At times, the big networks forget about TV movies and ignore "Hallmark Hall of Fame," which does those movies beautifully. Still, those films persist; on Sunday, ABC airs this season's second "Hall of Fame," a feel-good film called "A Smile as Big as the Moon." Here's the story I sent to papers:
By MIKE HUGHES
For a moment, John Corbett wasn't sure
about this role.
In ABC's “A Smile as Big as the
Moon,” he was supposed to play Mike Kersjes, a special-ed teacher
who was also a football coach. That's where the problem came.
“I didn't really like my high school
football coach,” Corbett said. “I thought of coaches as goons.”
All of that dissolved when he met
Kersjes. “He's gregarious,” said Corbett, who shares that trait.
“He likes a cocktail; he likes to laugh. He kind of looks like Dr.
Phil.”
And he has audacity, pushing for the
elite U.S. Space Camp to accept his class. “This was in 1988,”
Corbett said. “The camp was only six years old then and didn't have
any special-ed programs.”
Taking the role in this “Hallmark
Hall of Fame”film was be a huge challenge for Corbett, who:
– Had never seen Space Camp. He does
remember watching the moon landing when he was 8; much later, he met
Buzz Aldrin, who described the last-minute crisis of being unable to
find a landing site.
– Knew nothing about special-ed. “I'd
never even met a kid with Down syndrome.”
Now “Smile” put him with several
Down-syndrome actors, including Peter ten Brink, who plays Ben.
“Some of the best conversations in my
life were with Peter …. He tells great jokes, he loves every
country singer,” Corbett said. “He's learning the guitar; he
calls Taylor Swift on the phone sometimes.”
For Corbett, who is working on his
second country album, these are admirable traits. He and ten Brink
worked together, doing large chunks of the film at the real Space
Camp in Huntsville, Ala.
The story – taking a class from
Forest Hills Northern High (in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, Mich.) to
Alabama – seems like a stretch. Then again, many parts of Corbett's
own life are just as unlikely.
Flash back, for instance, to when he
was a teen-ager, in an apartment with his mother in Wheeling, W.Va.
He was a good athlete – a basketball center (6-foot-5, 200 pounds),
a high-jumper and, despite disliking the coach, a football tight end.
He was also a poor student (attention deficit problems) with no
long-range plans. And at 18, he remembers staring in awe at the
movie“10” and Bo Derek.
“I'd never seen anyone like that
before,” Corbett recalled. “I remember thinking, 'I wish I had a
girlfriend as pretty as that.”
Now he does. Corbett, 50, and Derek,
55, have been together for 10 years. They live amid Northern
California beauty, while he races off to acting jobs.
There were a lot of things in between,
of course. There was Corbett traveling to California on a beanbag
chair in the back of his friend's pick-up truck …. Showing up there
on the doorstep of his father, whom he'd only met a few times ….
Getting a factory job until he hurt his back, and then going to
community college, where he found an acting class … And getting a
huge break.
“I got lucky when I got 'Northern
Exposure,'” Corbett said. It was then a low-budget summer show and
he was an unknown, but it lasted five seasons, with Corbett as Chris
the disc jockey.
Other series kept piling up –
“Lucky,” “The Visitor,” “United States of Tara,”
boyfriend duty in “Sex and the City” and in the movie “My Big
Fat Greek Wedding.”
Corbett even has a sharp change-up in
“Parenthood,” playing an ex-husband who's an alcoholic
rock-and-roller. “I can do the nice guy roles,” he said, “but
it's nice to do something different.”
Still, the nice-guy stuff beckons,
including two “Hall of Fame” films. In “November Christmas,”
he was an earnest dad; now he's a coach who isn't even remotely a
goon.
– “A Smile as Big as the Moon,”
9-11 p.m. Sunday (Jan. 29), ABC
– Then on the Hallmark Channel – 8
and 10 p.m. Feb. 4, 2 p.m. Feb. 5