louisiana. The Morgan family is poor, but close. Young son David (Hooks) enjoys hunting with his father Nathan (Paul Winfield) and his trusted dog Sounder. Eventually, they fall on such rough times that Nathan steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, but he is arrested and sentenced to a work camp. Mother Rebecca (Tyson) realizes that David is now responsible for taking care of the family. He sets out to locate where his father is being held, and becomes involved in a school for black children where he learns facts that give him a new level of self-esteem. Sounder was nominated for a variety of Academy Awards, including Best Picture. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide